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17 Oct, 18 tweets, 5 min read

welp, i finally broke down and bought my first 3d printer! this one is an Ender 3. 🧵

it comes in a flat pack, this is basically like the Ikea bookshelf of 3D printers.

there are two layers of parts in this box!

ooh close call, glad i checked! (my country uses 115V, not 230V!)

lots of parts.

the front panel LCD has chips underneath these blobs of epoxy.

here it is mostly assembled.

i leveled the bed, and now it is time for a test print! something small so it won't take too long.

it is starting to take shape.

done! it is a little tiny maze. now to chisel it off and remove the support structure.

the little support pedestal peels off quite easily, leaving me with the finished maze.

not too shabby. i could probably tune things a little more but this is usable.

now it is time to print something useful. any guesses as to what this is?

still no guesses?

here's the finished part. it's not perfect but it still came out pretty well.

it's the rear bracket for an MCA card!

(technically i did all that printing yesterday but just didn't have time to post pics until now.) this morning i printed another part: the volume knob for the Snark Barker!

that was quick! one advantage of a 3D printer is you can iterate quickly. here are 3 versions of brackets for the Plaid Bib.

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Tube Time

@TubeTimeUS

18 Oct

in 1990, a tiny company nobody had heard of, Cadtrak, sued Commodore for patent infringement and won. Their company CEO bragged that he put Commodore out of business! Commodore's downfall took more than just that, but who was Cadtrak, and what was their patent? 🧵

first, the patent. 4,197,590, filed in 1978. it described a method for drawing a cursor and then erasing it again without having to store a copy of the background. this was a simple XOR operation.

you see, with an XOR, a '1' bit in the cursor caused whatever graphics were on the screen to get inverted. XOR it again with the same bit, and it gets inverted back to the original state. a '0' bit made no change. this saves RAM, since you don't need to keep a backup image.

Read 24 tweets

Tube Time

@TubeTimeUS

17 Oct

i'm testing more vacuum tubes this afternoon. as you do...

don't use soap or water to clean a tube, the numbers will come right off. instead I just gently wipe it with a cloth.

first step is to find the tube in the little roll chart built into the unit.

Read 10 tweets

Tube Time

@TubeTimeUS

9 Oct

all right, this is a new one. a EULA on...fruit?!

'the recipient of the produce contained in this package agrees not to propagate or reproduce any portion of this produce, including "but not limited to" seeds, stems, tissue, and fruit.'

some folks think I faked it. it's real. it's even printed in French on the other side

as for the fruit itself? not that great, they're just too sugary for my tastes. but hey, i'd never had them before.

Read 7 tweets

Tube Time

@TubeTimeUS

7 Oct

looking through some old photos, i found some neat pictures of IC chips. this one is a 7805 regulator.

8755 16K EPROM + GPIO

Intel 8080 CPU.

(this one is from National, i think they were a mask licensee)

Read 12 tweets

Tube Time

@TubeTimeUS

5 Oct

this is one of the world's first electronic calculators, the Friden EC-130, which came out in 1964! it's a really fascinating machine, so let's look at it in more detail. 🧵

you could buy it for about $2100 back then (about $20K now!) isn't it pretty though?

let's take a closer look at the screen. these are not LEDs or vacuum fluorescent displays, this is actually a CRT!

Read 51 tweets

Tube Time

@TubeTimeUS

1 Oct

this neon lamp should never light up! there's a fascinating reason why... 🧵

ok so what is the circuit? this is a 3Com Etherlink card from the late 1980s. you can see the neon lamp in the lower right. actually there's a bunch of other interesting things going on but first, the neon lamp!

the circuit on the right side of the Ethernet card interfaces to the external AUI transceiver (the 15-pin D-sub) or a coaxial 10Base-2 network. the whole circuit is isolated by those two transformers, and i've put a red line so you can see no traces cross over.

Read 14 tweets

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