Free Stuff - November 2024

The belated November 2024 recipients for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program are the folks at iMagineLab makerspace in Antwerp, Belgium! iMagineLab is home to a community of students and tech enthusiasts alike that gather weekly to collaborate on and share knowledge for open source projects.

Thomas Janssen from iMagineLab has informed us of the makerspace’s upcoming project to build a digital radio receiver for receiving and decoding NOAA weather signals using open source software. Their goal is to then visualize NOAA weather images and collect and display data to create a weather monitoring station based on RF signals!

Thomas has...

Free Stuff - October 2024

The belated October 2024 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Dustin Chambliss, who teaches at Pearl River Community College in Mississippi! Dustin currently teaches a 2 year electronics program and aims to revive an older and outdated communication course to focus on more modern technology. By obtaining a HackRF One, Dustin will be able to teach students about wireless communication including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular, and provide hardware for the updated curriculum. We are excited to be providing Dustin and his students with a HackRF One to continue their educational journeys and stay up to date...

Домашняя стеклодувная мастерская. Текущее дооснащение

Стеклодувная приборостроительная работа немыслима без прорвы разнообразного инструмента и оснастки. И в самом деле, манипуляции с раскалённым размягчённым стеклом специфичны — горячие заготовки приходится как-то удерживать, вращать, формовать. Известное дело — иной раз на подготовку к работе времени уходит больше, чем сама операция, и чем более разнообразные действия выполняет стеклодув, тем большим ассортиментом всякой вспомогательной всячины неизбежно обрастает его рабочее место. Читать дальше →

A tricky Commodore PET repair: tracking down 6 1/2 bad chips

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=nxilekpLp6g

In 1977, Commodore released the PET computer, a quirky home computer that combined the processor, a tiny keyboard, a cassette drive for storage, and a trapezoidal screen in a metal unit. The Commodore PET, the Apple II, and Radio Shack's TRS-80 started the home computer market with ready-to-run computers, systems that were called in retrospect the 1977 Trinity. I did much of my early programming on the PET, so when someone offered me a non-working PET a few years ago, I took it for nostalgic reasons.

You'd think that a home computer would be easy to repair, but it turned out to be a challenge. The chips in...

April Update: Risc It For A Biscuit

This month, the PineTab-V returns, PineNote, PineTab2 and PineTime software improvements and a new Pinecil micro soldering tip set. Does anyone even read these descriptions?

Газоразрядная лампа с символами, своими руками

Текущая работа в домашней лаборатории-мастерской — практический крупный декоративно-сувенирный электровакуумный прибор (ЭВП), развитие прототипа [1] c аргоновым наполнением и дополнительным титановым электродом-геттером, распыляемым разрядом — для некоторого понижения давления и удаления нежелательных примесей в рабочем газе. В работе использовано дешёвое стекло от трубчатых ламп дневного света (ЛДС), несложное самодельное оборудование и оснастка, простые приборы и инструменты. Читать дальше →

Fritzing 1.0.5 released

Fritzing 1.0.5 is a maintenance release. It has been tested on Windows 11 24H2 (ARM and Intel), macOS Sequoia, macOS Ventura, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 24.04. What is new Windows ARM Support for Windows on ARM CPUs. Fritzing uses Prism on Windows 24H2 to run on ARM. New Fonts We are fading out Droid Sans and Open Sans in favor of Noto Sans. This affects mostly the Breadboard and the Schematic View. A bunch of Fritzing parts was using unknown fonts, which resulted in using whatever fallback font the operating system provided. We have replaced these with either Noto Sans,...

Изготовление простой газоразрядной лампы с распыляемым Ti геттером

Очередная порция учебно-тренировочных работ в деревенской любительской лаборатории-мастерской — изготовление улучшенной индикаторной газонаполненной лампы простыми, недорогими средствами, с применением элементарного низковакуумного оборудования. Пониженное давление рабочего газа в лампе обеспечивается распылением титанового геттера. Заодно отрабатываем и совершенствуем стеклодувные операции и технологические мелочи. Читать дальше →

Notes on the Pentium's microcode circuitry

Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of software underneath: microcode. With microcode, instead of building the processor's control circuitry from complex logic gates, the control logic is implemented with code known as microcode, stored in the microcode ROM. To execute a machine instruction, the computer internally executes several simpler micro-instructions, specified by the microcode. In this post, I examine the microcode ROM in the original Pentium, looking at the low-level circuitry.

The photo below shows the Pentium's thumbnail-sized silicon die under a microscope. I've labeled the main functional blocks. The microcode ROM is highlighted...

Ghetto soldering tweezers

[Misc] And other 3D printed accessories