Computers.

[Uncle Al]

And........

With the "Voice Activation" on cell phones, and with greater improvements, you will be able
to access your PC via voice. reminds me of Star Trek - The Next Generation.
Say what you want, just don't preface your comment by using the word - "Computer"

Uncle Al

[crfriend]

And........

With the "Voice Activation" on cell phones, and with greater improvements, you will be able
to access your PC via voice.

Yes, walk into a crowded Hell Desk setting and yell "Reboot!" as loud as you can and see how many computers go bits up.

Today brought at least decent news on my last seeming fatality. The two disks are OK; I used parts from two dead PCs to make a single one that sort of limps along (although at one point it was state of the art (snicker)), plugged the two disks in and booted the concocted hybrid. The data is fine, that's the main thing I was worried about. The disks are now sitting on my desk.

The next thing is what I'm going to replace the dead system with. For the most part, it was a backup to my main workhorse Linux box that dates to 1995 -- and it was the media-player in my study. This means that aside from fan noise, my study would have been quiet if I didn't push my laptop into use -- and my laptop can't (right now) play FLAC-encoded files. <grrrr>

I'm going to give the dead IBM 300PL one more good going over, and if that doesn't yield clues or joy it's off to the boneyard. I do despise this throwaway society we live in...

I'm almost thinking this may be an excuse to pick up a Raspberry Pi to play with.

[crfriend]

I'm going to give the dead IBM 300PL one more good going over, and if that doesn't yield clues or joy it's off to the boneyard. I do despise this throwaway society we live in...

And the old Mark-I eyeball yields clues! I have three DC-inverter filter-capacitors with date-codes of 1999 and of Taiwanese manufacture that fall into the Capacitor Plague timeframe and which show subtle signs of physical deformation.

Now to find replacements. Two decades ago finding 560 micro-Farad capacitors rated at 25 Volts would have been a trivial exercise; nowadays, however, it's another matter entirely -- today it may be down to driving some number of miles to an electronics supply place with a 50/50 chance of finding the parts I need or an entirely out-of-proportion shipping charge for $2 (US) parts.

And all this work for a 350 MHz processor with 96 MB of mainstore and a 256-colour palette at a decent screen-resolution -- but with a audio chip that can do (more or less) CD-quality sound. Is it worth it, other than as an intellectual exercise?

I'm almost thinking this may be an excuse to pick up a Raspberry Pi to play with.

That might be the cost of shipping the caps from someplace else...

[Tor]

Ack, those annoying places that seemingly cannot ship in a padded envelope and charge accordingly.

The Raspberry Pi is a rather interesting idea - and something I've thought about getting since before they were released and finally ordered. You'll probably have your computer back up and running off parcel post shipped capacitors before you get a Pi, though, what with backorders being the way they are. Good luck getting things up again, whichever way you go.

[crfriend]

Good luck getting things up again, whichever way you go.

It's almost certainly the three capacitors I mentioned earlier. I let the thing get warm and it booted normally, and is playing some Klaus Schulze as I type this on my newer laptop. Side effect: I found a few sticks of 256 MB mainstore lying about and swapped two of them for the three sticks of 32 MB -- result, a system with a 512 MB instead of 96. The thing doesn't even swap any more.

I'm going to go casting about for parts today within reasonable driving range as I couldn't find any suitable parts around the house. Looking at Mouser electronics, I see the parts required range anywhere from 29 US cents to the princely sum of 60 US cents per. All that angst for less than two bucks worth of parts. It turns out I need a fan as well, which I'll order at the same time so I get over the minimum order limit and which won't affect the price of shipping much. I may even check the caps in my network switch, in which 12 out of 24 ports have gone inop; this may be down to degraded parts as well...

I looked in the telephone directory (remember those?) this morning for electronics parts suppliers. There were a handful, none of which sell at retail; there were more electrologists listed than electronics places. I guess nobody dabbles in the hobby any longer or actually fixes things. So sad, so sad.

Oh, well. Time to get off my backside, take a shower, get dressed, and head out into the world. At least it's not snowing today.

[Tor]

Good job on finding the mainstore about. Somehow, I've never been able to have too much - though more than I generally require is possible.

Sure is a shame about the throwaway nature of stuff. Gets harder to repair, too, as they stuff more into a smaller space too. That Raspberry Pi I just ordered comes to mind as an example. One "project" sitting waiting for me is a stereo base that stopped working after we had an overvoltage situation. I decided to open it before letting go of it and found a blown fuse - that I still haven't gotten a replacement for. Guess I'll have to not let you get too far ahead of me and get going on finding that fuse.

And yes, I do actually remember telephone directories - and use them on occasion when I need a local number that I don't already know.

Tor

[crfriend]

Good job on finding the mainstore about. Somehow, I've never been able to have too much - though more than I generally require is possible.

When I write code, I always tend to play performance off against memory usage. It's a balancing act, and it's always worth recalling that mainstore is not unlimited despite what VM architectures have "taught" us over the past few years. Writing things in "tight" confines is good not only for the mind but also for the soul.

This is not to say that there does not come a time when an architecture has outlived its usefulness; that time tends to come when the addition of paging is used to expand the physical address space whilst leaving the programmatic address space fixed. In defence of that assertion I offer up the PDP-10 (a longtime love), the pdp11, the DG NOVA (my first computing "love"), and the 32-bit Intel architecture -- all had the same tactic applied to them in various guises, the worst of which is the introduction of "segments" to augment programmatic address space. When that happens, it's a sure sign that "The time has come." (Shoot it dead; put it out of its misery.)

Sure is a shame about the throwaway nature of stuff. Gets harder to repair, too, as they stuff more into a smaller space too.

That's mainly an issue if your eyesight "isn't what it used to be", and even that can be compensated for, somewhat. I know I'll never be able to solder on 0.5mm centers so I just view that stuff as either tossable or I'll need to find somebody who can deal with it (that or get myself a binocular microscope and learn how to do things that way). I was able to dissect my laptop just fine to replace the keyboard a few weeks ago, so I'm not completely hopeless yet -- and laptops tend to be nasty pieces of work when it comes to compactness.

One "project" sitting waiting for me is a stereo base that stopped working after we had an overvoltage situation. I decided to open it before letting go of it and found a blown fuse - that I still haven't gotten a replacement for. Guess I'll have to not let you get too far ahead of me and get going on finding that fuse.

I'll take that as a challenge to get my Laserdisc player running again...

And yes, I do actually remember telephone directories - and use them on occasion when I need a local number that I don't already know.

Oh, how 20th Century!

[Tor]

That's mainly an issue if your eyesight "isn't what it used to be", and even that can be compensated for, somewhat. I know I'll never be able to solder on 0.5mm centers so I just view that stuff as either tossable or I'll need to find somebody who can deal with it (that or get myself a binocular microscope and learn how to do things that way). I was able to dissect my laptop just fine to replace the keyboard a few weeks ago, so I'm not completely hopeless yet -- and laptops tend to be nasty pieces of work when it comes to compactness.

True, I'm sure it is technically possible to redo 0201 package, or even 01005 package components, but I don't fancy making the attempt - though I suppose I probably could replace a resistor or two if I had a soldering iron with a suitably small tip. Sixteen thou, or even twenty four thou isn't much - and that's the large dimension. I'll agree with you about boards an components usually being dreadful to work on - all the more so because the plastic has usually been, shall we say, older by the time I've gotten to them - older meaning a few years in this electronics eating climate.

When I write code, I always tend to play performance off against memory usage. It's a balancing act, and it's always worth recalling that mainstore is not unlimited despite what VM architectures have "taught" us over the past few years. Writing things in "tight" confines is good not only for the mind but also for the soul.

Hmmm... might have to invent some time to actually learn to program something beyond a bit of shell. I do appreciate those who take the trouble to minimize resource use - as my use of the Ratpoison WM on a 64bit quad core with 8GB mainstore might suggest. Perhaps incongruous, but 3688K (<.05%) of ram consumed with nothing swapped is quite nice, and well supportive of maintaining pleasing uptimes

Oh, how 20th Century!

I'm not quite young enough for the twentieth century to be unknown to me

[Kilted_John]

Hey Carl,

May I recommend that you go with tantalum capacitors? Every single vintage Mac I own that has had the electrolytic surface mount caps will be equipped with tantalum caps. So far, I've had a friend of mine do eight motherboards with them. I'd have a go at it myself, but I'm not very steady with the soldering iron...

-J

[crfriend]

May I recommend that you go with tantalum capacitors?

Holy sheep-dip, Martha! I just took a look at the prices on those (in the value I need) and they were almost 80 bucks a pop -- well more than what I paid for the device to begin with (which was (US)$0.00). Methinks I'll be sticking with conventional electrolytics.

I can see that for some applications, but not this one.

[kingfish]

Mouser is #2 on my top 4 parts dealers, behind Digikey and ahead of NewarkInOne and Allied.

My shop specializes in prototypes and custom electronics. We've got the microscope(s) and techs I often refer to as surgeons when it comes to handling the assembly and inevitable rework as us engineers change our mind about what we really wanted.

.050 pitch quad flat pack? No problem. I've even done it with just an iron with a sufficiently pointy tip. Pre-tin the pads, flood the area with a little flux and reflow part down. Done. Don't discount the impact a little flux will have on a drossy, bridgy solder mess.

The LLC and BGA packages where they don't even give you a protruding pin to hit with an iron is another animal all together. Those things start requiring hot plates and reflow ovens that have some seriously hefty price tags to get anywhere near reliable results.

In terms of speed vs. compactness in the code, don't discount the bloat libraries can cause. There have even been projects where I've done control loop work and avoided using floating point math and even the integer divide function. On those projects, things like printf() are a distant memory.

[Jack Williams]

From my experience as a tech, tants are definitely the way to go.

[Milfmog]

From my experience as a tech, tants are definitely the way to go.

I'm currently wishing my employer did NOT use any tantalum capacitors. One of our customers (a major international brand) has asked us to make a conflict minerals declaration to confirm that we do not have any tin, tungsten, tantalum or gold in our products that originated in specific areas of the globe (primarily the Democratic Republic of Congo and its neighbouring countries) and, as you may be able to imagine, establishing the chain of supply from raw ores through to finished components or purchased sub-assemblies is proving to be something of a painful exercise.

Having said that, I do appreciate the lower failure rates of the tantalum beads compared to the electrolytics they replaced.

Have fun,


Ian.

[Jack Williams]

Wow, I never thought about that, and it does matter.
How on earth are we to know where the ingredients for these things come from??
We are "Ecofan Sound" and care about the "planet" as such, but the inhabitants of it? I'll have to have a yarn about that with the other members of the team..
The "bottom line" is reliabilty of product, and we're way up there in that department.
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1599

Just checked, and no, there are no low voltage such value caps in current models and other higher voltage electros we use are super reliable, so all is well by default!

[Milfmog]

Just checked, and no, there are no low voltage such value caps in current models and other higher voltage electros we use are super reliable, so all is well by default!

No gold plated connectors Jack? Really? Do you know where the gold came from? How about tin in solders? Or on component legs?

It really is a major pain in the neck trying to sort this stuff out.

Have fun,


Ian.

(Yeah, I just had a drains up audit on our chain of provenance and it really was an uncomfortable experience and one that I could have done without.)