Various ramblings – Electronics, Radio, 3D Printing & CNC
After much tweaking, fiddling and procrastinating I have finally been able to successfully mill a PCB! The only minor issue I had was with the drill file created by the PCB-GCode script which would not load correctly into LinuxCNC. Luckily this is a step that I can complete manually using my PCB drill. The results are excellent, the finish is...
While waiting patiently for the mill to finish running a PCB isolation route job I stepped away for a few seconds to skip a song on my music playlist. As I was fiddling with the music I heard the spindle motor starting to bog down and turned around to see that the cutting tool had started cutting deeper and deeper...
My first attempts at etching these boards didn’t go so well. Using the toner transfer method has worked very well for me in the past, but it looks like my current printer doesn’t work as well as the one I used previously. Below are a few pictures of the backplane boards I tried etching, the first photo based off a...
While I was reading the Steve Jobs biography I was given for Christmas in 2011 I was feeling strangely nostalgic about the good ol’ days. This was strange mainly due to the fact I wasn’t yet born when the Steve’s (Wozniak and Jobs) were designing and building the Apple I & II… Some time after that I read on Hack-a-Day...
Ruggedised slate PC – AMD “586” @ 133MHz, 32MB RAM, 1GB CF boot drive I picked this computer up off eBay for $26. This beast is machined from a single block of aluminium (years before Apple!!). It is a bit of a slug, especially running Windows 98, but it’s more than capable of running solitaire which is great with the...
Portable/luggable PC – Sharp 8088 @ 10MHz(??), 640kB RAM, 20MB hard drive, 360kB floppy drive I found this machine many years ago while walking home from school (around 1998-1999 as a rough guess). Sitting on the nature strip left out for the hard rubbish collection, covered in dust and looking very sad. I was curious what sort of machine it...
Z80 practice board – Z80 @ 3.8MHz, 4kB RAM, 20 character VFD display My brother saved this computer from the bin at work. It’s a small “practice board” for learning Z80 assembler. Not terribly useful to me as far as learning assembler goes but it is an interesting addition to the collection. This computer was made by a company called...