playing around with Inkscape and my HP pen plotter. it's not really going that well; Inkscape has severe issues with locating the origin, scaling factors, and can't handle things like crosshatching. these are problems that were solved 40 years ago.
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vintage computers, tubes, the MOnSter6502, cross-sectioned electronic parts, capacitors, and other detritus. coauthor of http://nostarch.com/open-circuits
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playing around with Inkscape and my HP pen plotter. it's not really going that well; Inkscape has severe issues with locating the origin, scaling factors, and can't handle things like crosshatching. these are problems that were solved 40 years ago.
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tonight's mini project: I built up this adapter board for testing IBM RAM chips in their odd little SLT package
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@tubetime want to see some chip reverse engineering? tune in to my Twitch stream: https://www.twitch.tv/tubetimeus
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the power supply in my PS/2 model 80 stopped working, so it's time to remove it and fix it. three screws and it even has a nice little handle in the form of a zip tie. got a cracked 8042 on this IBM PS/2 model 80 type 2 motherboard, but I'm going to try to dump it anyway! 🧵
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I'm a software person so I might be entirely wrong, but how could this be a RAM chip with just 16 pins? If it's 256 kbit like others are saying, you'd need 15 address lines, 8 data lines, power, ground, chip select, and read/write signals. So at least 27 pins. Unless it uses some kind of serial protocol, but is that even a thing with RAM chips? @tubetime well, it’s not a dirty word (or, indeed, a dirty bird). Sorry, I always think of that song every time I see the word eagle. I’ll show myself out. The F-4 fighter plane used an attitude indicator to show the plane's orientation. The ball in this indicator rotates in three axes. How does that work? We took the indicator apart to find out.
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f-4 was an interesting plane. when i was in the air force, pilots used to joke that the f-4 was living proof of the rule of aerodynamics that given sufficient thrust, even a brick could fly. downside was that when the f-4 lost thrust, it reverted to brick. but they had a long and pretty solid life span in service.
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Here is an IC mystery @bitsavers They look too narrow, too. I'm getting strong "soviet bloc" package vibes from these. CEMI and TESLA had those long divots. I reckon these are re-marked parts. '65 seems too early. @bitsavers I have no relevant knowledge knowledge but I wonder if this could be from a time when prices where high and there was enough margin to pay the higher manufacturing cost. The 3D logo would flaunt the technical advances and make them harder to clone.
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@tubetime Wow. Using a 2.5MB yes MB Linux kernel. I didn't think you could config Linux down that small. Wow. oh wow, the Titan Sub accident investigation has a bunch of new documents on the US Coast Guard site: https://www.news.uscg.mil/News-by-Region/Headquarters/Titan-Submersible/
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@tubetime This is horrifying. 🤢 In eng school we once had a guest lecture from a crewed submersible design engineer. I forget the exact numbers, but by convention they would overdesign metal hulls by e.g. 10x; but for any transparent ports they would overdesign them by e.g. 20x because they knew that much less about the material behavior... @tubetime with the fuses welded in place, i've made a new insulator to cover their tabs and prevent them from shorting with the main battery negative terminal strip. i've unfolded the cells now so they lay flat. i have to weld the two positive terminals (on the red wire, somewhat out of focus). the other little thing hanging free is the thermistor. first, i took it apart and documented the process here on iFixit: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/IBM+Thinkpad+700C+Battery+Pack+Teardown/176472 you can read through that if you want and come back. but basically that tells you how to remove the lid without making a huge mess. |
@tubetime It's nearly 40Y since I last used a pen plotter (possibly HP), and those did indeed seem not to be problems by then...
@tubetime as someone who has put a lot of hours into programmatically converting Inkscape-generated vector art into other formats, sometimes I can't tell whether Inkscape is underdeveloped or very opinionated. I love it. It's an amazing piece of software for $0. Unfortunately, that also means everyone uses it for everything, and it's not great at everything.
@tubetime For that sort of work you probably want to use something like QCAD (or maybe FreeCAD) and not Inkscape.
Inkscape is really a tool for vector art and not CAD. So no wonder those things don't work or work poorly - they are rarely an issue for typical Inkscape uses.