Panasonic KX-W50TH KX-W60TH Thermal Typewriter Service Manual
Mirror for my scanned copy of the Panasonic KX-W50TH and KX-W60TH Thermal Typewriter service manual. Scanned by me (with a friend's equipment and guidance, thanks!). Also available on archive.org. Includes full schematics and PCB foil layouts, along with mechanical and electrical theory of operation. A print head calibration procedure is also provided. A good read even if you do not own such a device - plenty of practical circuits to learn from.
» Read full post.Lanterna Superpila LED + Lithium Mod
Every object in our lives has a story, and if the observer looks hard enough, they offer a snapshot into a past life, of the long and unlikely path each of us leads. Even something as humble as this Lanterna Superpila I rescued from my great uncle's farm, in a tiny town composed of a half-dozen homes just south of Codroipo, Italy. The specifics of the significance of this particular object are mundane and uninteresting, except to underscore that meaning and connection can be found in the mundane and uninteresting. Seek these connections. Explore them. The world is never boring to the curious - we are surrounded by wonders. Some people take up painting a scene, to more intimately understand a space or event. Others, seeking a similar understanding, write poetry, or compose music. I tend to seek connection via tactile objects. In restoring them, disassembling them, reassembling them, modifying them, we visit the original designers in their space, and we visit their owners in their time and space. By adding our own contributions to the object, we join that chain of events. It is very grounding to me. Even if it's the Engineer's Anthropic Principle: If you look hard enough at a designed object, you can be sure that some poor engineer, somewhere, was frustrated that this particular piece wasn't working right.
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3D Printing LIDAR Survey Topography (GeoTIFF to hollowed resin print)
Primary Goals
» Read full post.Software for Toshiba Libretto 50CT (Win95)
I got a request from a YouTuber for the Libretto 50CT's software. Here it is, zipped up on the 50CT itself. 12MB of archives never felt so big 🙂
» Read full post.Stupid simple interrupt-driver IR remote decoder for ATtiny/ATmega
Quick one. For a project, I needed a really simple IR decoder program for an ATtiny85 that (a) Used interrupts for pulse processing, but (b) didn't use a timer interrupt, and (c) worked with an apple remote I had laying around. None of the libraries I found did this (mostly b, plus none really had the 85 in mind), so I whipped up my own. It's stupid. It's simple. It works well enough for me. Just whack your IR decoder's output to the 85's physical pin 3, hook a 9600,8,n,1 uart input to physical pin 2, press buttons on your remote, and marvel at the numbers and stuff appearing on your screen. Enough blab, here's the goods. This should work fine with pretty much any AVR, as long as you fix up the interrupt configuration in setup() for your particular chip.
» Read full post.Classic Mac -> PS2 mouse adapter
So I made a little adapter so I can connect PS/2 mice to the pre-ADB Classic Macs (128k, 512k, 512ke, probably Lisa). They use a really simple scheme: two pairs of quadrature inputs (one for X, one for Y), and one input for the single button. 5v is provided for the mouse. Perfect for a little microcontroller like the ATtiny to interface to (which is funny, because the ATtiny is capable of a far faster clock speed than the Macs...).
» Read full post.WS2801 LED Driver breakout
Just a quickie, companion to my bedroom lighting project video here: http://youtu.be/QDfqHmQUCMA
» Read full post.Strange Mac 512k RAM expansion by Calmos
So I picked up an old Mac 512k "fat mac" the other day. I was tearing it down for some maintenance, but encountered problems because a logic board was interfering with parts of the case. Turns out it was not a stock board - it was a 3d-party RAM expansion board: 512k Calmos 68k overview My teardown here:
» Read full post.SOHA: Complete
So as it happens with these personal projects, I've finished the project but haven't finished updating the build log (yet). However I've uploaded a video to my YouTube channel that shows the final result. I'll post more as I get inspired 🙂
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