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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBCYvoC4muc
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Oct 30, 2022 16:45
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LimaBiker posted:Not sure if pen plotters are at all in use anymore. At a company where i worked in 2017ish they had big 'plotters' to print hardware store layouts on a0 or a1 sheets of paper. Those were essentially just very large inkjet printers specifically for line drawings, fed by rolls of paper. Yeah, pen plotters are dead, everyone plots with inkjets now. Pen plotters live on as vinyl cutters.
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Oct 31, 2022 15:27
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A few pages ago we were talking about character generators and teletext, so I thought I'd share this thing I think I found from YOSPOS somewhere? https://edit.tf/ Basically an online chargen of the type that used to and may still run EBS/EAS type things.
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Nov 1, 2022 16:47
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I tried casting a halloween playlist to a speaker outside, but it kept cutting out. Instead, I hooked a discman up to a boombox and put in a spooky sfx disc. Way more reliable! The only downside was the discman is too old for a repeat function, so I had to start it over every hour.
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Nov 1, 2022 18:58
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DC to Daylight posted:Bonus obsolete tech. The house was built in the early 70's and had all the high tech poo poo for the day, like an intercom. It also had this near where the TV was supposed to go. Antennas are still great, they receive digital signals just the same as analog.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:08
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Iron Crowned posted:Antennas are still great, they receive digital signals just the same as analog. yeah my last house had a jack like this:  It connected to an antenna hanging in the attic. I was able to hook my TV to it and get way better signal than the flat leaf antennas you can get at Walmart.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:52
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Iron Crowned posted:Antennas are still great, they receive digital signals just the same as analog. Very true. wa27 posted:yeah my last house had a jack like this: That is one crazy jack. I wonder how the old box worked. Something like a servo would work in theory, but I think it would work poorly in practice. Also, I remember the knob had little detents when you rotated it, like it was semi-digital. I'm not sure how you'd do it cheaply with early 70's tech. The knob felt like the knob on an old washing machine, so maybe there were a bunch of microswitches wired in some clever way.
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Nov 1, 2022 20:26
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DC to Daylight posted:Very true. Probably some sort of gray-coded rotary knob. Like the volume control in most car stereos. Or possibly something outwardly similar powering cam switches with the control motor only knowing "go up" or "go down" until the cam switch breaks the power to the motor. I am now intensely curious how they actually did this.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:00
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Yeah, pen plotters are dead, everyone plots with inkjets now. Pen plotters live on as vinyl cutters. That being said, I'm an engineer and the market for hobbyist pen plotters is interesting because of all the different maker stuff that's big now and has the same mechanisms. I'm tempted to buy a small one because the look of plotted drawings is nice in its own way.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:12
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Explosionface posted:Probably some sort of gray-coded rotary knob. Like the volume control in most car stereos. Or possibly something outwardly similar powering cam switches with the control motor only knowing "go up" or "go down" until the cam switch breaks the power to the motor. I am now intensely curious how they actually did this. That's basically what I was thinking too, but I think the control was even dumber. I think (although I may be wrong) that it only turned in one direction. I'm trying to brainstorm the cheapest, shittiest way to do this. A bunch of relays, one for bit, OR-ed together and connected to the motor?
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Nov 1, 2022 21:13
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DC to Daylight posted:Very true. There's a potentiometer providing position feedback; seems to work well enough. https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/article/21807340/ham-antenna-rotator-the-teardown
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Nov 1, 2022 21:15
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I have no idea how rotors worked back then (they do still sell them today FYI), but analog signals were a lot less finicky back then, so you could still get at good signal with low accuracy. The thing about digital is it's you don't get that grey area, where you can get an ok signal and just put up with some graininess, digital has drop outs when the signal quality is too low.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:16
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DC to Daylight posted:That's basically what I was thinking too, but I think the control was even dumber. I think (although I may be wrong) that it only turned in one direction. I'm trying to brainstorm the cheapest, shittiest way to do this. A bunch of relays, one for bit, OR-ed together and connected to the motor? A potentiometer on either end? You turn the knob, the motor turns the antenna which turns its own potentiometer until it roughly matches your setting? E:f,b
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Nov 1, 2022 21:17
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Iron Crowned posted:The thing about digital is it's you don't get that grey area, where you can get an ok signal and just put up with some graininess, digital has drop outs when the signal quality is too low. That's because digital broadcasts include error-correction codes in the bitstream. You *do* get signal loss, but provided the loss isn't enough to lose the error corrections then the original bitstream can be perfectly reconstructed on the receiving end.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:20
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DC to Daylight posted:That's basically what I was thinking too, but I think the control was even dumber. I think (although I may be wrong) that it only turned in one direction. I'm trying to brainstorm the cheapest, shittiest way to do this. A bunch of relays, one for bit, OR-ed together and connected to the motor? Explosionface posted:Probably some sort of gray-coded rotary knob. Like the volume control in most car stereos. Or possibly something outwardly similar powering cam switches with the control motor only knowing "go up" or "go down" until the cam switch breaks the power to the motor. I am now intensely curious how they actually did this. I would be pretty surprised if there was anything digital in it at all. Just use a rotary selector and a bunch of resistors to set varying resistances as you go around the circle. Then: Zopotantor posted:There's a potentiometer providing position feedback; seems to work well enough. If you've got a pot in the rotor itself, I can't imagine the circuit to say "turn the motor until the potentiometer in the rotor matches the resistance of the controller" is especially challenging. A few transistors, I'd think, although I haven't sat down and figured out how it would work.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:22
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So, I was able to find a video of the thing in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIB-J44nu8g And here's a manual, with a hard to read schematic on page 2. https://www.manualslib.com/manual/966549/Alliance-U-100.html#manual I'm still thinking about this. Some of the comments in the manual make me think it was more like a Stroger switch.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:36
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Same, but the prior owner was a proud Yautja so we let it slide and never touched it.
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Nov 2, 2022 06:27
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I have owned 2 antenna rotors (still got one) They are essentially 2 syncronous AC motors. There is a 'set' pointer in the control box, and internally another sort-of pointer that appears to have a limit switch on it. Turn the pointer from east to west, and you'll open or close the switch, the motor inside of the control box as well as the rotor will both spin synchronous to mains, and therefore rotate the antenna in sync with the internal, sometimes invisible pointer in the box. There is no feedback in my old school rotors. If you noticed that the antenna and the control box weren't in sync anymore, you would rotate it first to 1 degree, and then to 359 degrees. The antenna rotor would just lock and buzz agains the end stop while the pointer in the control box kept going towards 1 or 359 degrees. After that, both are sync'd again. There probably are more refined setups, but this was common tech in the 1960s. After work i'll grab it and open it up. I have never actually opened it, this is just how i assume the simple buzzy ones work.
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Nov 2, 2022 08:06
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LimaBiker posted:Not sure if pen plotters are at all in use anymore. At a company where i worked in 2017ish they had big 'plotters' to print hardware store layouts on a0 or a1 sheets of paper. Those were essentially just very large inkjet printers specifically for line drawings, fed by rolls of paper. When I was a packaging designer over ten years ago, they had these special pen plotters that were fitted with knifes and "blunt pens" to cut and crease cardboard to make prototypes. You'd send your drawing to a computer connected to it, put the paper on its pegboard-like surface and turn the vacuum on to hold it down, and then you could plot out your design.
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Nov 2, 2022 08:11
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Our vinyl plotter still came with a pen holder. We still use it to make drill patterns for dimensional letters...when the big printer is busy. 30" wide plotters are pretty cheap on the used market as 54" & 60" wide models became more popular with sign shops to work with their matching wide format printers for print & cut production.
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Nov 2, 2022 12:28
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Nov 2, 2022 16:04
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This was fine for analog but with todays digital signals you’re gonna get too much loss
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Nov 2, 2022 16:06
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How does the signal move past that?
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Nov 2, 2022 16:43
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it transmits braille
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Nov 2, 2022 17:05
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it's clearly a multi room spitball distribution unit all those little straws running through the walls
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Nov 2, 2022 20:07
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It's often much harder on the type F coax connector than on the 300-ohm flat.
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Nov 2, 2022 20:16
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I like to imagine that entire thing is just for one giant, hosed up connector.
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Nov 3, 2022 02:42
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monolithburger posted:I like to imagine that entire thing is just for one giant, hosed up connector. V.35? 
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Nov 3, 2022 03:33
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Trypophobics most hated connector.
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Nov 3, 2022 03:57
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Posted this is another thread but you guys know a lot more about this stuff I need to track down some reasonably priced working tape players (u-matic, beta, etc) for a nonprofit. You folks have any suggestions on a source?
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Nov 3, 2022 19:42
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Do you have to collect four emblems scattered in the other rooms of your house to access the space behind that plate?
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Nov 3, 2022 21:46
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Catzilla posted:Do you have to collect four emblems scattered in the other rooms of your house to access the space behind that plate? No, you just need to suffer a loss.
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Nov 3, 2022 22:09
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So it's one of those cutscenes with inventory loss.
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Nov 4, 2022 07:08
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these old connectors for old intermittent tech we've all but forgot about is cool as gently caress folks are saying that those ancient 70s antenna pick up digital signals - are you sure about that? i had to pick up a new one
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Nov 4, 2022 07:25
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Waifu Radia posted:these old connectors for old intermittent tech we've all but forgot about is cool as gently caress Yeah, that ROTOR antenna tuner mechanism is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. The sounds it makes are very satisfying. Unperson_47 has a new favorite as of 07:43 on Nov 4, 2022 |
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Nov 4, 2022 07:38
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https://twitter.com/Snack_Memories/status/1588498665072906240?s=20&t=3xfifLJ5fjg-iqey2_CKyA
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Nov 4, 2022 13:33
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Be kind, rewind
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Nov 4, 2022 13:55
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Unperson_47 posted:Yeah, that ROTOR antenna tuner mechanism is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. The sounds it makes are very satisfying. Great, now I gotta watch R.O.T.O.R. again....
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Nov 4, 2022 14:44
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That movie is never obsolete.
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Nov 4, 2022 15:15
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Waifu Radia posted:folks are saying that those ancient 70s antenna pick up digital signals - are you sure about that? i had to pick up a new one Analog vs digital tv, it's still a radio signal, the antenna will pick it up fine. Whether the cord coming off that antenna fits the DTV port on your new TV (I don't see many of the wirenut pigtail connectors on tvs anymore  ), or you have to get a converter, or a DTV set top box to intermediate, that's kind of up in the air.
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Nov 4, 2022 17:12
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