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  • Author Author: dubbie
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My Pulse Generator

dubbie
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Technically this is not a Hack as I haven't done anything to it but it is a bit of reverse engineering and although it is not bus sniffing, I did do a bit of sniffing with my nose. I was inspired by Ralph Yamamoto's Blog on his old Pong game (Pong is Alive ) to dig out an old pulse generator I made, probably over forty years ago.

 

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The construction is much better than I ever remember doing, I must have been training to be an engineer or something, before I gave it all up to become a lecturer. The top and bottom are laminated chip board and the sides are repurposed aluminium sheet. I recognise the plastic coating of the sides from my days at GEC Telecommunications in Coventry when I was on placement, they had skips of old stuff they no longer wanted and you were free to take whatever you wanted. The front is brushed aluminium with Lettraset lettering covered with a plastic film I think.

 

In the video below is a look inside and quick overview of the integrated circuits used.

 

 

I'm not particularly attached to this pulse generator so rather than testing it step by step to see if it working I decided to just powered it up and see what is what. If it blows up it blows up.

 

 

Surprisingly it still seemed to work so the next step was to see what outputs were still being generated.

 

 

All the outputs still seem to work as desired, albeit with some strange voltages at times. Amazing! After 40 years sitting in cupboards and being moved from house to house, it is still in one piece and still works as it did when I first constructed it. 

 

Still, life moves on. I do not have any sentimental attachments to this pulse generator as I just do not remember making it and I'm not going to use it as it isn't safe and it is very heavy. Plus I am currently in a phase on de-cluttering so this is likely to end up on the rubbish heap somewhere in the not too distant future. I do not want any of these old ICs so I will not keep them. I might keep the 4 mm sockets and maybe the mains plug but that is probably all. If I ever need a pulse generator in the future which does seem unlikely, I will either make one from an Arduino or buy one ready made.

 

Dubbie

Parents

  • I do like it when you guys drag out your old stuff, I have a real appreciation for old engineering.  We are all old and ugly enough to know that things change over the years but it’s always good to show that we were solving these problems back in the day and, “no, you haven’t come up with anything revolutionary, just updated” image

     

    Software engineering doesn’t tend to keep a track of ancestry in the same way (unless you work with COBOL in a bank!) but it certainly isn’t getting simpler, just more complex, and we insist on solving the same problems.  Some things I definitely don’t miss though: try explaining juggling PC memory managers with boot files to install software that happens to be 700KB in size to the ladies and gents fresh out of university today.

  • in reply to Andrew J

    I started programming in machine code in 256 Bytes, yes Bytes! I didn't get very far.

     

    Dubbie

  • in reply to dubbie

    Bytes!  Bytes!  You don't know your born, you.  We had to have bits.  Only we called them flags 'coz we had to tell some chap to hold up the one we wanted and then we'd write it down.  In our own blood of course, none of this namby-pamby pencil nonsense.   You could only run programs by sprinting across the other side of the room and back.  All for tuppence a day.  Aye, good old days them.

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  • in reply to dubbie

    Bytes!  Bytes!  You don't know your born, you.  We had to have bits.  Only we called them flags 'coz we had to tell some chap to hold up the one we wanted and then we'd write it down.  In our own blood of course, none of this namby-pamby pencil nonsense.   You could only run programs by sprinting across the other side of the room and back.  All for tuppence a day.  Aye, good old days them.

Children
  • in reply to Andrew J

    Bits!, Bits!, sometimes I would travel to the centre of the sun (without any tea), get some steel, make it into chisels, then come 'ome, go to the quarry, dig some granite out with me bare 'ands, then by the light of a dozen fireflies, chisel marks into the granite. Once that'd been dun, I'd invent a postal service and then post the granite to the central picnic utility (CPU) and wait several years for the answer.

     

    Dubbie