Radio Shack Mystery Box 3000

bud what do we have here in the basement is it a large box even though it's labeled medium yeah this box is almost as big as you look how big you are now you're an adult cat now last time i weighed you you weighed 12 pounds i bet you weigh more than that now you look at your big cat paws big cat paws butterscotch bandit that was your winning name on youtube well this video isn't all about bud i figured i would just put him in it because he was mewing at the door uh this is actually regarding this box so i had someone email me and they said hey i bought a whole bunch of stuff at radio shack before it went out of business i mean it's still technically sort of in business but well you know what i mean are you gonna jump for it like oh i bought all the stuff at radio shack before it went into business and uh i'm probably gonna throw it away unless you want it and i'm like oh yeah i'll take it uh they wanted to remain anonymous so just thank you to anonymous person but yeah i figured we would see what's inside of the box and i have no idea what's inside i just know that it came from radio shack so you and i will be surprised at the same time bud's all excited because i never let him in here there's too much stuff for him to knock down all right there appears to be a black garbage bag which contains everything interesting way of patching it that's quite heavy this is really heavy mary jane evil santa bag engineers notebook for integrated circuit applications this is like a forest m mems thing oh who wrote it oh it is there it is forest m mems of course oh look this is beautiful oh man i think i had like one of his books when i was a kid look at all the schematics i might have to donate this i might have to pay it forward with this donation okay how about with switches oh this is great i love this i can put that on my bookshelf holy heck uh push on push off switch toggle switch more push button switches micro toggle switch more push button switches and it's like every oh i think what he did was he basically oh no i said that i i i guess their gender is not anonymous i went into a uh radio shack and basically just bought everything when they were closing out because this looks like an entire radio shacks worth of switches i think what i should do is i'll get like a little cardboard box and put things into it by category and then i can redistribute them into my bins because i do actually have uh an entire bin which is almost entirely switches oh yeah i thought this looked more modern the ico iconography oh it's arduino stuff okay oh a motor shield from seed studio cool ethernet shield so these we both go on arduino uno oh is there a oh nice arduino mega2560 now i still use arduinos from time to time and not the greatest poster looks like that sub subway map from new york city the you know the famous one from the 70s or whatever the i still yeah so i still on occasion use arduinos i when i'm doing integrated stuff i usually tend to go for uh uh i still like atmel i use a lot of admiral stuff i just i like their sam line the uh arm line also they're i like their new tinies uh yeah so thank you very much definitely use that or uh pass it along to a kid maybe oh it's a solderless breadboard oh it's some sort of circuit oh what was he trying to make five five five with a buzzer and whoa oh looks like a relay of some kind i don't know if he's trying to make a buzzer or a light blinker or i don't even know who made this but interesting it's like a window in the past but uh yeah look at this this is wishboard oh that's awesome oh and another one oh man you know crap you know we don't always get along that great but i should probably email karen about this because i bet she would know a lot of people that could use some of this stuff at the hackerspace what are those things bud are those packing peanuts some of which are biodegradable and some of which aren't are you triggered by that looks like some jars oh it's like spade connectors and random random jumper wires alligator clips uh actually probably probably put this one in the garbage because this looks a little too random for me i actually have quite a few uh alligator clips and cables but these are useful oh wow that's like an old school rolaids tin guessing this guy was probably a retiree oh counters yes [Music] a bin of bins everything's on a cob oh it's leds take two of these and call me in the morning oh those leds were removed from something else oh look it's just the old school led calculator displays oh that's so cool yeah uh you know like the old hp's and stuff from the 70s oh that's so cool i could make oh here's one with the clear dome yeah so what this would be uh what seven segments plus decimal point so eight so eight of these lines would be uh oh oh no no it's just it's the same thing on both sides because it's got plated through holes so let's see we've got one two three four five six seven eight and then one two three four five six seven eight nine this is oh yeah so this would be either common anode or cathode and then you would just light up the distances you want and then drive it with a row array basically like break it okay that's going to my keep pile oh i can make my own calculator i have uh have some contractors coming a week from week from today actually to dig up my driveway in order to put in a new driveway so i've been dropping some lines to future-proof my garage oh test probes can be useful for like multimeters um i think i have enough of those so i should probably create a donate box oh i remember someone from the email now he's like now there's some boxes in there that say cuban cigars don't get excited they're not actually a cuban cigar well they were but my dad smoked them all oh man i i had a cuban cigar once uh it was at uh mgc 2000 i don't know i was at the old building 2017 nice selection of switches here and it's got all type it's got rotary large push button uh i don't even know what that is like a key lock switch oh yeah it is i am what is it bud what's that you want me to kick you out of the room oh dip switches yeah i think i'll just go ahead and yoink those for myself oh wow those are old school snap action miniature switches yeah this is quite the old collection oh yeah look at those that's old school i think i'm gonna keep this i like this this electrical lock [Music] oh these go onto computers i believe and then a bunch of pc computer screws i think i might keep this for myself even though i don't build computers that often what you doing over there bud oh little trimmer pots yeah they look the same okay pot pot pot pot pot pot pot pot pop pot pot pot okay so these are all pots and it really accidentally got stuck with them oh i think i'll keep those trimmer pots i have a whole well i have two bins of potentiometers oh yes more of these i have so many of these though do i really need more maybe someone else could use them more than i hey you're attacking my chair you're really pushing a cat alright that's out you're out of here oh is this euro card no no no euro card has pins on the end you know i don't know enough about these i think these all appear to be kind of special i think i'm gonna keep those separate printed circuit board that's just perf board no copper on it i personally i personally bought like no joke i'm not exactly like a thousand of these off radio shack online when they went out of business yeah some ribbon cable smells pretty old that's at least from the 80s uh but you know i could probably use it one thing that's nice about older ribbon cable is it's much more easy it's much easier to separate the uh the strands oh yeah then there's this oh it's uh it's uh oh really stinky led lighting okay so it's a direct drive oh man the resin coating oh like like see how there's like a bulbous coating on it oh man it definitely has a pungent odor it has it has a strong musk uh oh of course the requisite giant bag of resistors look at that big guy uh you know i don't know if i can really justify keeping this maybe maybe i could put this into a jar and make a cool display but like as if i'm gonna dig through this bag of resistors looking for a value the value of the food usually create the energy you would expend looking for those resistors is far greater than the value of the resistor did mythbusters do that once like is it worth it to pick up a penny and i think the answer was actually no oh more relays oh toner relays oh this is all relays yeah these are all standard parts they just get re re-badged or repackaged by radio shack so it's not like you don't even need the bag you just like take the part out and then when you want to use it look up the number oh my gosh this is super old school deluxe metal utility cabinet sturdy two-piece construction steel cover aluminum panels louvered for ventilation well that's a word you don't see um banding about casually these days removable rubber mounting feet taiwan which is totally its own independent country this is okay this is oh this is old it's at least the 70s man i'd say it's pushing the 60s yeah it's this i would i would guarantee this is older than i am wow it's still in pretty good condition look at that yeah this is it's got like a nice flake paint some of the uh some of the old smell from the uh box has permeated the metal this is just just reminds me of like all those old school projects you know where you'd have some toggle switches right so you know you drill holes in the end of this and then you put the toggle switches in and then you'd make a 555 phone freaker or something yeah that's pretty much it man i can't remember last time i saw the word louvered anywhere rubber feet are still intact they're probably real rubber oh man it's like it's just like look at the box the box is awesome i feel like i want to build something with this how would how do you attach things inside of it though because like you would drill holes in the end like your power supply would come in here and then your switches would be here but how do you mount the circuit boards i guess they just kind of hang in the breeze it's a really nice box i'm definitely going to keep this i just love the flake coating of this okay this box is my favorite thing out of the package thus far [Applause] oh this is very modern radio shack packaging it's an infrared led white led yellow red led assembly i mean it's an assembly oh it's got a oh this would look perfect with that box even though leds did not exist in the 60s look i yeah that box has to be at least 45 years old i mean if it was an integrated circuit we could just like look at the date code that's a weird led look at that one how much do you think radio shack charge for those two leds i bet it was like 250. yeah i think i'm gonna put this on the donate pile i already have plenty of opto electronics random usb cables i guess you can always never have enough random usb cables a bunch integrated circuit sockets these are kind of random i don't think i would actually use these these are the kind you'd probably use with like wire wrap oh havana tobacco in aluminum tubes oh yes cuban cigars oh look you know what that is for that's cedar you actually are supposed to light this on fire and then use this to light the cigar kind of like in the movie hellboy where jeffrey tambor's like you can't you know if you light a cigar with a lighter the fumes or whatever will affect it so that's actually what that's for so i guess that's cuban cedar uh yeah this looks like all seven four series logic oh man you know oh no i just thought of a scam i could i could go buy a bunch of gas station cigars and stick them in these tubes and then go to like a gas station i guess i'd already be at a gas station in this plane i'd go to a gas station and be like hey i got some cuban cigars how old is this box this is probably from the 70s it's like yeah i got some i got some post embargo cigars it's like you want some and he'd be like oh yeah but no the person first of all the first person would be like i don't know this seems too good to be true but then what you do is you have another person another person the shill walks up to the mark and the person's like oh are you selling cuban cigars and you're like yeah i'm still keeping cigars you want some and then the the chill is like yeah that's a great deal give me the cigars and of course that person is your accomplice and then the mark is like well that person thought it was a good deal i'm gonna buy some too uh looks like uh rotary joystick with a button on top oh neat is there any of markings okay made in america whoa okay well that automatically puts this on my keep list oh okay yeah so they've got the wiper attached and then one of the sides which it wouldn't give you a voltage division but it would give you a difference in resistance yeah this is i nice make like a video game with this and it even has the panel mount for the bezel oh i still have the taste of that box in my mouth i can't get it out of my mouth looks like a couple fuses and then more leds and more fuses so i think i will sort these now let's see four inch and a quarter by one quarter inch fuses that's pretty standard size glass fuse wouldn't one of these look great in the back of that box for whatever it is i build with it whatever i build has to have a five five five in it for some reason i'm guessing this is capacitors you know what i'm just going to put this right into the donate pile i already have all the capacitors i could ever need what is this it's got an old ipod connector on it what is this that's not very old i actually got a charger just like this with my uh prime day tablet i got a couple months ago whenever that was oh they're old uh ipods oh cool like what do you call these things oh this is an old hard drive ipod oh it slows the charge awesome yeah 120 gigs this would have been a hard drive oh no oh yeah the hard i could i was listening to the hard drive oh it must have cashed the song into ram and then turn off the hard drive when that makes sense so what happens if i advance one oh it must have cached the entire album into ram oh this this is awesome like the these uh these are actually fairly sought after the old the late model hard drive uh ipods thank you so much this is so cool do you actually need itunes to load this with music heck this thing is this thing has more uh memory than my phone does what is this supposed to be that was made on may 14th 1980. um [Music] there's a capacitor and some sort of integrated circuit what was the point of this was it a boost circuit of some kind and also a quite old chassis base not sure what this would be very useful for for me a variety of project boxes looks like they're unused oh more chassis bases it's some sort of device we're going to have to have a two-minute tear down what would it wait what would it even do it has power coming in and two knobs and a switch i'm still gonna take it apart well i'm gonna finish looking at the box first oh it's an old-school digital logic probe i can't remember how to use one of these exactly it's like you can see it can see a a low pulse when it's mostly higher a high pulse when it's mostly low depends on how you set it and then how the light blinks tells you how it works is probably no it doesn't tell you the that's weird there's a chart of what it all means maximum operating frequency 10 megahertz that's not too bad i mean i have scopes i don't really need this but someone might what's this it's like a bunch of db25 stuff db cooper stuff db9 looks like they that was looks like if they're doing a uh two different directions yeah that would have been like a null uh wait no no it's not going to the same pins i wonder what that was for at first i thought it was like a null data connection because this uh well parallel port so it's got 8-bit parallel data and i those i'm kind of on the fence with those i think i might keep those i don't know i can't get the taste out of my head oh wow tons of logic [Applause] oh this is old ah see it's got this material is disintegrating oh there's stuff on both sides there are heroes on both sides oh wow that's right going for it see that that's a really old motorola 6805 wow that's old school like you can tell by the way the the dye is set up a lot of 83s 84 1980. oh an 8088 okay that's everyone knows what that is i wish i could have been there junior there were rats dad big ones ah junior i'm scared of rats and you're scared of snakes maybe your son mutt jones won't be scared of anything he's not my son oh yes she is here's your shun led flasher oscillator kind of interesting how we went you know further into the box and that last bag seemed like it was some of the older things as is this these pogos no they're just test points these are fairly old as well i don't even know what that is oh oh oh okay all right one last bag they have chick-fil-as in that state that this is from oh that's not old oh look it's something that was made with that box oh it's like a little power supply oh it smells old oh oh you can smell the the enamel the so that thing has had a hard life uh yeah the enamel of the wires yeah look at this some dichotomy well maybe that's not the right word and look at this the age range of these parts you've got something from like the 70s oh yeah it's been well loved and then some rocker switches create well i mean it's it's consistently packaged here's a bag within a bag like a wheel within a wheel more rocker switches rotary switch see cell pack terminals oh look at that old school beauty bob's your uncle what a win oh i guess people liked it but oh wow oh that's old school look at that that is really old school that's plastic wait high temperature plastic that's not a pcb oh man that's crazy he's so crazy i want to have your baby what the heck is what is this other old school roll aids that one is oh they're both plastic okay oh magnetic reed switches that's what they are ah yeah i think i might want to like take a closer look so i think it'd be cool if you could try to fire up one of these led displays wait light emitting diode display okay that's not redundant lcd display would be redundant like the sahara desert it's upside down puke cam i like this this is old school this is like from the 70s um makes me think of like one of those um kim kits you know like try out the new cpu from intel yeah so i might actually use this for something because i'm thinking i should try to make a calculator like a simple calculator with uh what we have here i wonder what i wonder what the purpose of this was let's take a look inside take a look it's in a book a reading rainbow i can do anything except get a date it is my fate when i'm in space jordi laforge space in cell um okay well uh the best i can guess is that this was supposed to be some sort of um variable resistor array like a decade box um kind of like one of these where you can basically dial a value yeah cause i'm assuming that's the common i wonder if someday somebody will be looking at my leftover gizmos and trying to figure out what i was doing someday someday yeah walk in the rain beautiful sun so that one goes there but wait that's weird because that would that would disconnect the oh no the black one goes there oh oh oh oh it's going to two places oh i see yeah but that's what this was supposed to be in well as evidenced by all the resistors in it hmm yeah it seems like maybe they they started this and then they're like oh wait it doesn't quite make sense and then they never finished it maybe i could finish it make a thumbnail it's like the unfinished symphony of something oh yeah and then well for one thing you you would probably want a knob with an arrow on it so you knew what the resistance was uh but i could laser cut that uh yeah because i'm thinking what you'd probably want this to do is you could have course values on one knob and then find values on the other or maybe you see i'm not exactly sure what the switch is even for but it's got the the banana plugs so let's see just go whoop just like that or you know you can attach from the side okay well yeah maybe i'll do that all right this thing it's obviously a power supply but what kind of power supply let's plug it in don't explode don't explode don't explode very dim led up is on that makes sense okay guess the voltage i'm gonna guess five or twelve and the answer is five of course we have to take a look inside ah but this gave me a big oh yeah there's gonna be a transformer in there look it's a louvered box this louvered box is so beautiful it should be in the i'll just let you finish that below i'm not even going to finish that dad joke oh that's got a vintage smell it still works it's got that same kind of plastic circuit board that we saw on that keyboard anyway uh let's see do they have this doesn't have ground does it no i think it was just neutral and hot yeah well they do have a ground wire that's going to the case although it doesn't really do anything because there's no ground going to the plug uh yeah so then you've got a uh bridge rectifier here so that basically converts it from ac to dc pretty beefy caps and then old school five volt regulator pretty simple oh and then they got the resistor going to the led but they pick too high of a value how so you're just critiquing this stuff now ben like yeah i guess i am like i don't know well depending on the load i'm not sure how hot this would get oh i'm sorry the green wires are the output from the transformer so we see the transformer is 6.3 volts 1.2 amps yeah that's actually a pretty close dropout for this regulator especially for something so old because i think we talked about dropouts before um you know you'd be looking at you know the minimum voltage that it takes to make a regulator work so yeah well maybe 6.3 isn't that low but it's kind of low i don't know maybe i should rebuild it with a better plug like a better plug and then grounding because you've got this big metal box but there isn't actually an earth ground to your house i've been uh future proofing my garage actually this is the first day in like five days i've actually sat inside and just got caught up on other projects been doing so much work outside um yeah the driveway is getting redone the it's wealth in two steps they rip it up and then they put a new one down the rip-up step is a week from today which means anything i want to change in the ground between my house and my driveway i have to do by next monday um i'm pretty close although i'm doing a few more tweaks but yeah i'm kind of wanting to future-proof it anyway so things like grounding and whatnot has been on my mind a lot yeah this is this isn't even a polarized plug or is it no it's not yeah because without a polarized plug you don't know which one is hot i wonder if this guy's gonna watch this video and and be like i can't believe he's doing all this well i mean i don't know what do you expect it's me oh this is smart he's got little nuts here on the banana plugs so you should be able to remove the circuit board without removing the banana plugs except for hitting that ah there we go yeah then you should be able to just slide this off yes the blue box yeah most of that old musk oh that's just coming from the led okay that's not a big deal most of that old musk is coming from the well all of it it's coming from the transformer because it smells like uh enamel wire it's weird that he used this post thing here i wonder why i wonder why i did it that way oh he soldered it and the wire nutted it oh except for that one he didn't oh no never mind why did that look like oh cause there is solder on it we get a strain relief tied up and that's good relief you've just been relieved jump to the choppa who could it be [Music] believe it or not it's just me just like the light of a new day it hit me from out of the blue knocking me out of the spell i was in making all of my wishes come true he wished to be the greatest american superhero i guess yeah maybe that makes sense you know with great power comes great responsibility that was the saying of old uncle ben if you missed it don't worry you'll hear the line again and again and again so i'm a huge sam raimi fan i still made all the best superhero movies marvel has not yet made a movie as good as spider-man 2. butterfingers let's see oh i see he tinned the end of the wire so it wouldn't separate now that makes sense okay is this switch even voted for oh no did i say vaulted it filed it's a bobby lose well anyway so we'll take the hot connect hot to the switch like so need a big wire nut on that one there we go we had to fix this solder junction oh i had another one another youtube related song driving around the south looking for some crap gonna hit a good weather too management uh wait was it crap or was it something else driving around the south looking for some crap gonna hit a goodwill or two big box games and things would grain driving around the south looking for some stuff stuff gonna hit a goodwill too stuff rhymes with enough driving around the south looking for some stuff gonna hit a good will or two [Music] big big box pc games and we're grandstand driving around the south looking for some stuff gonna hit a good willow too big box game big big box games wood grain driving around the south looking for some stuff gonna hit a good will or two big box games driving around the south looking for some stuff gonna hit a goodwill or two big box games wood grain frames and uh driving around the south looking for some stuff gonna hit a goodwill or two big box games wooden frames it's never enough i don't know what i will do driving around the south looking for some stuff gonna hit a good wheeler [Music] big box games big box games wooden frames is never enough don't know what i'm gonna do [Music] driving around the stuff looking for some stuff don't know what i'm gonna do no wait no no no no no i messed that up driving around the south looking for some stuff gonna hit a good world or two oh big box games wood game frames big box games would get no big box games and wood wooden frames big box games wooden frames it's never enough don't know what i'm gonna do oh i'm gonna attach ground so that it connects to the main casing through this nut and this frame so ground the purpose of ground is basically if there's some sort of catastrophic failure like the movie cats well it's taking a lot of soldering because this is old your favorite m night shyamalama llama movie okay then we'll also connect that to ground in the circuit driving around the south looking for some stuff gonna hit a goodwill or two [Music] big box games wooden frames it's never enough big box games and woodgrain frames is never enough don't know what i'm gonna do i already have the bridge figured out driving around the south looking for some stuff don't know what i'm gonna know driving around the south looking for some stuff gonna hit a good wheeler big box games wooden frames that's never enough don't know what i'm gonna do let's see that is ground right there it's also going to the negative of or the fr it's also going to the frame of the of the can for the regulator oh i could probably use one of those spade spade connectors i found oh okay i think i got it hmm the resistor was only 75 ohms i guess this led maybe it just lived too long i'll put a new one in but it won't be blue driving around the south looking for some stuff gonna hit a goodwill or two big box games wooden frames is never enough don't know what i'm gonna do back in the lg you don't know how lucky you are boy back in the lg gr don't those east coast girls really get their kicks when they see what you bought in the store uh they drop their panties for a 486 and when it comes around they're asking for my mama more back and the lg back and the algae back and the lggr all right so the resistor wasn't the issue it was the uh led itself so i'll just put the same resistor back in that'll save me what a tenth of a cent although these days with component shortages in these unprecedented times well i guess they are what's that famous curse may you live in interesting times okay hooked it up the same except for now we know which one is hot coming off of ac it's going into this toggle switch then we have the ground connected to the chassis and the ground or earth wire coming from the house yeah there there there there oh was that gonna be a problem with the transformer in the frame like that all right let's try not to blow up the house and boom 5.8 volts great and the led is visible this time let me see if i can get one of these displays to light up uh it's probably a common cathode or anode for every segment and then what is it a b c d e f g so seven segments there's something okay so this tells us this is a common uh common cathode and then this is the uh what would that be segment if you go to that common cathode and then we hit other ones oh yep there's the other segments cool all right i should be able to map it out from here seems like it's every other uh line hooks up to a common uh well it's like segment common cathode digit segment common cathode digit so we go this one skip two skip two skip two i was thinking about driving this with a decade counter um that's a circuit where or integrated circuit where every time you give it a pulse it uh increments up to ten and then it resets i have i have some here but looking at the data sheets it looks like it outputs a positive pulse which means i couldn't use that to drive the common cathode unless i put it through an inverter which would then add a chip brute forcing it with something with more io like maybe an old arduino uno or something because what you do is you have the seven segments well eight if you include the decimal point you drive that and then you go boom boom boom boom you hit you change each common cathode from a one to a zero and that basically indicates which digit is on and then you do that very rapidly and it creates the illusion or the persistence of vision in your eyes of all the digits being you know solid now let's see there's one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 11 digits on this that's pretty fancy although the leftmost digit doesn't seem to work which gives us 10 digits so the question is how do we drive it um uh maybe just for a demo we could use a pair of uh 595 shift registers we can use one to drive the segments and the other one to drive the common uh cathode so we just send out 16 bits and that would control for lack of a better word the rows and columns yeah if we can do everything with shift registers then we could drive this screen using a potato uh they make uh led segment drivers i think maxim makes it i think i have everything i need here i've got the two shift registers i'm just gonna go with eight digits so i've got um the first one is driving the segments and the second one is driving the columns or the common uh cathode so this one for instance if it has an eight bit output um all the bits will be high except for one will be low and that'll be the active uh segment to be displayed i've got a test rig ready here i've got an atmel uh four one two uh microcontroller i believe we talked about that in previous video then i'm gonna hook that up to these shift registers all i need is a spy bus so this should work and then we'll see if we can get the display to display some numbers oh i forgot the trick with these breadboards um the power rails on the sides they don't go all the way across you actually have to put a jumper here oh yeah i got one character i just randomly typed in some data so cool all right let's work on the code and uh actually get some numbers on on the display spy send okay so this one tells it what row to draw and this one tells it what character to draw so a a ended up being that bracket thing that we saw that's great and then this set and clear that pulse the latch to make the data appear and then we do it once every millisecond we can do it faster than that if you want okay so we want to make all the did show up uh let's see well probably let's do it as fast as possible so let's get rid of the delay so which digit is zero so we take one we bit shift it which digit to the left which would be zero to start or a maximum of seven and then the tilde means that we're inverting whatever this is so then down here we'll do if which digit equals eight then we will reset it that should give us a full row of eight characters oh see how it got darker that's because it's being multiplexed hmm we're only getting six oh i see what i did see how i staggered the resistors to the other side i must have accidentally i staggered the column sink to the other side as well there's your problem bud seriously oh this is the start of my two week vacation it's supposed to come today and rip up my driveway uh yeah i'm not sure when they're actually going to get here so the display is going to be this is going to be what's actually on the screen uh let's see zero zero to nine so ten so i'm gonna have the tenth character actually be a space so no character so this is what's on the on the screen this is a indexes of what appears in each position so it'll be uh five blank spaces and then one two three and then we actually need uh need something to actually create the characters yeah okay and obviously there's well come on ben there's 10 of them uh yeah okay now i need to figure out the bit patterns this is how the segments are labeled a b c d e f g and then decimal point this shows one of these standard displays so see how it segments c h a e d g b f so it's a bit random uh yeah but i think i stuffed those bits pretty much in a straight line so i should be able to use this to come up with the bed patterns pretty easily okay so that's the rightmost part and then so the msb would be segment c all right so zero one two three four five six seven eight nine and the tenth is remember blank so that's just all zeros all right so i'm going to start with all the bits on so an 8 except for the bit that does the decimal point because we don't really need that yet then i can build up from there so i'll just basically create zeros where i don't want there to be segments uh okay so like to make a one uh let's see all i want are b and c and b and c are the msb and the second lsb so so i just go and that should make a one and yep there's a one easy now i'll do the rest cool there's the complete bit pattern for numbers i guess i could put x characters in here as well like a b c d e you can make those with seven segment pretty easily all right there you go that's how you can drive one of these old-school led displays uh they also make custom circuits for like maxim has some led driver chips i probably have some i know i've used them before i just don't know where they went so i just had to you know do this manually but yeah it's pretty easy to do i wonder well actually no this is a gap of like what one millisecond no i removed the gap okay so this is full speed uh let's see i'm gonna delay it excessively all right let me resend it see that's what's actually happening so if you were like a super robot from the future and you looked at a calculator that's what you'd see you know when i was a kid i always noticed uh vibrations would cause the segments in my alarm clock to dance and i always wondered why that was i thought i was like in a simulation or something but and not many years later now i know why that happened is because the characters were being updated at a high frequency like this and your eyes have a persistence of vision so if there's a vibration like if you if you go like with your mouth you'll see the characters dance because it's basically shaking your eyeballs slightly and so the the persistence of vision kind of like phosphors on the crt television the persistence of vision in your eyes causes the offset to change and so they kind of stick in different positions making them look jumbled it's kind of crazy one millisecond so times eight uh the camera might not be able to see it but i should be able to see it yeah if i do that they dance ten should be visible see you can see the strobing effect on the camera because the camera has a rolling shutter but as a human i look at it and it just looks like the whole thing is blinking i can't see the individual blinking yeah so that means it takes 80 milliseconds to complete one cycle which is what about 12 hertz well one thing you can do though i don't know if the camera would show up but you kind of want to leave each character on as long as you can to make it look brighter now there's one one millisecond per character is it any different if you go down to no gap whatsoever no perceivable difference okay there you have it we used a modern microcontroller and some logic to drive an old-school led display i thought about making this do a calculator but i i have a project that i've been working on slowly to make a programmer's calculator a lot of these calculators do have like binary in hacked but i wanted to make a dedicated calculator for it i wanted to have it done for vintage computer festival midwest but i didn't get around to it so maybe next year so i guess my point is i'm going to save my calculator building time for that so i guess i will see in the next video

Channel: Ben Heck Hacks

Views: 38,973

Keywords: radio shack, stuff, switches, LED, retro

Id: pX25oIkfzWA

Length: 53min 6sec (3186 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/aperson]

Ben Heck spends maybe 10 minutes figuring out the lyrics to his LGR tribute. Timestamp is 40:40 if it doesn't work.

[u/CaptMidnight264]

I love it when the retro tech Youtubers cross over like this. Reminds me of the saga when RMC restored and auctioned off a batch of IBM's on his channel. Then in the blink of an eye Clint was then reviewing one from said batch across the pond.

[u/Boyuki]

Ha! I saw this the other day and forgot to post it.