Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
I’m finally upgrading my soldering station.
After many years of using my slow, inexpensive (but pretty reliable) Radio Shack soldering iron, I’m upgrading to a Hakko FX-888D!
I’m excited to start using the Hakko. I expect there will be a bit of a learning curve with the new soldering iron, but I think it will be a nice step up. The old soldering iron will go back to the garage to get used on projects there.
On the workbench for some troubleshooting is a 1950s era vintage RCA Victor 45-EY-3 record player. It belongs to someone in my neighbourhood and came to me via a referral from a neighbour who’s familiar with my penchant for tinkering with electronics.
The owner purchased this recently and had already replaced the tubes, capacitors, a few resistors and some of the mechanical bits before the record player landed on my bench. He said it was sort of working (some mechanical issues with the arm moving), but then stopped turning on. Fortunately, he had a printouts of the service documentation available to look over. On the electronics side, the circuitry is pretty simple consisting of three tubes: rectifier (35W4), amplifier (12AV6), and output (50C5).
After touching up a few solder joints, I found the power switch was kind of dodgy and would work if I tilted it a certain way. I also realigned the muting switch (S2) so that it was oriented the same way as one of the photos in the service manual. That got me to the point where records could play and sound came out of the speaker instead of just resonating through the needle arm. The sound volume was pretty low though, even with the volume pot turned up all the way and there’s also a lot of hum getting into the electronics too. Those are the two main things I need to work on, and the owner will work on the mechanical stuff.
Finally, after almost a year, my PhD diploma is in a proper frame and is hanging on the wall!
The frame came with some interesting mounting hardware. The plastic hangers have a pointy part on the wall side. Insert those into the key hole hangers on the frame side, put the frame up against the wall where you want to hang it, and press against the wall. The pointy part leaves a little dimple in the drywall right where the plastic hangers need to be nailed. Take the plastic hangers off the frame, nail it to the wall where the dimple is, and then hang the frame.
Pretty clever.
Now I have it hanging on the wall above my computer. Looks pretty good there.
I have a long history of dabbling with emacs, having discovered it during my latter undergrad years (the emacs 18 era). I’d pick it up for a while, and then go back to whatever editor I happened to be using at the time. I liked emacs, but using it wasn’t anything that ever really stuck with me. Part of the reason was that I didn’t really have a solid use case for something like emacs. Emacs also has a not-so insignificant learning curve and getting into it can be pretty overwhelming and intimidating.
When I started on the PhD, I made a concerted effort to make emacs one of my primary tools, having learned about things like org-mode and distributions like spacemacs and doom-emacs from other people.
Org-mode makes setting up something like a research notebook pretty easy, and getting started is pretty simple. The basics are pretty easy to learn and when you want to do something more advanced, the documentation is very good.
Now, after spending the past couple of years of using emacs routinely, I’ve decided it’s time to learn more and start crafting my own emacs configuration. I’ll get to learn a little more elisp and dive into some of the packages I’ve become used to using. Might be something I keep and continue to evolve, or I might go back to spacemacs. Maybe I’ll try something else later.
It feels kind of like when a Jedi reaches the point in their training when they make their own light saber.
The Atari 2600 joysticks were pretty much shot, so I picked up a couple of arcade joysticks and buttons thinking I’d build a couple of new ones to use with the Ataris.
My initial plan was to use a project enclosure to build a new joystick out of, but it turned out to be a bit too small and felt awkward. Then I looked around and saw an old lap desk that I wasn’t using anymore and thought “Oooh, that might work.”
The lap desk was originally designed to have a little pouch for carrying things like paper and writing implements in. Perfect for containing the wiring and components. The innards of the lap desk was accessible via a few zippers (two “pouches” contained inserts with styrofoam beads for padding and a middle pouch for stashing things in). Used a hole saw to make a few holes for the joystick controller and two buttons so that the “lap joystick” could be used left or right handed.
The joystick controller and buttons went in very nicely.
To wire everything up, I started with a piece of copper clad PCB hot-glued to the back for a base. I thought some MeSquares would make good spots to wire up the joystick and buttons to the cable that connects to the Atari. A terminal connector was used for the common connection. I was originally going to just solder the common connections to the copper clad, but my soldering iron turned out to be too puny and ineffective for soldering onto a copper clad heat sink. The cable from one of the dead joysticks was used to connect to the Atari console.
The wiring is pretty ugly and I’ll probably re-do it at some point to make it neater but the lap joystick works perfectly with the Atari, and it’s actually pretty comfortable to use. The cable out to the console ended up being kind of on the short side (it’s not that long to begin with), so the console has to be pretty close to play. When I re-wire everything, I’ll see if I can extend that out a bit.
I’ve got one more joystick controller and will need to get a couple more buttons to build a second lap joystick. I think I’ll see if I can find some shorter buttons to use.