Category: Hobbies

An order of 20lb of copper clad PCB arrived, getting me closer to my goal of having the workshop stocked well enough so that I can build and experiment without triggering that “can’t use it because I’m running low” instinct.

(Banana for scale)

This is my second order from Copper Clad Laminates on ebay, and so far I’ve been pretty pleased with the product. This was one of his bulk items containing boards that maybe aren’t the right size, have some light scratches or other imperfections that wouldn’t qualify them for a regular batch, but are more than suitable for my purposes. It’s all double sided and there’s a nice variety of sizes too. At $1.05/lb, it’s a pretty good deal.

After using up some spare time over the period of a few weeks, I finally finished going through the parts bin of ICs and inventoried them. Right now it’s a big long list in a Google Drive spreadsheet.

I don’t know what most of them do, have no idea if any of them are still functional and probably won’t ever use any of them, but I did have fun going through them, digging up datasheets for them and reading the descriptions for each of the chips. Datasheets for most of them were pretty easy to find, while a few others I had to dig a bit. There were a handful that I wasn’t able to find anything on.

About a half dozen of the bins had EEPROMs in them, which I ignored for the most part. One bin had a stash of 555 timer chips that could find some use in a project if they work. There are CPUs, digital logic gates, op amps, buffers, registers, counters, even some RAM chips. If I had the know-how, I’ve probably got just about everything I need to assemble a simple computer based on the Z80 CPUs I found in the bins.

One interesting find in one of the bins was this Defender ROM.

Absolutely no idea if it’s any good, but it would be neat to plug into a Defender console and see if it does work.