Radio Controlled Tyranosaurus Rex Toy

I was recently browsing through some Christmas photos of the family and I found this little gem of a toy my nephew got. My how times have changed. We didn't have little radio controlled Tyranosaurus Rex toys when I was his age!

Better than a Chia pet though, that's for sure!

Bread Machine Action

Yesterday I loaded ingredients into my bread-making machine, and then about 3 and 1/2 hours later - BREAD!




Hey, I geek like me will make bread using a microprocessor-controlled gadget like this. After all, we don't live on bread alone.








Bread flour mix, yeast, and water. Simple & easy. This is an Italian herb bread mix.

















First, water is put in at around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. That's around 27 degrees Celsius I believe. Second, bread flour mix on top of the water. Third, yeast on top of bread flour mix.


Then just start the engine.







This loaf came out great - filled up almost the whole chamber. Crusty on the outside, soft & delicious on the inside.
















DEEEE-LISH!!!




This was great. More bread machine mixes will follow. Plus I've found some websites with bread machine recipes.

Drum Machine Project

Time for fixing up an old electronics project - the 2-chip drum machine.

It's a glorified metronome.

It has a timer chip and an audio amp chip. If I recall, the timer is a dual 555 timer, which is an industry standard. It makes a couple of different sounds in repetition.

Runs off 2 9-volt batteries. In an upcoming post I'll go over a bunch of rechargeable batteries I use, and the little battery charger.

Geek Project: Microprocessor Trainer

Here's a hobby electronics/computers education kit that I bought a couple years ago at a yard sale for $1.

It's a Science Fair kit that you wire up according to the instructions. It teaches how to understand and use commands for a little microprocessor that has some pre-programmed ROM in it. It has a small amount of RAM memory for coding in your own shtuff.

Allegedly, this microprocessor is a close relative of the ones that powered Speak-N-Spell children's toys.

This picture came out

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It's a list of the commands that the microprocessor 'knows' you could say. It's quite complicated even to do simple things like adding numbers together.

Here are a couple pages from the text.

Daunting.

So far I understand how to take some data and add it to a register, and also how to display the contents.

This is a video of the program for a countdown timer. On the left you can see how many minutes are left in the countdown with the 3 left-most LEDs, in binary numbers, and then the next 4 show the tens column for the remaining seconds, in binary, and the digit on the right shows the ones column for remaining seconds.

Now give yourself 1,000 Geek Points if you can read binary coded numbers!

Wordless Thursday

Today is a Wordless Thursday.

Enjoy.

Vintage Computer Sites Of Interest

Here are some sites that I visit whenever I feel like reading about old vintage computers. Not that I have much time to devote to the subject, but I just love reading about how computers were back "in the day".

http://www.old-computers.com/

http://www.1000bit.net or also http://www.1000bit.it - NOTE: 1000 is the binary number 8. In other words, if I have 1000 in base 2 numbers, it equals 8. Pretty clever huh? So it's really 8bit.com. Many of the computers on this site are also later 16-bit models, but hey, who's counting?

http://www.digibarn.com/

http://www.cpu-museum.com/

http://www.computercloset.org/

Good stuff. Oh, and follow your dreams.

BASIC Program

This is my 80th post. YEAH! To celebrate, I decided to post about a recent endeavor, trying to type BASIC programs into my old Atari 800 computer. I realize this is very geeky. Oh well.

This is a little test program. It is a looping program that prints a number, starting with 1, then that number to the 2nd power, then that number to the 3rd power, then the number to the 4th power. To calculate these exponential numbers, the little microprocessor of the Atari 800 is really maxing itself out, at least with the 4th power.

Here we go:

10 FOR INDEX = 1 TO 10000
20 PRINT "=================="
30 PRINT INDEX
40 PRINT INDEX^2
50 PRINT INDEX^3
60 PRINT INDEX^4
70 PRINT
80 PRINT CHR$(128), CHR$(164), CHR$(123)
90 NEXT INDEX
100 END


Now give yourself 1,000 Geek Points if you can actually understand this code. HINT: it's known as BASIC. Personally, I have never encountered anything basic about writing a computer program. It's all hard to figure out.

Hello, and welcome to my blog post about a new toy I just got.

It's a combination of 2 things I am really into - little electronic handheld gadgets, and NASCAR!!!

It's a little handheld car racing game.

It has sound, which can be turned off in case you are playing it somewhere where you're not supposed to play games.

It's made to look like an arcade game, in miniature form.

It even has the official NASCAR laser-sticker thingee.

It's fun for awhile. It's not the greatest actual racing game, but I like the fact that the game allows my car to be the fastest car on the track, if I can only keep it on the track. You can keep racing until you screw up too many times.

I should really get a real handheld game. I heard Nintendo has a new handheld out. I may just be buying it soon...

Vintage Computer Games From Nintendo - N64

Time for some more vintage computer games!
Here's my old Nintendo N64 64-bit console. It still works, along with almost all the cartidges.

Here are some of the many cartidges I still have. I have a lot of racing stuff. The NASCAR game rocks.

Star Fox rocks.

Here's a controller.

Here's the cat, checking the controller for quality and responsiveness.

I decided to remove it from the TV it was on due to the way it's little cable thingee causes the signal from my antenna to be weaker. Since I got the new digital converter box for my old-fashined analog TV, the Nintendo cable hookup caused the signal to be just a tad too weak. I'll be hooking the N64 beast up to another TV as a new project.

An Old Toy, New To The Net!

Here's my latest gadget toy - the Rolodex NAME CARD - from 1991 apparently. It is an old toy that needs a new battery.



It can be programmed to remind me of important events.

Like doing something that is scheduled.

I need a 2032 button-type battery - oh, look, I have one here.


I can schedule a beeper to ring when I want it to. COOL!








Here is my battery package.






Here's my battery removal screwdriver - how cool is that???







It goes to it's little "Hello World" date of 1-1-1991 - WOW IS THAT OLD???????

I can still get it to remind me of cool things on my schedule, like watching a truck race. Fantastic!

What a cool little obsolete device. I love obsolete devices in case your have not noticed.

I have coffee, Life Is GOOD!!

Here is some coffee I bought recently from Quality Markets.

Quality coffee - vanilla flovored.



I bought the beans.

Buying bean coffee allows you to grind the beans right before you want to use them.

Fresh-ground coffee beans - the key to great coffee!

And really hot water.

MMMM - hot coffee! Life is good.

Vintage Computer Games From Atari

Oh how I love old computer games. Years ago Atari ruled the world.
Here's an old Atari 2600 game console.





Here's a video of Defender from an Atari 800 computer. WOW!!! This is the video I tried to upload a few weeks ago but it didn't work, then I was full of piss & vinegar about it. Today I could upload it.

Finally!

Today Atari is not a gaming company, at least not at the top of the industry.

Fixing Up My Old Practice Guitar Amp

Here are some photos of my recent project to rejuvinate an old practice guitar amp.

I am using a power supply to power it up. It's your typical 12-volt/13.8-volt DC power supply from a surplus electronics place. Better than batteris, although I could hook up a 12-volt battery in it's place if I want to use it somewhere away from AC current. Or I could use a bunch of D batteries.

It's got a nice power transistor on the back with a heatsink, to dissipate all that heat from crankin' up the volume. Cool (or Hot, however you want to look at it).

Here's a close-up shot of the amp chip. This amp is actually powered by an integrated circuit amplifier. All the transisters and what-not are on a single chip! This has some advantages and disadvantages. The main thing is it makes the whole circuit nice and small. The chip also has a heat-sink on it, to dissipate all that heat from crankin'up the volume.

I've got the amp board wired to an 8" speaker that was once a woofer in a small set of bookshelf speakers. It seems to have a decent treble response, at least for a practice amp.

Here's the amp hooked up to the power supply.

I hope to put this thing into a real cabinet sometime soon. Right now it's just sitting in a cardboard box, which isn't the best way to go.

Here's a little sample of that powerful tone. Actually, it's not that loud. I think the chip is only capable of about 8 watts of output. Not much, but this is only intended to be a little practice amp.

Rock on people.

The Garmin Nuvi

As I mentioned in a previous post, I got a Garmin Nuvi for Christmas. It's a GPS device. At first I thought - "I don't need a GPS device, I never get lost." Then I used it for awhile and found it has some cool features.

Even if you don't get lost ever, like myself, you can still use this device for tracking mileage, average speed, it leaves little blue lines on road you've driven on, and more. I even downloaded a cool blue monster truck icon, to represent my powerful persona, of course, from the Garmin website. Totally unnecessary, but cool.

I also found out this device can be used to find places, like restaurants, gas stations, places for entertainment, amusement places, and other useful places. It can find phone numbers and give directions. It searches for places within your current location.

Plus it has the ability to be used while your ride a bicycle, or if you just walk around. It can see how fast you are going, what direction, puts you on a map, finds average speeds, how much time you are moving, how much time you're stopped, and a bunch of things I'm still discovering. It has a built-in battery that charges from a USB connection to a computer, or you can use a cable that goes into the lighter socket in your vehicle.

It even has a voice that tells you when to turn right or left, when you program in a destination. Plus, if you decide you don't want to turn when it tells you to, it doesn't get mad at you, like a human direction-giver would do. It just recalculates your next turn, and keeps it's mouth shut. Way too cool.