I applaud his desire to keep e-waste from going to the landfill, but whatever energy savings that results in ( by not having to buy a new equivalent ROM device ) is somewhat countered by the energy it takes to shine the UV light on those things to erase them.

Plus, what’s your time worth ? Most people who know how to work on this stuff probably earn more per hour than to waste their time UV-ing / inserting / removing. But of course it’s his choice what he does with his time.

@Timmah,
try and find a new eeprom to fit in a Commodore PET or a Rockwell AIM65.
I am off to make one of these erasers so I can use my stock of TMS2532s.

I’d rather see a UV-laser that can erase single bits in a running system. But I guess the refraction of the glass could be an issue.

its hard to find parallel eeproms pin compatible for every eprom, the early ones especially

its also hard to find parallel eeproms period, and getting parallel flash chips that are ttl compatible is a serious challenge, most 5v versions only come in tssop packaging requiring even more work

all in all im very happy with how it turned out, a 30 dollar investment that ended in something that would have cost several hundred for a unit with comparable capacity

@everyone

“try and find a new eeprom to fit in a Commodore PET or a Rockwell AIM65.”
2716 (2k x8) and newer all conformed (mostly) to jedec standard. You can generally substitute any JEDEC eeprom for any old school PROM/EPROM. You might have to bend/cut a pin or use a resistor to bring up a select line, but they’re drop-in replacements all the way back.

By the time you’re back to 1702 era, you can burn a pic or avr or other micro and just emulate the damn thing in software. This is a little known way to add features to 70s vintage gear.

Let’s say you have a ranging head off an old IR tracking… uh, lawn dart… and you find that crap 1960′s tech just isn’t cutting the mustard and you want to make it able to locate the smiling face of hello kitty, assuming the face of hello kitty is created using a modulated laser pointer. Well, you might need someway to replace the chopper mechanism with something a little less archaic. Electronics has come a long way since 1965, so …maybe – I’m sorry, I seem to have drifted back off topic again.

You see, in those days, we hung an onion from our belts because that was the style of the times, and it had to be a white onion. Red onions were for commies.

Hey, Abbott… :)
It’s all good. It’s just that when you add up the cost of waiting for them to burn clean… I spent my time smelling ozone (it should be obvious) while chips baked, and I applaud anything someone chooses to build.

But it’s like putting a hand crank starter on your car – one day you decide that hand cranking died out for a good reason. I was the same way about toggle switches on computers, but one grows older and starts to think about time.

My current project is a 1937 something or other, so I’m far from being able to criticize him. I’m just saying the burn/test/edit cycle is old school but ineffective.

I think you miss my point – we can make it better/faster/bigger/stronger and have fun doing it. It’s fun to go one step past reuse and aim for recreation. Seriously, there’s a lot of room for people who build functional replacements for old electronic parts like EPROMs and NLA integrated circuits.

I have boxes of formerly expensive parts. I will never burn another eprom or design a noiw defunct intel supercomputer into another system. I hate to admit it – given the choice between an arduino and a Rockwell AIM65, I’d now use the arduino.

Is the box grounded? It looks like the ground pin of the power cord socket is simply capped off with shrinktube, which seems silly given there are several perfectly good grounding points right next to it.

Also, where did you get the UVC tube? I’ve only seen them selling for ridiculous prices.

@dcroy

“So easy an arduino could do it”.

Hang an arduino off that dirt packer using a couple of relays and have at it. There is nothing on any packaging equipment old enough to lack a controller that won’t be easy to get running.

People make decent money retrofitting old controls, and it’s damnably easy if you watch out for safety issues (mechanical interference, operator safety, burning the place down) while doing the retrofit.

Publish it as an article on HAD with VIDEO of the packer operating, and I’ll send you some lovely french pate that goes well with cheese and crackers… if you get it running by 1 JAN 2011.

We should add a section called “So easy an arduino could do it” and fill that baby up.

@Rachel
Grounding isn’t needed here, as the UV tube and timer mechanism are completely isolated from the case. It just happens to be a metal box.

@dcroy
Good luck beating the weather.

im going to use the transformer casing as a ground point, ill scrape some paint off so it will ground the box at the same time… and add a fuse to it when i find a spare fuse holder in my pile of stuff

on another note i used some really flexible wire rated at 600v 110c from an ancient crt to prevent fraying at the hinge, im not entirely sure how all the plastic coatings will hold up to that much uv exposure… time will tell i guess

just found a few 27c801 eproms in a piece of telecom equipment, i think ill build a snes devcart next