Field Guide To North American Crop Irrigation

Human existence boils down to one brutal fact: however much food you have, it’s enough to last for the rest of your life. Finding your next meal has always been the central organizing fact of life, and whether that meal came from an unfortunate gazelle or the local supermarket is irrelevant. The clock starts ticking once you finish a meal, and if you can’t find the next one in time, you’ve got trouble.

Working around this problem is basically why humans invented agriculture. As tasty as they may be, gazelles don’t scale well to large populations, but it’s relatively easy to grow a lot of plants that are just as tasty and don’t try to run away when you go to cut them down. The problem is that growing a lot of plants requires a lot of water, often more than Mother Nature provides in the form of rain. And that’s where artificial irrigation comes into the picture.

We’ve been watering our crops with water diverted from rivers, lakes, and wells for almost as long as we’ve been doing agriculture, but it’s only within the last 100 years or so that we’ve reached a scale where massive pieces of infrastructure are needed to get the job done. Above-ground irrigation is a big business, both in terms of the investment farmers have to make in the equipment and the scale of the fields it turns from dry, dusty patches of dirt into verdant crops that feed the world. Here’s a look at the engineering behind some of the more prevalent methods of above-ground irrigation here in North America.

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The Nintendo Famicom Reimagined As A 2003-era Family Computer

If there’s one certainty in life, it is that Nintendo Famicom and similar NES clone consoles are quite literally everywhere. What’s less expected is that they were used for a half-serious attempt at making an educational family computer in the early 2000s. This is however what [Nicole Branagan]  tripped over at the online Goodwill store, in the form of a European market Famiclone that was still in its original box. Naturally this demanded an up-close investigation and teardown.

The system itself comes in the form of a keyboard that seems to have been used for a range of similar devices based on cut-outs for what looks like some kind of alarm clock on the top left side and a patched over hatch on the rear. Inside are the typical epoxied-over chips, but based on some scattered hints it likely uses a V.R. Technology’s VTxx-series Famiclone. The manufacturer or further products by them will sadly remain unknown for now.

While there’s a cartridge slot that uses the provided 48-in-1 cartridge – with RAM-banked 32 kB of SRAM for Family BASIC – its compatibility with Famicom software is somewhat spotty due to the remapped keys and no ability to save, but you can use it to play the usual array of Famicom/NES games as with the typical cartridge-slot equipped Famiclone. Whether the provided custom software really elevates this Famiclone that much is debatable, but it sure is a fascinating entry.

Reverse-Engineering Mystery TV Equipment: The Micro-Scan

[VWestlife] ended up with an obscure piece of 80s satellite TV technology, shown above. The Micro-Scan is a fairly plan metal box with a single “Tune” knob on the front. At the back is a power switch and connectors for TV Antenna, TV Set, and “MW” (probably meaning microwave). There’s no other data. What was this, and what was it for?

Satellite TV worked by having a dish receive microwave signals, but televisions could not use those signals directly. A downconverter was needed to turn the signal into something an indoor receiver box (to which the television was attached) could use, allowing the user to select a channel to feed into the TV.

At first, [VWestlife] suspected the Micro-Scan was a form of simple downconverter, but that turned out to not be the case. Testing showed that the box didn’t modify signals at all. Opening it up revealed the Micro-Scan acts as a combination switchbox and variable power supply, sending a regulated 12-16 V (depending on knob position) out the “MW” connector.

So what is it for, and what does that “Tune” knob do? When powered off, the Micro-Scan connected the TV (plugged into the “TV Set” connector) to its normal external antenna (connected to “TV Antenna”) and the TV worked like a normal television. When powered on, the TV would instead be connected to the “MW” connector, probably to a remote downconverter. In addition, the Micro-Scan supplied a voltage (the 12-16 V) on that connector, which was probably a control voltage responsible for tuning the downconverter. The resulting signal was passed unmodified to the TV.

It can be a challenge to investigate vintage equipment modern TV no longer needs, especially hardware that doesn’t fit the usual way things were done, and lacks documentation. If you’d like to see a walkthrough and some hands-on with the Micro-Scan, check out the video (embedded bel0w).

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