Fixing A Busted Fluke While Fighting A Wonky Schematic

August 9, 2024 by 16 Comments

Fluke meters have been around for a long, long time. Heck, we’ve got a Fluke 73 that we bought back in 1985 that’s still a daily driver. But just because they’ve been making them forever doesn’t mean they last forever, and getting a secondhand meter back in the game can be a challenge. That’s what [TheHWCave] learned with his revival of a wonky eBay Fluke 25, an effort that holds lessons for anyone in the used Fluke market.

Initial inspection of the meter showed encouragingly few signs of abuse, somewhat remarkable for something built for the military in the early 1980s. A working display allowed a few simple diagnostics revealing that the ammeter functions seemed to work, but not the voltmeter and ohmmeter functions. [TheHWCave]’s teardown revealed a solidly constructed unit with no obvious signs of damage or blown fuses. Thankfully, a service schematic was available online, albeit one with a frustrating lack of detail, confusing test point nomenclature, and contradictory component values.

Despite these hurdles, [TheHWCave] was able to locate the culprit: a bad fusible power resistor. Finding a direct replacement wasn’t easy given the vagaries of the schematic and the age of the instrument, but he managed to track down a close substitute cheap enough to buy in bulk. He searched through 40 units to find the one closest to the listed specs, which got the meter going again. Fixing the bent pin also gave the meter back its continuity beeper, always a mixed blessing.

If you’re in the market for a meter but can’t afford the Fluke name, picking up a busted meter and fixing it up like this might be one way to go. But are they really worth the premium? Well, kinda yes.

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A black device with a monochrome LCD sits on a wooden table. It's keyboard extends below the frame. On the screen is the "Level 29" BBS service login.

Internet Appliance To Portable Terminal

August 8, 2024 by 2 Comments

Few processors have found themselves in so many different devices as the venerable Z80. While it isn’t powerful by modern standards, you can still use devices like this Cidco MailStation as a terminal.

The MailStation was originally designed as an email machine for people who weren’t onboard with this whole computer fad, keeping things simple with just an adjustable monchrome LCD, a keyboard, and a few basic applications. [Joshua Stein] developed a terminal application, msTERM, for the MailStation thanks to work previously done on decoding this device and the wealth of documentation for Z80 assembly.

While [Stein] designed his program to access BBSes, we wonder if it might be a good way to do some distraction-free writing. If that wasn’t enough, he also designed the WiFiStation dongle which lets you communicate over a network without all that tedious mucking about with parallel ports.

If you’d like something designed specifically for writing, how about an AlphaSmart? Wanting to build your own Z80-based project? Why not start with an Altoids-sized Z80 SBC, but don’t wait forever since Z80 production finally ended in June.

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A Smart LED Dice Box Thanks To The Internet Of Things

August 8, 2024 by 5 Comments

If there’s one thing humans love, it’s dancing with chance. To that end, [Jonathan] whipped up a fun dice box, connecting it to the Internet of Things for additional functionality.

Expect dice roll stat tracking to become a big thing in the D&D community.

The build is based around Pixels Dice. They’re a smart type of IoT dice that contains Bluetooth connectivity and internal LEDs. The dice are literally capable of detecting their own rolls and reporting them wirelessly. Thus, the dice connects to the dice box, and the dice box can literally log the rolls and even graph them over time.

The project was built in a nice octagonal box [Jonathan] picked up from a thrift store. It was fitted with a hidden battery and ESP32 to communicate with the dice and run the show. The box also contains integrated wireless chargers to recharge the dice as needed, and a screen for displaying status information.

The dice and dice box can do all kinds of neat things, like responding with mood lighting and animations to your rolls—for better or worse. There are some fun modes you can play with—you can even set the lights to sparkle if you pass a given skill check in your tabletop RPG of choice!

If you play a lot of tabletop games, and you love dice and statistics, this is a project well worth looking into. Imagine logging every roll so you can see how hot you are on a given night. Or, heck—whether it was the dice’s fault you lost your favorite player character in that foreboding dungeon.

We see a few dice hacks now and then, but not nearly enough. This project has us questioning where smart dice have been all our life! Video after the break.
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Tulip Is A Micropython Synth Workstation, In An ESP32

August 8, 2024 by 6 Comments

We’re not sure exactly what Tulip is, because it’s so many things all at once. It’s a music-making environment that’s programmable in Python, runs on your big computer or on an ESP32-S3, and comes complete with some nice sounding synth engines, a sequencer, and a drum machine all built in. It’s like your dream late-1980s synthesizer workstation, but running on a dev board that you can get for a song.

And because Tulip is made of open-source software and hardware, you can extend the heck out of it. For instance, as demonstrated in this video by [Floyd Steinberg], you can turn it into a fully contained portable device by adding a touchscreen. That incarnation is available from Makerfabs, and it’s a bargain, especially considering that the developer [Brian Whitman] gets some of the proceeds. Or, because it’s written in portable Python, you can run it on your desktop computer for free.

The most interesting part of Tulip for us, as programmer-musicians, is that it boots up into a Micrypython REPL. This is a synth workstation with a command-line prompt as its primary interface. It has an always-running main loop, and you make music by writing functions that register as callbacks with the main loop. If you were fast, you could probably live-code up something pretty interesting. Or maybe it wants to be extended into a physical musical instrument by taking in triggers from the ESP32’s GPIOs? Oh, and did we mention it sends MIDI out just as happily as it takes it in? What can’t Tulip do?

We’ve seen some pretty neat minimalist music-making devices lately, but in a sense Tulip takes the cake: it’s essentially almost entirely software. The various hardware incarnations are just possibilities, and because it’s all open and extremely portable, you can freely choose among them. We really like the design and sound of the AMY software synthesizer engine that powers the Tulip, and we’re sure that more synthesizer models will be written for it. This is a music project that you want to keep your eyes on in the future.

The First Real Sputnik

August 7, 2024 by 17 Comments

Americans certainly remember Sputnik. At a time when the world was larger and scarier, the Soviets had a metal basketball flying over the United States and the rest of the world. It made people nervous, but it was also a tremendous scientific achievement. However, it wasn’t the plan to use it as the first orbiter, as [Scott Manley] explains in a recent video that you can see below.

The original design would become Sputnik 3, which, as [Scott] puts it, was the first Soviet satellite that “didn’t suck.” The first one was essentially a stunt, and the second one had an animal payload and thermal problems that killed the canine occupant, [Laika].

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Vintage Crystal Radio Draws The Waves

August 7, 2024 by 10 Comments

The classic crystal radio was an oatmeal box with some wire and a few parts. [Michael Simpson] has something very different. He found an assembled Philmore “selective” radio kit. The simple kit had a coil, a germanium diode, and a crystal earphone.

We were sad when [Michael] accidentally burned a part of the radio’s coil. But–well–in the end, it all worked out. We’ll just say that and let you watch for yourself. The radio is simplicity itself, built on a wooden substrate with a very basic coil and capacitor tuned circuit. Continue reading “Vintage Crystal Radio Draws The Waves” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 795: Liferay, Now We’re Thinking With Portals

August 7, 2024 by No comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls chat with Olaf Kock and Dave Nebinger about Liferay! That’s a Java project that started as an implementation of a web portal, and has turned into a very flexible platform for any sort of web application. How has this Open Source project turned into a very successful business? And how is it connected to most iconic children’s educational show of all time? Listen to find out!

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