14:49 Sniffing glue... this actually explains some things, Dave.

"Person unknown from company unknown" ... in Osborne Park, WA. A quick flyover on the Google Maps suggests only a couple of candidates. But you didn't hear it from me!

mail bag is always a fun episode of the EEVBOLG thanks

Piggyback packages were often available for mask-ROM MCUs for development. They were very expensive though.

I worked as an AXE 10 test plant support engineer and AXE 10 program producer, then later I also ran production for AXE 10 software systems, then became Unix / AXE / Net admin / developer / tester. Loved every moment of it, Ericsson was a great company to work for. Switched over to mechanical engineering now. Great seeing AXE stuff. (It's not pronounced like the wood chopping device... AXE is an Ericsson product code and is just pronounced "A" "X" "E"....)

Dave I love ur videos words cannot express how much I appreciate you. You've set my life trajectory towards EE

Am I the only one who thinks that the person who sent the Rogaine video display should have put a 'Rick Roll' video on it? :-D

Thank you Dave for making these videos

Those old boards would be great, embedded in clear epoxy and used to make a coffee table or work bench top.

Mailbag, I'm usually asleep when these come out. Nice to see one right when it's released for once. Cheers Dave!

Hey Dave, my dad was a dermatologist and he'd receive all types of promotional materials (bribery) from pharma/skincare companies- free samples of sunscreens and lotions, literature detailing various products, other branded doodads- to convince him to use or recommend their product to his patients. So the Rogaine ad is most likely something mailed or handed out at a trade show to a doctor or specialist- only meant for their eyes, so it's still wasteful, but less so than if it were in a major circulation magazine. Seems like a pretty cunning advertising strategy actually. Convince a single person trusted by dozens, hundreds, thousands of people to promote your product rather than spend time and money reaching and convincing every individual to trust your company and then buy your product! In fact, I signed up for Tron Club because you were impressed by it and recommended it in one of your mailbags :p PS- I only recently came across your channel, and although I know next to nothing about electrical engineering, or maybe because of that fact, I absolutely love your work and I feel like I'm really learning a lot! Cheers!

The 3D printed part is probably because they make them with different sockets on the front and so they only need that specific part for the Australian socket.

my favorite segment :-) Thank you Dave!!

Sat at Dublin airport, just heard my flight s been delayed.. Dave saves the day with a new video

16:00 Just a note about RS-232, the address is set on the computer. Those switches would be for changing the baud rate, parity, bits, or such, which the host computer would have to match.

33:57 why is there writing on the inside, behind the LCD and board? Did they recycle cardboard advertisement for this? At least that's one enviromental thing about it...

Very nice inductors at 11:45. Looks like they used the spool the magnet wire was on for 2 of them.

I learned something new today. Thank you

Greetings from the United States of America! Love your content and thanks for the quality entertainment! Good on ya!

That purple ceramic stuff is so neat. I wish I would have something like that in my collection of old chips, but so far got nothing like it. Btw, in the compliance tester I would say that the other coils were the 250uH and not the ones Dave have pointed to. Also, on the RS232-to-radio board, that coax was not linking two sections, but it had the function of an inductor, since on the other side the signal was going right to ground.

Just got this one to the office and Tekbox actually had thise video linked on their product website, so I needed to go check. The Dave moan of pleasure at 10:47 is priceless :D

Transmitter 17:20 - The coaxial line is shorted and operates as a resonant circuit and is part of the VCO for the PLL-Circuit. To prevent mechanical microphone effects of a simple L / C oscillating circuit - 73 de DL1LAJ

Piggyback packages are still around, look into POP (Package on package) on stuff like the Broadcom SOC on the Raspberry Pi etc. :) - the digital advertisement is using an AllWinner ARM926-EJS E200-CPU.

2:45 am, and i'm supposed to get to the airport at six... Thanks Dave.

A literal tear down!

This looks like i could be a very interesting tutorial/ demo for pre-compliance testing equipment and methods. I would love to see it!

Dave, de-cap one of those ASICs off the gridseed and put it under your microscope! I used to own two Antminer S2's that were 10 ASIC blades in a 4 u chassis that pulled around 1kw per chassis. I'd love to see what they did one their dies!

I worked for Telstra in the DDN network centre. Very familiar with the NTU. That is a rack mounted NTU, but was also available as a stand alone unit. AWA made a similar NTU for the DDN network.

Dave, funny when you're unpacking the phone boards, you were reading off the list but handling a different board! I actually used to repair & test the Alcatel boards when they were manufactured back in the 90's. Had a bit of chuckle at your conclusion to those hybrid chip's marked BELL. From memory they didn't have a lot to do other than they couldn't fit the components on the boards so they went sideways and up. They were marked BELL because they were manufactured in Belgium and were a standard part for BELL telecom boards. The Alcatel board went into the first digital exchanges in Australia (System 2000), taking over from the purely analogue AXE exchanges that had been used for 15-20 years previous. System 2000 also had boards for when the cell network changed over from analogue to digital (one of the better jobs where I used to drive around Sydney and suburbs testing the cell network). Most of the exchanges at the time used generic boards and custom software for each country - Australian Telecom (before Telstra) was probably the most demanding in that respect. That guy would have been made when Alcatel broke into a subsidiary (the manufacturing side was called Bluescope), little bit after I started working on the software side of the exchanges. On a side note, Alcatel also made the AXE boards for exchanges as Telecom never wanted to be without operational exchanges - ever! Hence why two manufacturers. There was always built in redundancy.

Re your comment 33:40 - 33:50 - right on Dave, couldn't agree more.

...I want one of those adverts, they look amazing!

The Rogaine thing is not intended to be sent to millions of balding guys so that they run to the doctor to get the stuff, that would be cost prohibitive. It is a limited production run to be sent to doctors. There is SO MUCH MONEY in pharma that this makes sense. Also, the NEW COOL thingy curiosity factory kicks in to open and play this - which keeps it in the mind of the doctor when he meets his patients. Perfectly logical!

Rifa hybrids look like they've been laser trimmed. Maybe done like this for surge/spike tolerance

I've fixed those miners before. The board has two power supplies on it: - A dinky 3.3V linear reg, supplied off USB, that feeds the ARM micro which serves as control and PC interface. - A buck converter that supplies 2.5V for the mining chips, fed off the DC jack. It's a very obscure but high-efficiency synchronous buck converter. Looks like that's the section that failed. I have one where the ARM chip failed. I could replace it, but without a firmware image that wouldn't be enough to get it working. Although, if I had the chip off of yours... yes, that would probably let me get mine going. I'll send you a cool home-built PWM solar charge controller in return, if you want. Also, you're off about the heatsinks. It's not lots of litte ones: It's designed for a single huge heatsink that serves all the ASICs together.

Look at all those nice caps at 21:16! All those red caps are WIMA MKP polypropylene film caps, beautiful

@EEVblog: Dave, that semi rigid coax in the 440 MHz message transmitteris no section connection. Look closer at the picture. Soldering! It is shorted at one end of it by a big soldering blob. So all it is it's just a resonant "stub", nothing else than a coil (the inner wire in it) surrounded by a tube which then forms very well defined capacity with very high "q". So, it's just a *LC-filter* or resonant and highly tuned L-C circuit!

Ik love this! From the Netherlands!

@Dave Jones. the piggyback tactic is commonly used but only in smaller devices. If you take apart your smart phone (especially apple) you will usually find the memory on top of the arm processor. I think it is generally avoided due to increased distance from signal lines and the decoupling caps.

In that uhf transmitter, that short piece of coax is the tank inductor for the VCO I think. One end of it being shorted is the main suggestion of this

The SOC is not a powerpc part but actually an Allwinner E200 ARM9 part.

Awesome, my dead Gridseed board made it intact! That was pretty darn fast. I have to assume that there was a fire in the overcrowded rack that the mining house was running the unit in.

You can still buy those 1AB01418 line interface hybrids; they've been made by a few different manufacturers other than Alcatel.

I received one of the advertising thingy from a real estate agent. the mini usb you can plug into a PC and change the video file it also charges the battery. :)

That Rogain-thingy is GREAT for tinkering - a free LCD and microchip :P

If i seen those LCD advertisements in my Dr's office, i would take as many as i could. free speakers and Lipo's!!!!! Yay!!!

20:00 3D stacking! Hehe... We can do this now at die level easily. :)

19:44 love this reaction :D

Okay the box-in-box extraction was already pretty funny, but I have to point out that it would be rippingly funnier if you'd briefly ramped down to slo-mo for the little kick at the end.

Any interesting mix of items today. Learned some things and had some memories jogged as well. I remember those line interface cards or more specifically the ones used in PABX. Often have just one huge card to support a ISDN Primary rate of only 30 phones lines.

"That's practically DC to daylight"

Waiting on 1000, Dave!

love it as always

24:12 120 ohm termination / line match to 50 ohm? I reckon this was part of the telstra - Optus STP (signal transfer point) maybe?

Toward the end of the Jeb Bush campaign in 2016 when they were just throwing away money, they had those LCD advertisement mailed out.

That piggy back chip reminds me of the clock add on chip for the Tandy TX 1000. You unplugged the, I think, processor and plugged in the clock chip then the processor piggy backed on top of that.

On the small PBX (I guess) line card, those things are presumably made by or for the Bell telephone company, AKA Lucent.

had also such advertisement for enterprise computer hardware

That's a heck of a knife to open packages and letters XD

ah good ol Telecom australia. also those RF transmitters, i have several hard locked to 433MHZ

The piggy back micro-controller was for development purposes. You could use an EPROM emulator to develop your code in the final circuit and reprogram in seconds. Using the EPROM version of the 8051, for example, took 5 to 30 minutes for each program-test-change-reprogram cycle. Your final product may not need or have a full data & address buss to justify putting your EPROM on the PCB. All before they invented ICSP flash micro-controllers.

The rigid coax looks shorted on one side, so a kind of resonator may be its purpose.

At 17:15 - looks like coax stub shorted at one side, which can function as bandpass or notch filter at certain frequencies. Maybe to suppress harmonics

WOW, plugging in the EPROM (or ROM) directly on top of the CPU of course shortens the distance for any signal to travel which of course makes any system faster...Pity this is not done today on a regular basis!

Dave: You just made a *BLACH HOLE* at 27:55. The Large Hardron Collider cannot generate them so efficiently...

In the US about $60,000 is spent on marketing per doctor per year, (as in advertising directly to the doctor) to convince them to prescribe certain medications. If the doctor doesn't prescribe enough, their database is kept at the pharmacy, and they can expect a call asking why they haven't shelled out enough crap to their patients. #Medicare for all.

17:20 with the center pin to ground it's more likely a filter?

I had some old mostek mk38p70 there had piggybag eeprom, did' t not believe there was other type out there.

That paper description haha it's a trick for no customs tax lol

I like that big knife. Needed that today for chopping down some fries.

19:45 - the same solution - IC over another IC - is used in Raspberry Pi, where the RAM IC is soldered on the CPU

perhaps the 3d printed part is to fit different sockets on a whim or as parts change.

I find it quite puzzling that they reccomend placing the D.U.T. directly on the metal ground plate. For a proper pre-compliance setup you should place your D.U.T. 80cm above the metal GND plane. This can severely influence your measurement results, specificaly in the 5-30MHz range.

17:19 is not hardline coax connecting 2 sections of RF, it's probably an RF stub filter (though they can also be used as an oscillator or matching network, depending on design intent). Conjugation means they can be used in short- or open-circuit configuration depending on the desired effect. Fascinating things. Proof: the right end has solder shorting the inner to the outer, forming a short circuit at the end of a quarter wave stub (taking into account the velocity factor of the hardline) It's a common trick to get rid of harmonics, as a rough guess I'd say it's tuned (sized) to a quarter wave of the 3rd harmonic, so approximately 1350-1370 MHz. I'm guessing it's about 4 to 5cm long for that frequency. It will also be effective at higher odd-order harmonics too. Variable/tunable ones can be made by using a slightly shorter stub and connecting a variable cap or inductor across the bottom of the stub giving a limited range of adjustment. This one is fixed because it's soldered, although there seems to be a pad to the right end where a variable cap could have been planned just in case it needed tweaking. First, roll your trouser leg up, spin around 3 times and say the magic incantation "Faraday Maxwell VVV, RF powers envelop me" then see: www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/quarter-wave-tricks

Thomson, not Rockwell

The board at 27:57 kissed lighting! 😎

love that hd63p01m1 micro @19:55

For the magazine, were you thinking of the 2008 issue of Esquire with the eInk displays?

It's Mil-PEE-tus. One of the towns of the South Bay (of the SF Bay Area), part of Silicon Valley.

13:49 I took a sorted lot of RF attenuators and SFP transceivers as a carry on for a domestic flight once, TSA immediately lost interest once I said the word networking

If you already have a bench setup with integrated isolation transformer, variac, breakers, filters and display panels then integrating a lisn into that would maybe make more sense than to have a seperate box around. But looking at those nice inductors, maybe it makes most sense to buy that thing, throw the case away and put it into my setup box... or... first build a larger box so it can fit in....

The rigid coax is likely a 1/4 wave transformer for the output circuit to match the impedance of the antenna. Smith charts anyone?

You know you're an engineer when you open up a new piece of equipment before ever applying power to it. :-)

Makes me think of the operation instructions from an IMF assignment "Should you accept Mr Phelps"

Designed in Australia and build by a road construction company in Melbourne parts picked by soccer mum from Sydney

YT user "Peter Brockie" did a video on a similar electronic advert, I think you can search his channel for "video playing junk mail" if you want to see it

The burned board around 28mins. I'm guessing lightning strike?

When it comes to power sockets, the UK style 3 pin are the best for being secure once plugged into the socket. There is a lot more surface area in contact with the pins. The US types I find waggle out easily. The Aussie ones are slightly better but still not as secure as the UK types :) The 2 pin Euro with the earth are also good if you don't use cheap Chinese sockets :)

They still stack memory on top of CPUs, but nowadays it's more like a big ass SDRAM on top of an SOC.

That rogaine thing is not for doctor's offices, it's marketing *to* doctors. That's at least a vaguely promising market for this sort of thing, because the potential profit from convincing a doctor to prescribe is huge. But definitely disposable, although highly targeted.

That shim was a bit "how ya doin'"...LOL

MAILBAGGGGG!!!!! Yeah!!!!

Not much different from the old Dataradio VHF wireless modems, except those have a separate radio in them. The HD63P01 is a 68P01, a microcontroller designed to piggyback to a ROM chip. They used to be a common solution for 6800-based embedded applications.

I'd love to find one of those electronic video adverts. I have many uses for them. I wonder how difficult it would be to encode videos for these so you can put your own content on it.

the shipping times and rates to mars would be terrible!

20:00 Is that the grandfather of the current days BGA PoP package - PDIP PoP. :D

I now, Ricoh make them (30:14). You can mount it as a drive and copy your video as a .avi on it. Like 1.avi for button one ens.

that throw away advertisement could have been done way cheaper than that, waste of a magnet and sensors that you dont even need.

Re: Regaine. Looks very much like something they would give out to surgeries. Doctors get all sort of toys from the drug manufacturers to try to push their wares, and some of them are pretty expensive (for a 'freebie'). The Regaine thing fits this profile perfectly.

I'd love to have Dave as a next door neighbor and friend`. Really nice guy.

31:55 I think I heard it say damn it lol