In 10 years we hear "Welcome to the the new EEVBlog. Im your host, Sagan Jones. And this is episode number one!"

There is absolutely no point scrubbing the part numbers off any part now. All major components have ID code in them, often accessible over JTAG. So as long as I can spot JTAG pins I can just hook up a generic JTAG programmer (like Altera USB Blaster + OpenOCD) and pull the JTAG ID out of the part. Then it will be very trivial to figure out the part number.

CNC controllers tend to not have drivers onboard as you don't know how big the motors will be.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Normally I'm extremely annoyed by kids being in video blogs but Sagan is enjoyable to make an appearance. He's well behaved, intelligent and you two make a great team because you're both soo excitable. I'm jealous that I didn't get videos with my Dad and I doing experiments when I was little. Now that he's gone, I would love to be able to watch those videos as the 20 year old memories are fading.

Its Always A treat to have Sagan in the Lab...He is a Smart Young Man. Looking forward to More Videos From you Dave..Cheers!

Dang, I'm so envious. Wish I had had a dad who was into electronics and introduced me to the stuff when I was a kid.

You should totally make a map so you and sagan can put all the locations of the senders on there :)

The Password is literally, "blank"

Don't disassemble the Canon Ion analogue camera until you make a retro-review or something, I want to see how it works!

Those sinclair meters looks suspiciously calculator-shaped.

LPC2478FBD208 LPC2478 PQFP-208 - is my guess and that Micronta meter brings me back to the old days. I had one when I first started electronics in the 70's. My little brother pinned it plugging into the wall, broke my heart but dad bought the newer model Micronta 22-204A and I was back in business. Great mailbag Dave nice to see you and Sagan back at it again. Cheers ...

"It looks like a whole town." - Sagan - Satellite views of cities and urban areas are uncannily similar to integrated circuits. Kids are smarter than what adults usually give them credit for. :)

Good to see you are passing on your tongue position tips to the younger generation

Did you name your son after Carl Sagan our lord and savor?

Video Floppy was a professional-grade still video format developed by Sony in the early '80s for the original Mavica and ProMavica series of still video cameras. It has 25 tracks, each of which stores a single NTSC or PAL video frame divided into two fields. It was popular with TV stations for storing single frames of video for various uses. Smith Corona word processors also used the discs for data storage. HiVF was a backwards compatible format which provided improvements in video quality.

5:32 hehe Dave wanted to swear, but couldn't because of Sagan.

Got to give it to Sinclair to do things so cheap even the Chinese were probably impressed.

I hope I have a kid as awesome as Sagan some day. Hopefully I can be as good of a parent as you Dave!

Wow, you can tell Sagan is growing; he's getting more fluent. He'll be competing with you on KZfaq one of these days.

The case for the datalogger is actually a commercially available case manufactured by Bopla and is called BOS-Streamline.

Obviously for the hovering DeLorean to work you need to be on the northern hemisphere, because it uses antigravity and gravity is pointing the wrong way round already at the southern hemisphere.

A little contact cleaner and that Russian Meter would be ready to go again. I am very impressed! I would love to have that as part of a collection. Its so fun collecting things like that. It is something we use in all apects of the electronics field and have been using for years. They are so cool.

I bet the CNC controller CPU is an LPC2478 NXP ARM7TDMI-S :)

Great video. Good Ole father and son bonding. :-). I scored a beautiful RCA VTVM. Check it out tomorrow.

In Soviet Russia Warranty Voids You!

Sagan in the mailbag section, that's an instant thumbs up..

OMG !! I comment quite a lot on your vids Dave but this one is quite special. You have the Sinclair multi-meter (x2) there and when I was 21 (52 now), I got this for my birthday. Get this though, I got the 200MHz freq counter too which came in the same case as the multi-meter. Sitting side by side they looked great. I tested my counter on the standard at work (GEC) and to 8 digits it was bang on. I trashed my set when I had them powered from the same PSU and connected the -ve terminal of the multi-meter to the wrong part of an immersion heater. (I was young and you hadn't made your video on 'How not to destroy your scope'. I got the multi-meter working again but it wasn't the same. The counter was fried though if I remember it right. Also, I had the Tandy (Radio Shack) 20K/V analog meter you showed shortly after. Boy what a blast from the past this mail bag has been. Way to go.....!!!! With your CANYSEY item when you had the scrolling text, the paper should have been leaning back so it looked like it was from Star Wars. lol

Sagan is such a smart cute fella!

Sagan is such a cutie pie. But he keeps touching (dirty) things and putting fingers in his mouth. That's not safe

One of the real reasons to watch Mailbag, is to see Sagan such a funny little kid :)

Hi , Dave. Great review for the canyse data logger. a nice industrial product for maintenance and troubleshooting of various systems. Made in Slovenia. Needed such a gadget while at work years back... no way. To Gorazd - congratulations, awesome design !

I had an email today from a friend whose first job was designing electronics for Bristol Aircraft using point contact transistors in the early 50's. They were wondering how many people there could still be around who had worked with these devices at that time.

I lost it when you pulled out your first multimeter. I was like I have seen that before, It can't be, I have the exact same model of multimeter.

Pasword to CNC is "blank". CNC trolling in action.

Make sure you check if there are any fun photos on those floppies!

It's fun to see how much he's grown...been 14 years since my son was his age.

I had one of those Sinclair DMMs - think it was my first DMM, fairly quickly replaced by a Kaise one, which was one of the first autoranging LCD DMMs

I kind of liked the child-free version of eevblog over the last few months. A little sad to see it go away. Keep up the good work Dave!

So awesome to see the younger generation involved and interested in this stuff. I hope the little guy visits again in the future.

Dave, I think the optocouplers are in sockets because on a cnc you have so many moving wires going through a cable chain, and there is potential for wire breakage. I've had trouble with that myself 24v motors and 5v inputs. I blew a few opto's before i discovered the problem. I ended up puting sockets in myself after re-soldering new opto's in for the 5th time. at first i thought it was just cheap optos.

Dave, I have an older version of your first multimeter. No fuse either with no standoff for the holder. I used it last week while stringing out field power cords in the north forty for a week-long astronomical star party in Oklahoma. I like the quick response of an analog meter over the El Cheapo digital meter I also carry in my field electronics toolbox.

the Linear LS8 ceramic package isn't old, it's actually new-ish! I gather it's intended for better long-term stability than the usual SMD packages.

HDMI is not designed for high noise enviroments like motor drivers and electromagnetics interference. Thats why they use vga for industrial purposes.

The only Korean multimeter manufacturer I could think of was GoldStar/LG, who spun off that division in the late 90s, but all of their instruments were top-notch.

All too easy to take the piss out of the Sinclair DMM but in the context of it's time the thing was a miracle! At that time digital was the holy grail for amateur electronic hobbyists, and what professional instruments there were around, cost a fortune. So for a 'pocket' DMM to be 'affordable' to the average hobbyist was almost too good to be true. Even so, I couldn't afford even that! Even an Avo was well out of my reach, so I made do with the best of Japanese analogue tech, TEK 100,000 ohms per volt no less!

hi from slovenia ! I am 15 years old and I love your videos. Keep up good work I have a lot to learn!!!

Two of the same multimeters, must have been a fluke... :p

Jeez, its cool to see how fast your kid's linguistic and cognitive skills are improving. I'll be honest, I used to mind him tagging along a little, but not anymore. Great kid you got there.

Great to see Sagan again - so cute and obviously very bright!

Oh, I remember that "Project Sagan" video when he was born. And now he is five and a half years old! Life is going too fast.

Sagan has inherited the way of saying 'Awesome' from his father. In a couple of days will have mastered Bob's your uncle!

There is a file named "Eevblog" on the thumb drive of the cnc controller (can be seen at 38:48). Please show us what it contains. :D

That Video floppy is *fascinating*, I'll have to look it up!

That might literally be _the_ cutest kid on KZfaq. Tough call between him and AvE's daughter. Very bright for his age, he might be giving dad a run for his money in a few short years.

What an honour to be named after the bloody brilliant Carl Sagan. :)

Sagan is adorable :) I hope he follows in his dads footsteps when he is older

Stuff sent to the EEVBLOG has to be both mail and Sagan proof. I just did a search for that Sinclair multimeter and found an add for it in June 1978 Popular Science, it was $49.99 which was very cheap for a digital multimeter back then and that thing was much better than the passive analog multimeters most of us were using.

Dave, about those Sinclair Multimeters, I did use one, though it had a black case, in fact I had 2, I modified the second one with a then modern true RMS IC to create a combined Frequency/TRMS meter. That was in 1975! Those meters were then State of the Art! And very portable! I wish I knew where I left them! cheers!

I'm a little more hardcore, my first meter (ie. - not one I borrowed from Dad) was the Radio Shack Archer Kit model 28-4014A from that same era that has a huge display and a 'range doubler' feature that was actually pretty useful if the voltage/current you were reading fell on the upper range of the meter and moved it back into the center where it could be more accurately read. It still have the box and assembly instruction booklet that came with it. I haven't used it in years but I keep it around for likely the same reason you still have yours

Had one of those ion cameras when I was at school, it's battery life was terrible and we had an external pack for it that took 8 AA batteries which still didn't last long. We got the pictures off using a video blaster card in a 486 PC.

The Video Floppy almost looks like Sony might have later reused aspects of the design when creating Mini-Discs. Given that, I'd say the release for the shutter is a little plastic leafspring bit in the track along that edge. Heh, those VF disks would make good sci-fi props... Familiar, and yet _just_ foreign enough. I could see one being the MacGuffin of some early 2000s cyberpunk movie. ;P (Rather like how Strange Days used Mini-Discs)

That Sinclair PCB would have been roller tinned, not tin plated, then wave soldered - having no solder resist was the norm in the '70s. The case was borrowed from their Oxford calculator range.

As a matter of fact, the two germanium diodes(9:25) are for rectifying (AC range), not for protection. I own a similar one(40 years old). Because the multimeter was heavily abused, I had to change them several times.

You should bring Sagan back more often. It's easier to understand what you're talking about when you're explaining it to him!

Scratching up the top of that big flatpack so much with what looks like a grinding tool to hide its partcode in the Hind Technology CNC unit to the level it had concerns the crap out of me for its reliability! I'm think ESD and yes OK the device is probably ok but is it really? You dont know! If we were to build one of these controllers into my update CNC machines project and it shits itself right in the middle of a fixed leadtime big job a few months/years later all because of that kind of handling then we're sure not going to be happy ... eh Dave..?

I'm really interested in seeing you use the Canon Ion before tearing it down. Curious about the quality, framerate and length of the produced videos.

I think the mysterious chip at 40mins is the STM32f405ZGT6

I have fond memories of the Canon ION, used to grab the frames with my Vidi Amiga. :-)

For some reason I lost it when he said "We can pop out our floppy"...

I remember the canon ion camera , they sold a kit with a video capture board to digitise the images

Dave, you're an awesome Dad! Two thumbs up! :)

scared the crap out of me was not expecting that

Sagan is a riot. Love his curiosity.

54:00 First jpeg standard was in 1992 Dave, with the group having met since 1986. So it probably had been thought of by 1991.

Your son is so adorable! I hope he ends up enjoying electronics as much as you!

can I make my ring tone on my work phone Sagan saying "another multimeter!" that is too good.

The JPEG format specifications were released to the public in 1992, so I would assume that "JPEG wasn't even thought of in 1991" isn't quite accurate :)

You and Sagan so remind me of my father and I when I was 6. I was learning how to solder in his workshop. Mum walked in and said "Don't let him do that, he'll burn his fingers!!", "Yes," said dad " but only the once!!" Has Sagan burnt HIS fingers yet?

Yey! Sagan is back! Welcome back, little mate!

I was hoping to see that old analogue video camera in action!

I started watching you when Sagan was a baby. I feel old!

Still have that RadioHack meter, and guess what...BANG ON. Better than those made today for that those harbor freight specials.

That Sinclair meter, it appears to have an aluminium front panel... all around the input jacks!

38:47 missing the EEVblog Tap like a pro...

It's great to see Sagan earning his apprenticeship. He's flying along. *Now that's proper parenting..* _Top Banana Dave.!_

We need to organise sending a bunch of the same device to create a really strange mailbag.

Snap Dave - my first multimeter was one of those Tandy/Radio Shack ones - I've still got mine as well!!

Dave's first multimeter was the same as mine :) Bought it from Tandy too in the mid 80s, still got it, still works though the original probes are long gone!

For the display of CNC controller a lot better would be DVI-I that can transmit both analog and digital signal, it would probably require a bit of reengineering, but would resolve the problem with one connector.

What will be your son's first multimeter if he doesn't already have one?

as i watch this im looking directly at the texas instruments campus in new hamshire and thought i could use a good watch of a new mailbag😃

I see a future electrical engineer there.

"RF unit" probably stands for "remote focus unit". Basically a (wired) remote control for the camera.

great vid !!

9:28 D2 (Д2) Point germanium diodes. Introduced in 1957 and produced until USSR collapse in 1991 (well, during production it's changed its case several times and production quality was improved) Datasheet: www.155la3.ru/datafiles/d2.pdf

Given that it has a mini USB port on it, it's conceivable that it uses an internal Mini SD card for on-board memory that can be off-loaded to a NUC for analysis. (Edit) From watching the rest of the video, this seems to be correct. Original comment was posted before you took it apart.

Hi Dave when u was "davescrolling" the instructions for the data logger it looked like it said that the blue on-screen button was a sleep button

For such a smart guy, i laughed a lil when he couldn't figure out the password.

12:00 - I wonder what type of enclosures Sinclair used for their calculators /

I had to test a Canon DSLR (one very heavy piece) that used these VF-50 disks with a crappy resolution (well PAL i guess). Can't find anything about it.. does anyone know about this?