I Crashed My Fiesta: DARK IN HERE, ISN'T IT?

Darnit. I thought that quote was 'Quiet in here....' but there you go. I've been quite quiet recently, mostly because this thing called 'real life' has the audacity to get in the way of generating high quality, vintage computer related, web published articles. As Crashed Jr (an avid gamer) once said, "I went outside once. The graphics were amazing but the game-play was shit." A regular modern day philosopher (and I know he shamelessly pinched that from somewhere on the internet).

Anyway, what's happening? A few updates:

Torch Triple X

I received several more replacement chips to try swapping on the OMTI disk controller board but to no avail. I've said before that I don't like throwing parts at a problem but this one is so annoying I couldn't stop myself. Sadly, the new parts - a Z8 Romless microcontroller and a floppy drive controller chip made no difference.

You can see which chips I have replaced or managed to test off the board from the pic below. There's not a lot left to try other than the two PLCC socketed OMTI chips. If they're faulty, then the board is completely toast.

Green - chip replaced
Orange - chip removed and tested OK

Just in case that it was actually the floppy drive causing the issues I also tried hooking up a Gotek to the OMTI board, but no joy. The unit sits there with no interaction shown on the OLED display at all. Nothing, nada, nil, zip, zilch etc, although with a real drive I have noticed that the floppy drive light does pulse almost imperceptibly and regularly so perhaps all is not lost.

To try and analyse the SCSI activity the most excellent Adrian at Binary Dinosaurs lent me a 16 channel logic analyser as he too has a Torch Triple X. I have certainly learnt a lot about SCSI in general while poking away at some of the trace files I have pulled off but I have not yet managed to get the one SCSI decoder that is available (which takes the analyser output and translates it in to more readily readable SCSI commands) to work - yet.

There was a another glimmer of hope recently when I realised that the BlueSCSI that is currently working fine with the TripleX also supports floppy drive images i.e. it can pretend to be a floppy controller on the SCSI bus. However, the issue we have with the Torch is that it expects the hard disk to be on SCSI ID 0, LUN 0 i.e. the first sub-address on SCSI address 0. But then it also expects the floppy drive to be on SCSI ID 0, LUN 2.

Gratuitous floppy shot.

The current BlueSCSI software favours only LUN 0 on each SCSI ID although it is possible to 'force' the filenames of the disk images to be the LUNs. But, as described by the BlueSCSI chaps on BlueSky, it's a bit of a hack. Changing a simple parameter in the .ini file activates the option as well as another parameter for an option to use 'quirks' related specifically to OMTI disk controllers. But sadly, at the moment, this is not working and no matter the various configurations I've tried, the key disk remains resolutely unseen.

That's not the end of the BlueSCSI floppy though as another chap popped up on the VCF forums who also has a Torch Triple X (or at least the motherboard for one). He is looking at the code for BlueSCSI v2 - avaialble on github - to see if he can update/modify/patch the current code to specifically cater for the Torch. If I had the knowledge and capability I would be pitching in with this but, given my limited exposure to coding in anything but BASIC or Python, I'd just be peering over everyone's shoulder asking "What's that bit do?".

Cifer

Ah, the Cifer. After repairing another broken logic chip on the keyboard and another failed RAM chip, everything seemed to be back to normal. But, guess what. In the spirit of vintage hardware keeping everyone on their toes, it's failed again.

Working. Now, not working. :(

It basically keeps munching through RAM chips. I had it running CP/M and left it on for a while as I was doing something else. When I came back to it, the screen had locked up but was still displaying everything normally. So I switched it off and back on (ha, the more things change, the more they stay the same) and rather disappointingly, the display appeared blank. Closer inspection showed that it was on, but very faint and showing garbage. Yep, another RAM fault.

Suspicious power supply. Are you responsible for killing
all my RAM chips? Well? Speak up!

I do have suspicions about the power supply. It's the only thing I can think of that would keep blowing up the RAM although I do still need to work out exactly which chip is affected. If it's in the same position as the last one then I might drag all the boards out to check for unexpected shorts etc. I have been considering a Meanwell supply to replace original but I'm not sure if that's feasible although the current supply is a very similar form factor. We shall see..

Christmas (very seasonal..)

Not necessarily retro but an interesting project fell into my lap around Christmas. For 'reasons' I ended up with two rolls of remote controlled LEDs (from Menkind). Now, being a bit of a tinkerer there was no way I was just going to let them live happy lives with their built in controller and IR remote. One roll would be sacrificed to the great gods of tinkering.

First things first, what sort of LEDs do they use?

Hmmm. Are these WS2811/WS2812 LEDs I see before me?

Dunno. They're too bloody small but they
look like they could be.

A small section was cut off for experimentation purposes. One Raspberry Pi and three dupont connecting wires later and:

Ohh! Pretty!

Looks like we have a successful test. :)

For a long time I've always wanted to have a go at the DIY Christmas decoration that was highlighted by the RasPi guys several years ago. Fortunately, the article for that is still up here. In fact, it was 10 years ago! Holy cow.

Anyway, here's some pictures of me setting it up:

Designing the scrolly message.

First few strips mounted.

Original wire connections - but later changed!

All strips mounted, awaiting wire connections.

The board was a piece of hardboard, about A3 size, from Hobbycraft. I cut the LEDs into strips of 12 LEDs and mounted 8 strips (so 12x8). My handy staple gun fired staples that just straddled the rubbery LED strip making it really easy to fix to the board, along with the adhesive on the back.

Initially, I tried to use some offcut mains cable to join the stretches of LEDs but the wires were too stiff so that hour or so I spent soldering them onto alternate ends of the strips was a bit of wasted time. But no matter, I found some thinner core wire that was much more appropriate and easier to handle.

For power I used the end of a broken micro-USB cable i.e. I chopped the knackered end off and then wired up the +5v and ground to the end of the first LED strip. I also attached a second connection to the ground so I could plug in to the ground pin on the RasPi GPIO. As I'm using a relatively short section of LEDs (no more than 96) I can get away with connecting the ground but there would not be enough to power the LEDs from the Pi. So by attaching the USB plug I can either use a chunky power bank or simple USB charger plug.

With power and ground connected I just needed to connect up the data pin. I basically copied the original article so I'll let you go and read the details over there.

Once it was all connected up and power applied I ran the AdaFruit LED test program and....

Rainbow!

Rainbow! But with the colours slightly changed!

...it just worked! Nice!

So then I shamelessly blagged the code from the original article and loaded up the included test .png. I did have to make a couple of tweaks to the code to match exactly the LEDs I had. For some reason, my LEDs did not like the RGB order in the code, which meant the colours were all wrong. But it was an easy fix in the code and only took a couple of minutes of pondering to work out what was wrong.

And the results are:

This would definitely benefit from some sort of diffuser in front of the LEDs. If I can be bothered before this Christmas (only 298 days to go!), I might even 3D print something to put each LED in it's own compartment to make it even clearer. We shall see.

Sadly, it looks like the LEDs I used are no longer available if you fancy a go at doing this yourself. But there are later versions with 2m strips for £10 and I think they use SMD5050 LEDs (mine were two 5m reels for £12 each with WS2812 LEDs) which might work. YMMV. All the details of the project are in the original article. But some handy hints I found with this LED strip:

1) The clear rubber needs to be removed from the contacts before you can solder to them. They need to be clean so make sure you get it all off.

2) On the subject of contacts, make sure when you cut the strips, cut in the middle of the contacts that appear between the LEDs! It doesn't matter too much if it's not exactly in the middle but you could end up with one strip that's dead easy to solder wires to, and one that isn't. Ask me how I know.

3) The board I used was this one from Hobbycraft.

Merry Christmas!

Xbox Controller (Again)

Repaired Crashed Jr's Xbox controller AGAIN. That boy (also known as 'the cable slayer') could break a cast iron skillet..

Once again the joysticks in the unit failed and, once again, I had the joy of stripping it down and taking the old joysticks out. I've done it so many times now, it only takes about half an hour and that's including making sure that the damaged traces from previous repairs, don't get dislodged.