Notices by Tube🌞Time (tubetime@mastodon.social)

nobody:
F4 Phantom attitude indicator: OFF!

first, since i always seem to do stuff the hard way, i designed a board from scratch for the 2350. i call it the Rotten Pi 2350[A] mostly because i threw it together in a huge hurry two weeks ago.

this is a graph showing the infamous GPIO bug in the new Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller. the scale is not mA, it's actually uA (phew). but you won't believe what I went through to get this data! 🧵

we ended moving 80 cabinets -- containing 4,000 plastic drawers, to an undisclosed location where we could slowly pick through the collection, catalog it, and separate it out three ways.

this was great for a while, but on July 16, 2022, Excess Solutions opened their doors to the public for the last time. and on that day, I decided to get myself a guaranteed supply of chips, and two of my friends were totally down for it.

most of their inventory got sold to Excess Solutions (located in San Jose).

unfortunately, the company had to shut down their retail outlet in 2019.

OK some answers to questions you might have:

* i don't want to run an electronics business so i'm not planning to sell any. doesn't mean i won't give parts to friends occasionally.

* yes, i have a catalog of parts organized in a spreadsheet, which makes it much easier to find things

if you've been wondering why i haven't been posting as prolifically this year, this is the major reason.

over the last few months, i spent hours and hours carefully packing chips into separate drawers. by putting multiple part numbers into a single drawer, i was able to reduce it down to just 12 cabinets.

after separating out my share of the parts, i stuffed them into thousands of plastic ESD-safe bags, each labeled with a sharpie and stored in a moving box.

* rarest part i found? probably these 4004 processor chips. but there were other oddities in the collection, shift register memories, drivers, and that sort of thing.

HSC originally used black ESD foam which degraded horribly over the years. i hate that stuff. i hate the sour smell it gets when it degrades, and i hated having to pick hundreds of chips out of crumbling, decaying foam.

* yes, many of the drawers (for MOS parts) have ESD protection in the form of an aluminum foil layer. i applied it with glue and this custom 3D-printed jig.

a couple of statistics: there are 3,622 different part numbers and a total of 72,108 parts in this collection.

so i did something totally insane. the local electronics store was closing down and so i (and two friends) purchased THEIR ENTIRE STOCK OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS. and today i finally finished organizing my share into these 12 cabinets. 🧵

HSC was on Ryder street for many, many years, but they had to move in ~2016. the building was demolished in May 2017.

these parts started out at HSC Electronics (aka Halted) in Santa Clara and were collected over a period of 40 years.

(before being split, this means there were over 216,000 parts that we had to sort through manually!)

HSC/Halted has had several other locations over the years, but served as a steady source of parts for hobbyists and engineers. many famous individuals bought things here.