Finally got two minutes to sit down in front of an actual computer, so can provide a (pretty brief - by my standards anyway!) update...
So, firstly let's show what other than weird old military portable computers I picked up at the DDRC car boot sale...
Firstly a pair of these...
For the simple reason that I'd always wanted one, especially when I was growing up and saw them in catalogues - was nowhere close to being able to afford one though! This one's in pretty good shape under all the dust and should clean up like new. I've not done any detailed testing yet, but aside from the obvious new belt being needed for the tape deck, it picks up (a lot!) of radio stations properly, and responds to things in the surrounding area on the TV, but I've not had the opportunity to feed it a signal yet. The second one is basically intended as a parts donor if necessary though to be honest I fully expect it to be in identically functional a condition.
Next up was this thing - which I zoomed in on (pun entirely intended) from halfway across the field.
I'd been after one of the old floppy disc based Sony Mavica cameras for a long while now. The last few I'd tried to get via eBay kept going for stupid money in the last few minutes, and the one I did win at a sensible price never turned up. Have had a bit of a play around with it, and while the resolution is obviously low by today's standards (1.3MP), the image quality is actually quite reasonable. Thinking back to the resolution that film tended to get scanned into a computer in back in 2000 when this thing dates from, it actually makes a pretty good case for being a perfectly usable camera. I'll probably take it out to one of the regular meetups I go to down in London or something just for a laugh and to see how it really works in the real world.
The Saab was started up today and moved over to the position in front of the garage. While this is *vastly* reduced from the smoke screen when I first arrived after the head gasket let go - it's obvious that something's not right here...
...The fact that it's running on three out of four cylinders is also a bit of a giveaway. In the time it took me to reverse it out of the driveway and shuffle across to the other side, the water does now appear to have found its way into the oil system unfortunately.
I'd like to seek some advice here. Would it be best to drain the contaminated oil from the system immediately, run the engine (sans coolant obviously) briefly to circulate it and expel the contaminated stuff from the various bearings etc and then wait till the gasket is changed, or is it likely to be okay to just wait until I can get the head sorted out - likely to be a month or two given my usual pace. I'm tending towards just get it out of the engine as soon as possible myself.
The 107 is now off commuting duty, so has been pretty much sharing daily driver duties lately with the Lada. I mentioned a couple of days ago that I'd picked up a heads up display for it off Amazon - primarily as an easy way to get a coolant temperature gauge as not having one of those *really* makes me uneasy. If this link works -
This should be the one I purchased over here... though there are a number of different styles out there. It just sits on the dash and plugs straight into the OBD connector (down by your left knee in the 107). It can be pretty much entirely hidden from direct view from the driver's seat behind the rev counter.
I have to admit that I was sceptical about how well it would work...but it actually does surprisingly well. It was a really bright sunny day when I got it, and it would probably benefit from me cleaning the inside of the windscreen, but even so it was plainly readable - if a little washed out. I've not tried the little slightly tinted/silvered sheet they give you with it to attach to the screen yet. I might try that once I've cleaned it. It is *really* hard to get a decent photo of the display in action though...
The image really doesn't appear like it's an obvious reflection...it does just kind of float there like some hugely futuristic hologram or something. It's nice to have the speedo up there as well, especially as it seems to be a lot more accurate than the one on the dash which is at least in the case of my one is really quite optimistic. Also nice just when you're in a built up area being able to glance at the speed without actually having to take your eyes off the road...which is the whole idea I guess.
Now however on to the over-complicated, heavy, olive-drab bit of electronics I've been swearing at for the last couple of days.
Given my total weakness for any oddball bit of computer hardware, there was no way that I was going to be able to walk past this thing without buying it.
Here's a bit more identity information...
...and the little elapsed time indicator...Note the mesh screen over the display (similarly the main display)...and under the keys on the keyboard etc...they weren't kidding around with the EMI shielding on this thing.
Initially I couldn't get it to do anything much aside from beep at me in a highly annoyed fashion. I knew there was an intermittent display problem, do tried plugging in an external monitor - and sure enough, it was complaining about a flat BIOS battery, and thought it was 1988. Punching in sensible details there resulted in - despite a rather sick sounding hard drive - it proceeding to boot...straight to a screen stating it was the Ptarmigan Universal Terminal Menu. Not only did it have a drive in it, it appeared not to have been wiped. Bit of an oops there surely...Quitting to DOS and poking around revealed it to also have Windows 3.11 installed, and a couple of radio specific applications which wanted to talk to external bits of hardware and meant nothing to me. To be fair, I've not the foggiest idea whether this is the original drive (though it is the right capacity), or whether it's been reinstalled by a previous owner etc!
I was still curious to find out what hardware was in the box other than what I could see from the POST screen and via the BIOS, so stuck another drive in...at which point the display magically came to life - albeit briefly.
Suffice to say, Ubuntu didn't manage to make it as far as a desktop with only 60Mb of memory to play with, but it had a good try! It also meant that I could get some hardware specs too...
It was about this point that it started refusing outright to boot, or even POST. So I started taking it to bits. This was *quite* a long-winded process given the measures they've gone to to make this thing EMI-proof - which I later found out was indeed because it's designed to deal with the TEMPEST regs...so basically the thing is indeed for all intents and purposes, EMP-proof I believe! I knew the PSU looked to be struggling a bit, but even when fed from a known good external supply with everything save for the built in VGA connector hooked up, it would still only POST 1 time in 20.
After three evenings of work, I finally managed to extract the motherboard - which appears to be an off-the-shelf multi-purpose PC board with a tonne of I/O options etc...annoyingly, it is devoid of a model number, and trying to figure this thing out without a datasheet is likely to be a challenge!
To be honest though, I'm not really *too* worried about whether I can get the original board up and running. While it's an interesting machine, a 466MHz PIII isn't *massively* useful...especially if it's going to be highly unstable. So I've started poking around...It looks from how things hook up to the motherboard that the keyboard is essentially "talking" PS/2 most likely so could be adapted...and after removing another 3756495742009 screws, I managed to get into the display, which again appeared to be an off-the-shelf item - one which did have a visible model number thankfully!
Not only did it have a visible model number...about the third Google hit on searching for that was a datasheet - including useful stuff like this pinout!
(Which I hastily scribbled down on the back of the display itself for future reference).
My current plan for this thing...if I can't get the original board to behave properly, in which case I'd reassemble it as a proper working early 2000s time-capsule...is to stick something like a Raspberry Pi in there, using the existing display, keyboard and trackball. That way I've got a working portable machine that's both capable of doing something useful, and being a wonderfully eccentric conversation starter.
Yes, I know I'm a bit mad...but hey...I also drive a Lada so we all knew that!
