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Lemmy Shitpost @lemmy.world

Gork @sopuli.xyz

1mo ago

You can do anything at Zombocom

74 comments

I would really appreciate it if nobody looked at the PS/2 to USB adapter currently on my workbench, kplzandthx.
- could you attach a picture of it? i want to be sure i don’t accidentally look at it by mistake
  
  You’ve been warned.
- I may have recently retired my IBM->PS/2->USB daisy chain because I was gifted a modern mechanical keyboard...
  
  Well, I fell pretty deep into that rabbit hole, where I’ve even designed a couple of primitive circuit boards and hand-wired a bunch of keyboards. I also mess around with vintage stuff a bit.
  This particular converter is programmable and meant to be used with a not mechanical 122-key terminal keyboard made by the company that took over IBM’s US keyboard factory, but it’s been hanging out with several DuPont wires shoved into it to connect it to a molex connector to test a different old board.

Somehow that VGA port became a cenobite.
- It has such sights to show you.
  
  The images that have traversed my wire span the entirety of sensation, from the darkest pits of depravity to the... Wait, no, that's it.
- Plot of the next disney hellraiser movie

"Welcome to Zombocom."
- This is zombocom
  
  You can do anything at Zombocom

The power of Bogatin compels you!
- 😂 that's great

Wait until you realize you only need 4 of those pins.
- Five signals + ground if you want more than one color channel. The RGB ground might not be connected to the shell insde the monitor and both H-sync and V-sync are required.
  
  Kids these days with their colors.
- They routed the serial port to the other side of that header.
  
  Wait until you realize you only need 3 of those pins.

I wonder... do we have any kind of cablegore or tech gore community around here?
- Be the change you want to see in the world.
  I'll join you.
- https://zerobytes.monster/c/cablegore

This reminds me of how my speakers work.
I have a 3.5mm jack for my speakers that converts to an RCA jack at the end, I also have T-intersection that goes between an amplifier and the RCA jack to intercept the signal and send it BACK to a set of desktop speakers.
Why? Bootleg surround sound, I know it's just stereo, but hey, more speakers! Also it sounds better, and it can get louder.
- It may get louder, but does it go to eleven?
- I learned the "more speakers = more better" when I once had 2 radios tuned to the same station and noticed it sounded better with both playing than either one turned off
- I have an old Logitech 5.1 surround system, and there is a "stereo x2" setting that's pretty much exactly that.

That's not Zombo COM1:, that's the serial port, the one above it. This is Zombo VGA.

You should see some of the contraptions I've done (or had done) over the years. Like basically taking a a BGA FPGA off the board, soldering wires to the pads, and soldering the other ends to the balls of a different brand of FPGA to get something working while switching suppliers.
- Please tell me you took pics.
  
  The prototype exists - somewhere - in my office, but I can't provide pictures, sorry.

VGA stands for "vestigial garbage adapter" after all.
- Ouch, I just assumed it was the serial port and didn't even look how it's reversed. There must be all kinds of fun things you can do by hand-writing VGA data.
  
  The VGA connector is actually reversible! Once. given enough force. It also doesn’t actually work properly when installed upside down.
- I mean VGA is good for 1080p 60fps which honestly is a plenty high resolution even today. Sure you can get higher resolution and you can get higher refresh rates, but for a ~20" panel 1080p/60 is a sweet spot and you can get some really good panels for pretty cheap these days at 1080p/60
  
  Oh I was just joking about this janky adapter. It worked great paired with a CRT.

I left the headlights on overnight and woke up to a dead battery.
Stupidly left my tools in the house as it was an impromptu trip out of the city.
So I wired the output on the solar charge connector to the permanent live on the head unit and left it for a while

I've been there before.
Was trying to figure out how a still functional but LOOOOOOOOOONG since defunct companies sensor worked.

i appreciate the title very much!
The only limit is yourself!

This reminds me of The Etherkiller
- Normal harddrives and cdroms want +5VDC and +12VDC. We give them 120 VAC. They like it. Ohhh, they like it.
  🤣
  
  More power = more gooder

I am so conflicted about this meme; on the one hand I'm in awe at this bodge into the RCA port and on the other the caption made my eye twitch.
- Had a cat engine in a crane once. A pin got damaged fir the ecm. Cat said 5k + labour to replace ecm plug. I said fuck you and any one that may slightly resemble you my good man. Went back to yard. Wittled down and ramed a solid 14awg wire in the hole. Been fine for over 5 years now.
  
  They thought they had your nuts in a vise. But all they had was acorns.

Modern cables for high bandwidth data transfer just don't have this kind of luxury. You can't send 100 GB/s through a ramshackle connection.

I actually did the reverse when I was a kid with a VGA computer monitor lol my mom took my TV away as punishment but I still had my console (I'm forgetting which it was, probably n64) and I tried sticking the 3 color wires from the console into the wire for the monitor and it actually worked, but if I remember correctly it wasn't exactly color correct lol

This coupled with my having just watched the interview with a steam engineer taking about 5 layer pcbs is making me question if I may not be a furry.

i have an old monitor that's 25 years old. still works great, but i have to do this kinda shit to connect it

The lies of Big Wire have shackled users for too long!

You can just do things. There's no real rules.
Once I used some jewelry wire to connect pins from a vga port on my PC to pins on the svideo port on my tv. Worked fine. It was black and white but I had a display.
Edit: I think I just connected the sync and then put the luma signal oitput into the composite video signal input.
- I have a slim Playstation 2 still. It is modded. How is it modded?
  Styrofoam in the disc tray sensor.
  I can play burnt DVDs by just stating up a legit game (I have MGS2) and swapping the still spinning disc after the PS2 and Sony logos end, so long as the console doesn't know the disc tray is open. The styrofoam prevents the console knowing the tray is open by keeping the button pressed down.
- Way Back in highschool, we convinced one of our friends who was selling drugs to pony up $300 for a used B52 speaker system, so we could throw raves (and he could sell more drugs.) Hes long since moved on, but we still have that b52 unit, and still use it for events.
  20 years ago, a couple hours before one such event, the system was dead. I pulled off the cover, and found a scorched up resistor. I took a penny, soldered one of the clipped off leads to the edge of it, then with a multimeter, slowly dragged across the surface, until I found a point with the correct resistance value. I soldered the other lead on at that point, soldered the penny into the board, and its still working to this day!

Did something similar with an IDE drive, when I couldn’t afford a new ribbon cable.

This disturbs me to look at. I don't care if it works.

Actually a repost with another text. But still funny.

You really can do a degree. We once manually patched the ribbon cable from one PowerBook screen into another totally different model and even different sized screen and got it to work mostly. I think it clipped off part of it but this was almost 20 years ago.

Had to rig up an rgb light strip like that last week

"propagated" I see what you did there

Didn't someone do a test and an old wire hanger worked as well as an audio connector as an expensive wire?

74 comments