168 168 Never Quit

Greetings and welcome to an LGR printer thing! This is something I wanted to talk about for a long time now. This is a Star Micronics NX-2420 Rainbow dot matrix printer. This was announced in 1990. Fall of 1990, right before the COMDEX Show and it was retailing at a cost of $549 on launch or the equivalent of about $1,043 today, adjusted for inflation. Yikes. So yeah despite that price this was actually billed as one of their low-cost printers. Yeah, low cost right alongside the model NX-2420 Multifont which was 50 bucks cheaper at $499. This was not one of the most expensive printers on the market really. I mean, laser printers were still twice as much as this thing but it still wasn’t cheap. I just noticed does that say Ponts? Well despite the typos, this was actually meant for businesses. Mostly small businesses being that it wasn’t like the very highest and full letter quality things that you can get from a laser printer but it was still for dot matrix, it was pretty awesome. So y...

 The jacket is back because.... Uh, so, say it’s the 1980s --late 1980s or early 1990s, and you’ve always wanted to be able to write your letters as a document, save them to a floppy disk to edit later, but you’ve never been able to afford one of these newfangled personal computers. Well, Smith Corona has got you covered with this: This bad boy is the Smith Corona PWP-3200. It is a typewriter that has a VERY large LCD display and most importantly, a floppy disk drive. Let’s take a look at it. Alright so let’s get into it. Obviously this was a Goodwill find, as you can see by the sticker, I’ve had this for a number of years and you’ll see a great example of that in just a moment. So really, all this is a daisy wheel printer (and well look a bit more at that in a bit) but it’s a daisy wheel printer which has been integrated into a typewriter chassis with a floppy disk drive and a very basic computer. And, well first let’s turn it on. Most typewriters don’t turn on like this. Alright,...

In the last this, we took a look at the early history of Laserdisc. If you haven’t seen that, you can find a link down below or up there. In short, Laserdisc was the first optical storage format, storing analog video on 12 inch reflective discs, and it was released at the end of the 1970’s. Featuring many of the noteworthy features of DVD , it may seem surprising that it didn’t become that popular. It’s market adoption barely reached 2 percent of videocassette recorder sales in North America, and was even worse in Europe. Its most successful market was in Asia, but even that wasn’t fantastic. Only 10% of Japanese households had a laserdisc player, and Japan was considered the healthiest market. In this video, we’ll find out why Laserdisc just sort of stayed in the background its entire life. Let me begin by saying that the problem is more nuanced than simply, they cost too much. Because initially, laserdiscs were far cheaper than videocassettes. And it’s also more nuanced than laserdis...

Hello everyone, In the next few minutes you can see  the  production of this boom box. The speaker box is made with plywood You can find dimensions in the description The interior of the box must be at least 50x40x20 cm I used a pocket hole jig to join the plywood I also used wood polyurethane glue The plywood must be glued very good to avoid vibrations and cracks The amplifier will be powered by a 12v battery pack that has a 3S BMS attached Charging are often made thru the BMS with external 12.6v (max) power source but it'll be not balanced The BMS stop charging when one among the cells reaches 4,2 bolts. That means that one or more of the cells may not be fully charged The other method, much better, is to charge with a balance li-ion charger, I use IMAX B6 I also made a schematic that you can find in the video I used wood filler to cover the cracks I let it to dry and sanded Apply white matte finish paint The white paint is the base coat for the transfer potch/medium The im...

Hello everyone, That is powered by lithium-ion cells The speaker has a 2x15w amplifier installed It has a player with Bluetooth, radio module, card reader and sub port The system is powered by a 3s 12v battery pack The battery pack is built from 3x18650 cells The battery pack is connected to a 3s BMS(battery management system) The BMS is maybe the most important part of the speaker The BMS has overcharge and short-circuit protection First I used a 3d printer to make the battery holders The box is made of Bambus I bought it from IKEA The IKEA name for it is Dragan Inside the speaker box I installed one extra battery for phone charging For the build i used 4 speakers The speakers were recovered from a broken TV The speakers have 8 ohm The charging of the pack can be made thru the BMS (battery management system) I also installed a socket for each of the cells This way I can use a Smart Charger to balance the pack The BMS will not balance charge the pack The BMS will stop charging when an...

It’s no secret that the majority of then items I show  come from thrift stores.  The ones I go to have different colors of price tags and every day one or more colors have discounts on them which I think is just their ploy to raise prices across the board and hope you’ll shop more often to try to get those discounts but in some cases it can work in your favor such as with this HP monitor which had a price sticker of $5.99 on it but it had a 75% discount so I got it for $1.60 I also got this Sony Digital8 Handycam which did not have a discount on it but even at the full price of $9.99 that’s a steal compared to what these things sell for on eBay and it works perfectly -- it even came with a free tape in it.  But you may ask even at that price why bother getting this tiny little 15-inch monitor when I have a perfectly good 19-inch monitor that you often see in the background of my videos?  Well, there’s a couple reasons why I think this will be much more ideal as what ...

Greetings and welcome to a brief LGR thing while I work on more involved LGR things for the upcoming near future. And this is just going to be talking about VGA capture solutions for older PCs, and newer-ish PCs because I capture a wide range of systems. I’m also getting questions about it. But more recently I was getting very specific questions because of the MCE2VGA box. This is a converter for video signals. It takes TTL RGBI right there for like old computers running CGA, EGA, and monochrome and such. And sends them to the other side here for standard VGA output. It’s pretty great but it also doesn’t work with every capture device that I have, and I mentioned that in the video and people were like “well what do you have?” Anyway, my setup is always changing its gonna change again, but for now this is my basic setup. So I’ve got a newer Windows 10 PC capturing things over there and then over here is where I do most of the actual capturing.  And I like a separate station for this...

I picked up this Commodore 128 and disk drive on Craigslist for $30. The poor thing is in really rough shape In fact, I think it’s the worst I’ve ever seen. The whole thing is yellowed and you can clearly see its from UV exposure because you can see the original color hiding in the shadow of the keys, but the amount of dirt and grime is just amazing.  Part of this is due to being in storage for years, according to the seller, and, unfortunately, a key is broken off. I do have the key, so I’ll see what I can do about that. The 1571 disk drive doesn’t look any better. I don’t know if either of these items even work. So, really, I felt like the first thing I should do is test them. I plugged in the power and connected up the disk drive and monitor. So, half afraid something was going to pop and start smoking, I turned on the disk drive. It did spin up and the power light came on. That’s a good sign. Now, time for the computer. Well, the computer seems to be completely dead. In fact, t...