Stiga SD 98 ride-on lawnmower repair and mod
(Also includes how to seriously mess something up creating even bigger repair needs) When we bought our property we also purchased a lot of the equipment the previous owner had acquired. An integral part of that is the lawnmower tractor - total size is close to two acres and most of that is covered with grass. It’s a Hurricane HTG 98 SD, which is a model also sold under many other brands.
English · Htg · Mower · Mtd · Stiga · Tractor · Uncategorized
10 minutes
Above you see two probes that came with my DSLogic Analyzer. You also see two EZ-Hook XKM-S probes bought from Digikey at 30 SEK each. The latter are vastly higher quality - and much easier to work with since you can place them closer together due to their thinner tips. Highly recommended.
Dslogic · English · Logic · Uncategorized
1 minute
Wireless phone charger - Tesla
Love the Tesla Model 3. When I got it I thought the clever way to route a charger cable up from the front USB ports was nice, but after a while I got real tired of having to poke the phone onto the plug whenever I got in the car. The Tesla M3 subreddit had a thread about adding Qi wireless phone charging to the front compartment, and there seemed to be no real competition to the product from TapTes.
Apple · English · Mobile · Tesla · Uncategorized
2 minutes
PLCC 44 PROM programming with TL866
Even the retro world is moving away from the regular DIP packaging sometimes. The Atari Falcon, and third party ROM boards from Exxos, use the 27C4096 PROM in PLCC packaging to hold TOS (the operating system). The TL866 with its DIP40 socket cannot obviously handle these, but a quick search shows us that there exists many adapter packages available to purchase that will sort out various types of popular socket formats.
English · Retro · Uncategorized
1 minute
TL866 firmware updater macOS support
I own a TL866CS IC programmer. Wonderful device - I truly recommend it (and I assume its successor is even better). It’s been known for many years that the company who made them had one hardware revision, and limited the CS revision compared to the A revision purely in firmware. That limitation has of course been hacked for almost as long as the device has existed. Someone going by the name “radioman” detailed many years ago how the bootloader could be reflashed from CS version to A, after which the original software and firmware updates will see the device as the A model in all aspects.
Apple · Code · Development · English · Retro · Uncategorized
1 minute
Kokoon Relax headphones review
[this post has been updated, see additional edits being made at the bottom] April 2018 I saw a Facebook ad for a pair of headphones that sounded like the perfect match for my needs. I’m a severe insomniac, and a frequent flier. I’ve had the same pair of Sony MDR-NC32NX in-ear noise canceling headphones for a decade, and I was looking for something new. Yesterday they arrived. Now, this was originally a Kickstarter (and I have seen that not all backers have gotten theirs yet) but when I ordered they expected to ship them in July the same year.
English · Kokoon · Review · Uncategorized
6 minutes
GrafX2 SDL2 version for macOS 64-bit
update 21/7: I’ll make regular builds of this, and hope to have it completely automated soon. They can be found here (link might change in the future): original post: 12 hours ago SDL2 support was merged into the popular retro graphics program GrafX2. Here’s a fully distributable macOS x86_64 binary (only tested on macOS High Sierra) built from that. Thanks to evil/DHS for letting me know of the new SDL2 support, even before it was actually merged ;) (If you try to build from source yourself there are edits I’ve done on my local branch to make it build and include the support libraries/frameworks.
English · Retro · Uncategorized
1 minute
I’ve added yet a new little description to Projects - a circuit and modification to “nudge” wakestates on Atari STs without needing to power cycle.
Atari · English · Retro · Uncategorized
1 minute
Back in the day, those of us who did advanced video tricks on the Atari (opening borders, hardware scrolling on hw without hardware scroll) knew that there were differences between systems, and sometimes on the same system. After some trial and error you built in some compensation which made things work “always” on all systems. Today we know that a lot of this comes from the fact that the GLUE and the CPU, while both running at 8MHz, can be offset from one another 0-3 cycles (since the master clock everything’s divided from is 32MHz).
Atari · English · Retro · Uncategorized
3 minutes
I’ve done an extended writeup of a little project I’ve been working on and off on for the last few months. Extending the video modes of an old Atari ST in new and interesting ways. Going from 4 colors to 16 might not sound much with today’s tech, but for us oldies this is pretty fascinating ;)
Atari · Code · English · Retro · Uncategorized
1 minute