Today’s vintage entry is rather cute:
TI’s Little Professor
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Category Archives: Vintage
Casio personal-mini teardown in pictures
Optical mouse, the old way
Today’s topic is somewhat unique- a vintage optical mouse, made in the days when it was not very trivial. It’s not like you can just slap a camera in and have it take pictures to figure out where things move. In the old days you had to actually design it, maybe even using some 2N3906 and 555 timers as we’ll find out. Let’s start with unboxing (pardon the masking tape holding things together)
Vintage find
Micronta 22-191 multimeter teardown
And here is the second part of the $1 multimeter deal from the last Hamfest. Together with Micronta 22-201U analog meter reviewed here I picked up this 3.5 digit digital one of a similar age. The poor thing looks like it had a rather difficult life!
Updated 11/2016
A $1 hamfest multimeter teardown: Micronta 22-201U
This one has been sitting since the summer- it took a while to get all the rain to evaporate from the inside! When I grabbed the pour fella, it had water up to the mirror.
$1 takes it!
It seemed like a good idea at the time
A while back I did a teardown on a vintage multimeter- Weston 6000. The 38 years old LCD was dead, but otherwise I saw signs of life in the meter. So I figured I’d try recreating the display using modern components. Continue reading
Vintage Twins: Beckman DM78 and Hioki 3217
Today we have two tiny multimeters to take apart and see what we can learn from how their designs progressed:
On the left is Hioki 3217 and on the right – Beckman DM78
Vintage multimeter – Weston 6000
Another addition to my growing collection of vintage multimeters is this Weston Schlumberger Model 6000 meter from the mid 1970s
Old vs new(ish)- notice how square it is
The meter was listed as in almost like new condition except for a spot on the front panel. It came with (very rubbery) test leads and an actual printed user manual- a rare thing these days.The Ebay posting was worded very carefully to never mention whether the thing actually works, so I figured it did not really matter. If it does not- teardown turns into repair attempt and either way we learn something new. Continue reading
Vintage Keithley 130A teardown
Introduction
The latest addition to our vintage collection is a Keithley 130A handheld DMM from the mid-eighties.Keithley is not well known for its handheld DMMs, or at least I’ve never heard of them. It’s a 3.5 digit 0.25% instrument made in mid 1980s
Keithley 172A DMM in pictures
Another ebay find- a vintage Keithley 172 multimeter. The datecodes on the parts range from 1978 to 1984, placing the final assembly somewhere in mid-1980s. It seems fully functional, but could use a bit of a calibration to regain its past precision.