Szuba [Schaube]

Aktualnie jestem gdzieś na półmetku szycia szuby datowanej na mniej więcej XVI wiek. Półmetek czyli zasadniczo zszycie wszystkich szwów nośnych wierzchu, no ale od początku.

Na potrzeby mojej wewnętrznej klasyfikacji definiuje sobie szubę jako męskie ubranie rozszerzane od samej góry i nie odcinane w pasie. Jako takie coś kojarzyć może się lekko z XV wiecznym robe, nie wiem na ile słusznie. Elementem mocno wyróżniającym szubę jest jej kwadratowy kołnierz i rozchylone poły pod szyją. Bardzo często szuba posiadała futrzany kołnierz lub była nawet podbijana futrem, jednakże nie jest to wymóg, zważywszy na ilość ikonografii i zabytki bez futra.

Zasadniczo, co do kroju, moją szubę wzoruję na przedstawieniach żołnierskich. Szuba cywilna-miejska wydaje się odrobinę różnić, po pierwsze obecnością futra, po drugie krojem (jest chyba o wiele bardziej rozkloszowana) i po trzecie rękawami - te w wersji cywilnej bardzo często posiadały rozcięcia do wyjęcia rąk.

Urs Graf 1508 

Urs Graf 1518

Wykrój szuby, który wykorzystałem do szycia mojego ciucha pochodzi z XV wiecznej damskiej szuby i w zasadzie spełnia wszelkie wymagania co do szuby - rozszerzanie się, brak odcięcia etc. Przedłużyłem odrobinę szubę względem pokazanych powyżej rycinek (to nic, mieszczańskie-cywilne szuby są dużo dłuższe, generalnie do kostek).

Dodatkowo chciałem dołożyć pewne ozdobne elementy w postaci aplikacji. Pomysł jest spójny z tym co widuje się na ikonografii (głównie są to różnego rodzaju sajany/waffenrocki/wappenrocki etc z obszyciami). Ale chociażby tutaj widać obszytą rzezaną taśmą szubę:

   

Kranach 1530

Półmetek prac nad szubą wygląda mniej więcej tak (dolna aplikacja jeszcze na szpilkach):

Pozostało jeszcze podwinięcie i podszywanie brzegów (nie mam zielonego pojęcia jak zrobić to poprawnie historycznie, więc będę improwizował stosując nowoczesne metody) oraz wszycie lnianej podszewki, której jeszcze nawet nie zszyłem w całość. Akurat to będzie proste i przyjemne. W następnej notce pokażę jak wygląda szuba podszyta na krawędziach i wyłogach czerwoną wełną i z wykończonym kołnierzem. Trochę w tym czarnej magii.

Pewne zmiany

Pewne zmiany, trochę jak powtórne zakładanie bloga. Postanowiłem trochę odświeżyć formułę mojego bloga z uwagi na pewne zmiany rozkładu czasu i skupienie się na pewnych rzeczach (kosztem innych). Dodatkowo z uwagi na powyższe doszedłem do wniosku że nie ma sensu używać języka angielskiego do pisania na przykład o rekonstrukcji (albo zwłaszcza o rekonstrukcji).

W najbliższym czasie czeka mnie sporo roboty jeśli o rekonstrukcję chodzi. Po pierwsze całą rodziną chcemy dołączyć się do projektu Polska Dzielnicowa, a jego datowanie (XII/XIII) to dla nas zupełna nowość. Będzie ciekawie i sporo nauki przy okazji, bo wiele będę musiał się nauczyć na nowo. Po drugie, jak może wiecie, projekt Parszywa XVIstka nabrał rozpędu i w związku z tym na najbliższy sezon chciałbym mieć gotowy strój i wyposażenie na to datowanie. I akurat do tego mi blisko, bo brakuje mi dosłownie tylko kilku rzeczy a i wykroje wydają mi się jakoś bliższe, z uwagi na to że wiem coś tam o tym jak się szyło w XV wieku.

Z drugiej strony o sprawach technicznych nadal będę pisał po angielsku. Wydaje mi się to jakieś prostsze i wygodniejsze (co akurat nie powinno dziwić). Tutaj też czeka mnie sporo rzeczy które chciałbym dokończyć lub zrealizować. 

Scarf (through the ages)

Recently, when I have finished my doublet and shirt I've noticed that the neck opening is really wide. As so it does not provide much of protection in cold weather. A natural way out of thi problem would be to wear a hood. But I have not noticed hood-wearing Landsknecht soldiers. So maybe a scarf? Then it all started - when scarves were used? do we have any proof of it's use before modern times? A scarf seems to be extremely simple piece of garment but from some reasons it is not as popular as expected.

For now I want only to hoard some pictures that I have found up to date. Maybe somene will be able to update my list and will help me to find any proof for a scarf in XII/XIII or XVI century.

But, starting from antiquity:

Romans wore two type of neck-wear: focale and sudarium. Both of them used, as far as a I know by the military and civilians. Focale was used as a protection against cold and, by legionnaires as a protection against armor rubbing against the neck. Sudarium was used rather as a sweat cloth. These scarfs were made from linen or wool.

A focale on a modern roman reenactor

In early medieval the scarves were also used, although not as often as by Romans. I have managed only to find one clear depiction. Additionally I heard some stuff about scarf usage by the vikings but without any proof whatsoever The source is Stuttgart Pasalter from the first halve of the IX century:

And following that we have Lubin Codex from the II half of XIV century:

For better picture see here - http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=4360&handle=zm#

And finally, long after medieval times, we have the cravat from the '30s of the XVII century:

Portrait of Ivan Gundulic, 1622.

Cravat is a piece of garment adapted by the French from Croatian (hence the name) mercenaries. After that cravat-scarf is more or less gaining its popularity very fast, and the rest is well known (and not really interesting for me).

Okay, so we have antiquity - IX c. - XIV c. and XVII c. without anything in between (?). Seems odd.. I'll be investigating the thing further. Contact me if you have any additional info.

XVI century shirt

Last few days (or rather few weekends) I was busy making a shirt for the XVI century Landsknecht kit. Finally it's ready and I can show me new shirt. It looks like so:

And with the doublet:

The pattern is classical for this kind of garment. (see below): 

Basic medieval shirt pattern (adapted from The Medieval Tailor Assistant)

I have only omitted the side gores, that are sometimes used (not in this pattern), as the shirt is very wide and the gores are totally unnecessary. Of course I have kept the underarm gussets, as they seem to be crucial for a period shirt. The point is to make everything extremally wide. The 

The smocking around the neck is based on this painting:

A young man (Holbein 1518)

I have used this tutorial in order to learn how to do that and must say that this is amazingly fast and easy. The only mistake I made was making the marks 2 cm apart. It would be much better if they would be 1.5 cm or 1 cm apart giving a finer smock.

And that's all. I hope it looks as good as expected. The next thing - a hood based on Sebald Beham woodcut :

Months - December(?) (Beham 1546)

Loudspeaker - part 3

Okay, so today I have found some time to work with the enclosure. It was covered with a thick layer of acrylic filler, that was applied some years ago. This filler turned out to be too brittle for my use, as I wanted to have all the angles as sharps as possible. In order to obtain that I decided to use a totally different filler, a polyurethane filler, that is two part filler. I chose Finish (Novol) to obtain as fine grain as possible, yet have a hard filler layer.

Firstly I sanded really hard the acrylic filler to remove as much as possible. To do that I sanded it hard with 60 grit paper until most of the filler was removed. Additionally I sanded some of the MDF front to fit the shape of the enclosure.

Finally after sanding and blowing all the dust out I sprayed the sanded enclosure with acrylic primer (Motip, cheap one). The primer serves two roles here - firstly it helps the polyurethane filler to stick to the surface, secondly the primer fills small cracks and holes on the surface. The second role of the primer will be very useful later, as I will apply the same primer on top of polyurethane filler, before I paint the whole damn thing.

Primed enclosure (on the left), and box before priming (on the right).

Using a water based primer had a bad outcome on the OSB. Although the OSB I use is said to be waterproofed (with same kind of wax on the surface) one piece of the boxed absorbed the primer and swelled - fortunately only a little. Unfortunately this was the top part of the enclosure, so anything here would be very visible. To make things right I sanded this part (again), even harder to sand the wood of the OSB, to hide the swelling and primed it again. Still, it is very rough but this will be hidden underneath the filler.

At this point (and all further points, regarding the paint job) I would like to thank Saskia from elektroda.pl, that helped me a lot in understanding how things should be made. I bow before your master knowledge.

Loudspeaker - part 2 - the project

As I described earlier the columns are designed as 2-way system in a closed box. Now to give more details:

Used drivers are:

Tonsil GDN 20/40 8 ohm

This is an relatively old design, but I got this speakers quite cheap, and decided to use them. The thing that I like in them is that they work pretty well in the middle of the audible spectrum, around 2..3 kHz. This is why I have implemented them in this 2-way system. 

Visaton SC10N

This a dome tweeter from Visaton, also not very fresh design, although seems to be quite reliable. The mid-woofer is 40 W rated and the tweeter is 100 W rated, so it should withstand lower-than-normal cut at around 3000 kHz.

Box

18 mm thick OSB loudspeaker box is 35 cm high and 24.6 cm deep and wide. After excluding the thickness of the walls (36 mm) this gives an approximate volume of 14 liters. The final volume will be even smaller, as in this calculation I didn't exclude the volume taken by the crossover elements, inner reinforcements, tweeter etc. Finally the volume should be around 13 liters. This produces a response curve like shown below:

This gives band (-3 dB) going from 70 Hz to 3500 Hz for the mid-woofer in theory. Reasonably speaking, it should go as low as 80 Hz with ease. You can see a bit of enhancement (up to +4.5 dB) in the kick-bass region, that is intended.

Cross-over

Passive crossover network is a classical CLC third-order network for the tweeter and nothing for the mid-woofer (simplicity again). The two capacitors are 4.7 uF and 15 uF, inductor is 0.56 mH giving the cut-off frequency around 2700 Hz.

Phase issues

The third order filter, used for the changes the phase by -270 degrees - -3/4 of full period. This is not possible to be compensated by plugging the tweeter in reverse polarization as with second-order cross-over, as it would still give phase mismatch by 1/4. At 2,7 kHz (cut frequency) the full period of the wave is around 13 cm - the approximate distance between the mid and high drivers. They reach in-phase work at around 3.8 kHz. Unfortunately in the 2.7 - 3.8 kHz the mid-woofers SPL is still around 90 db/W/m. This issue will be further investigeted one the loudspeakers are done.

Making of

The boxes were assembled some time ago (few years), so I do not have any pictures from the process. When I got back to the project I started from gluing the front MDF panels using universal spray adhesive (universal meaning usable for gluing paper, wood and textiles). This was a bit problematic as both sides - OSB and MDF - were just soaking in the glue, and close to nothing remained inside. At first I have covered both sides with glue, waited a few minutes and tried to glue them together with no good effects. So I waited till the first layer of glue dry up totally, applied another thin layer as a primer and then, after 10 minutes applied the final layer, waited 3 minutes and placed in on the OSB. After that I put them under pressure (25 liters of water ;) ) and let to dry overnight. It seems it worked.

 

The OSB boxes are partially covered with acrylic filler (I really regret using this one, as this is no hard enough to get the corners right). I will apply some other filler on top of that later.

To get the speakers centers together possibly close I needed to cut out a piece of the tweeter. It didn't turn out perfect but still acceptable (tape is to block the dome of the tweeter from the dust etc):

And finally the mid-woofer (still needs to be put together):

Next part - sanding/filling/priming the boxes!

Loudspeaker - part 1

As I have stated some time ago I'm biasing my resources towards audio systems for some time. Additionally I have several - quite old - projects that I have abandoned few years ago and want to finish them now. One of this projects is a 2-Way loudspeaker system based on Tonsil GDN 20/40 (that additionally needs some fixing) and Visaton SC10N.

I wanted to have this monitors as simple as possible, even if this means sacrificing some performance. In case of this speaker the sacrifice is in the low end of the spectrum - bass. The 20 cm woofer will  not have exquisite performance under - let's say - 100 Hz od 80 Hz. But on the other hand it wil provide a dynamic sound, what is more important for me.

The enclosure is 20 liters, closed (simplicity). GDN woofer is used without any equalization or cross-over (simplicity), SC10N is cut at around 3000 Hz with a 12 db/oct short pass CLC filter.

Enclosure is made from 18 mm thick OSB with an additional layer of 4 mm MDF on the front glued on. The MDF front layer is due to the fact that you can not mill in OSB and I wanted to hide the speakers somehow deeper in the front.

Actually I'm watinig for the glue on front panels to cure. After that - filing, sanding, priming and painting. I will post some more detailed information later on in the next part - together with some photos and calculations for the system.

XVI century coif

As I am completing an XVI century Landsknecht kit I've decided to finish some stuff that was 'on hold'. The first thing - a Landsknecht coif. Not really varying from a normal coif from that period (from late XV up to - let's say - middle of XVI) only with slashings to make it fit to the overal style. This kind of head-wear is in use from, at least, XII century to XVI or even later, I do not really know.

This is the pattern that I used:

Usually coifs like this were made from linen, as they were only worn under other types of head-wear in order to soak the sweat etc. In my case, and generally in late XV and on, I wanted it to be a simple stand-alone head-wear. Additionally I intend to use it as a part of padding of the helmet I'll be wearing later (proto-burgonet or similar).

My coif is made from two layers of wool in the same colors as my doublet, only in opposite order. The most external layer is from dark-blue wool, the inner layer from red. The coif also has lining inside, made from white linen. Apart from the linings inside seams, everything is hand-sewn with linen thread. I guess it came quite well, especially with my lack of skills ;)

Coif with one side of the slashing visible - you can see the inner red wool

Slashing on the other side

And some details:

Overall I'm glad from the outcome. This means that I have The top half of the Landsknecht kit ready and need only to make the trousers (or re-use the regular late XV century ones that I already have) and shoes. This would conclude the textilepart of the XVI kit... for now I guess.

Mysterious hardware, part 3.

So finally I have obtained an ISA-equipped PC that would be relatively new (a industrial grade P4) that allowed me to install Win XP and LabView software in order to debug the card, or at least try to do that. The motherboard was kindly donated by an elektroda.pl user and blog-reader nicknamed music. Thank you!

Using a simple LabView software I tried to write and listen to/from the cards addresses (that I know, as I can configure the 7 MSB by jumpers). It is quite easy to do that, as LabView offers InPort and OutPort commands that allow me to directly talk to the bus. As I do not believe that it can be so easy I have hooked an oscilloscope to the cards address lines and address decoder output in order to check if it's working or not. And it is.

Unfortunately I did not get any response from the card. Two options are: the card (or cards CPLD at least) is dead or that the communication protocol is more complicated. I'm in favor of the latter. For now I have no further idea what to do with this piece of hardware apart from trying to read the CPLD content. As I do not have any cable for Lattice ICs and any proof that this approach will be valuable I just put the card back on shelve. At some point maybe I will come back - to further work with it or scrap it, as there are plenty of nice and rare ICs there.

Some new ideas

Long time, no hear. Again. But now I'm back from vacation with some spare time (let's say) for tinkering in the lab. I have revised my plans a bit as my focus changed. The idea now is to bias some of my work to audio related projects, especially Pro-audio and studio techniques. Recently I have acquired some stuff so I'll be trying to put it together. Of course it does not mean that the rest of things-to-do will be set totally aside.

So for now, several things to add to my list:

1. Speaker box - needs finishing (filling, priming and painting - I will elaborate soon) and fixing the speakers (also will elaborate in the next few notes).

2. Amplifier - a classic LM3875 based gainclone. Only needs an enclosure of some kind, as I have all the parts (I think so) ready.

3. Headphone amplifier - project work currently. An op-amp driving a complementary (MJE340/350) pair with DC-servo.

4. Other stuff, like an vintage BOSS reverb clone, or Coron DS-8 drum synth. Lots of stuff.

See you soon!

Short pulse generator, part 4.

As I have tested the device mentioned earlier (here) now I can show some pictures

The test setup

Short pulse generator entangled in wires

The device itself. The soldered twisted cable pair is for measuring the pulses before they hit the IXDD604 driver.

Short pulse generator, part 3.

Last week I have finally put together the pulse generator described earlier. IXDD604 driver seems to work in a satisfactory manner producing ~ 30 ns pulses. Unfortunately I didn't had time to make any photos of the working setup, so for now I can show you only a single pulse measured using 150 ohm load (a regular power resistor for now).

 

Sweet, isn't it? There are several issues still to be resolved like oscillations after the pulse (so called ringing) and difficulties obtaining such pulses for different amplitudes and loads. The problem, most probably, is in the pulse shaper not in the power driver so I should be able to pursue this in order to get this device working better than it is now.

Short pulse generator, part 2.

At last I have some time to write about recent progress in the matter of the short pulse generator. I have almost finished making the first prototype of this device. I had decided to use an integrated output stage. After some research I found IXDD604, and IC from IXYS that is dedicated as an MOSFET gate driver. Maximum voltage is 35 V and current a A, so it exceeds my needs in terms of power. 35 V peak amplitude must satisfy our needs at this moment, as this solution is very neat and I do not want to go into more complicated solutions as this should allow us to generate <30 ns pulses without any fuss.

 

The PCB is a single sided, as most of the elements are SMD. Only the driver is in THT as I was unable to obtain an SMD IXDD604 here. Such a design allowed us to make this PCB with thermotransfer and soon the prototype should be ready and soldered. I will post it as soon as I solder the prototype and run some tests.

1Q after, progress? zero.

After first quarter of the year I though about summarizing some stuff and making some plans for the near future. So, my main thoughts:

1. I did almost nothing in the field of the reenactment  Apart from buying early medieval shoes and a some padded garment for fighting no stuff here worth mentioning. I guess that this stuff will be on hold for some more time.
2. Almost finished with my stuff for airsoft. The rifle is complete and working with 420 feet per second on a 0.25 g BBs and the gear is also complete (apart from med-kit 'stuffing'). Maybe I should post some photos soon...
3. VME crate
1. The crate itself is almost finished
1. Only thing lacking are several nuts and screws and double checking everything if it's ok.
2. The CPU card is running fine
1. But in order to attach an drive to it I need to prepare an breakout box for the P2 VME connector.
2. If it will work I will be able to put an SCSI drive there and install an Linux OS.
3. Together with VME Universe drivers.
3. As soon as the above is done I start working on my own VME card. For now I have CPLDs (xilinx) for the addres decoder and data latch. 
4. Apart from VME CPU card I have an STEBus card that needs to be tested. It has CGA or similar graphics, so it will also need some work to run.
4. At work I'm into several projects that I try to describe here:
1. USB 24 bit 80 sps ADC
1. Need to master the USB connectivity of the AVR used there.
2. After that - write a protocol to work with an LabView developed software easily.
3. Write some code to use the ADC that is on the board, but this should be relatively simple.
2. Short pulse generator
1. Build the pulse generator, as this part is already fully designed.
2. Test some ways of producing high voltage, high current short pulses. I have several routes for that in my head, so after testing them I hope to achieve the parameters that I need.
5. I have acquired some nice machines recently, some of them even running. I guess that this place, apart from the Inventory, is a good place to sum it up.
1. Tulip 8088:
1. Needs cleaning of a leaked battery.
2. And installing a new one.
3. Display - has an CGA card, I do not have an CGA monitor, although I have an CGAtoVGA converter (that needs 12 V to work). It should do the trick.
4. Keyboard - this is an XT, so I need to have an XT keyboard or an XT-AT converter.
5. I intend to use the 8088 with an Xircom Pocket Ethernet do I need to install drivers for this. 
2. IBM 286 is fine and working. 
1. I need only to install Xircom PE3 drivers.
2. And maybe some additional software.
3. 386 is dead at the moment (RAM error I guess)
1. Investigate the RAM error (first 64k). I hope that this isn't a dead motherboard case...
4. 486 is working but without any OS
1. The main problem is in forcing it to boot from a FDD. The FDD is controlled by SCSI card, and this seems to be a bit problematic.
2. If this will work, and the SCSI HDD is alive (it should be) only thing left to do is to install some OS, preferably Windows 95.
5. PICMG Pentium
1. Put it together maybe?
2. Definitely put it together and make it run.
3. Install an OS.
6. PowerMac 7200
1. Need to buy a keyboard; 
2. And mouse (both with ADB interface).
3. Install new Mac OS (9.1?) - english! current is in german.
7. Amiga 500
1. I don't event know is it working still and if I do have all the parts ;-). j/k, but still have to put it together.

I guess that this is all that I have on my mind now. I hope that I will be able to cross out some of this things in the next 3 months.

Short pulse generator, part 1.

Some time ago I have started designing an short pulse generator for time-resolved spectroscopy of electroluminescence. At first the design requirements were high, but after a market query, in search for devices capable of meeting these requirements they were lowered down significantly.

The sample for which this device is planned is a thin sheet of material suspended on an alumina frame, that acts as electrodes. We have measured DC I/V curve for the sample to assess the working parameters:

Therefore what we need is voltage of at least 35 V with current of at least 250 mA. In order to have an reserve in the parameters I assume that we need at least 40 V and 400 mA. For sake of simplicity I assume that the load of the device is almost purely resistive. Assesing the time parameters was a harder thing to do, so I assumes that the lower the better (the pulse time). Where is the limitation? In the power stage.

Using a simple generator, shown below, we are capable of generating a ~1 ns wide 5 V pulse with ease, using standard, from-the-shelf components. This could be even improved with faster ICs (comparators and AND gate.

From this Linear application note.

But this circuit generates only 5 V pulses (or close to that, this is the power supply voltage of the output AND gate). Also, the current is very limited - to 10 mA, offered by a TTL gate. In order to improve these parameters we have to add an output power stage, that will have output current and maximal voltage on the level of the planned device and could be controlled by an TTL pulse. To meet these requirements I have chosen several routes to achieve that:

• A set of parallel bipolar transistor put in the common base topology. This should allow to achieve high rise and fall time of the pulse, but a current of a single fast transistor is low (tens of mA) so I need to put lots of them in parallel and I am not convinced that this is totally safe and will not affect the working of the device.
• A (most probably single) FET/MOSFET device. An easy scheme for achieving high currents, even of hundreds of amps, but the pulse time will be significantly longer. With a dedicated driver and chip-to-pcb mount some people achieved 25 ns pulse width, although with a current of 100 A (as soon as I find the paper I'll post a link here). A stand-alone mosfet usually will have a rise time of several ns and fall time of 100 ns or more.
• A dedicted IC. A RF power amplifier or a MOSFET driver. The first type of ICs seems to be a good idea as it offers tens of GHz in bandwidth, although when I have looked closer in this matter it seems that such IC will only work good in a typical circuit, for example an WiFi amplifier or so. On the other hand, some MOSFET drivers, are capable of almost meeting my requirements. EL7158 from Intersil is capable of producing 12 A pulses with rise and fall time of 12 ns (with 2000 pF load). This gives a chance to produce a 25 or shorter ns pulse, although the voltage is limited up to 18 V. Although this is not the only such driver on the market...

So currently I'm on the stage of parts requirements stage. As soon as I get something new I will post it here for sure.

VMEBus crate - why not.

Recently I have acquired an VME CPU-Card and thought about testing it somehow. As after powering it up the card seemed to be alive I have decided to give it a shot and try to put together an VME crate.

For that I have used an old Eurorack that I have got from some phone central (or some similar telecommunications equipment). After checking that the size of the crate is standard I bought an backplane from e-bay for... 1 Euro (plus 12 for shipping, but that's not the case). Unfortunately only this backplanes are so cheap, regular VME equipment is pricey as hell.

So i have started from taking apart the old backplane:

And putting the new one:

Sorry for the mess. You can see that here the backplane is already in position, and connected to a power supply (it takes 5 V and +/- 12 V). The PSU is also taken from the same equipment that the crate is.

This (above) is the CPU card (on the left) with the display controller removed, and the display controller itself (on the right). The CPU Card is an Pentium 120 MHz with 64 MB RAM equipped with Universe Tundra VMEBus controller. Fortunately there are plenty of drivers for this PCItoVME bridge. The cards equipment covers a wide range of peripherals - starting from two serial and one parallel port, going through VGA, Ethernet and finishing with SCSI-II. The card has two PCI-compatible slots, one of which is occupied by the display controller. It also has an PC/104, ISA compatible socket. The SCSI, together with the FDD connector are on the P2 connector of the VMEBus, so I will have to make a special connector going from the P2 on the backside of the backplane  to the SCSI harddrive. As far as I have tested the CPU-card is fully functional so after I get some free time I will try to connect an SCSI HDD to this setup and install some Linux maybe. After that I plan to go back to few years ago when I was studying and try to re-learn VHDL in order to make some VME cards for this setup

IBM PS/2 Model 30-286

Some time ago I have bought this PC to finally have an 286 in my collection. It arrived a bit dirty but fully operational.

Although the case was a bit dirty the insides do not have much dust on them. It seems that the computer was stored in a rather nice place. The PC has a 286@10MHz CPU and around 1 meg of RAM. As this is obviously not enough formy taste I decided to add an RAM-card that was laying in my workshop from ome time. It seems to work, but gives 'only' 3712 KB of RAM. I guess this is only due to the jumper settings of the RAM-card, that I have to play with in the nearest future.

To enrich this machine even more and to allow it to have some connection to the outside world I have also added an Xircom Pocket Ethernet adapter (with RJ45 connector) to plug it to my ethernet at some point. A neat thing, that you may see here are the ports of that machine - keyboard and mouse uses PS/2 connectors which I find very convenient, when plugging it into my Compaq KVM (not so retro, I know).

As this machine is fully operational at the moment, with IBM-DOS on board (I do not remember the number) only thing that needs work here is the memory. The machine itself can take up to 4 megs of RAM on board, an the RAM-card should give additional 3 megs, making it 7 total - quite impressive for an 286. Additionally I plan to buy an 287 coprocessor and put it in, so I can try to test some calculations, why not. I have two more ISA slots so maybe I'll populate them with some other board in the future (a full-length data acquisition card would fit just right).

Latest project ;-)

So... my latest and most important project is here. Yesterday on 21:05 my wife gave birth to a healthy baby boy. And to imagine that this is only the beginning of a new journey...

Currently my wife and son are recovering in the hospital, which gives me some time to work on other, not-so-important stuff like old PCs so I'll post some updates on my blog somwhere soon, as later on probably I will not have any time to do that.

To PSoC or not to PSoC?

I have found several PSoC3 samples in my drawer recently... it seems that I have been planning to start learning to program these devices... why not? What do you think?

I have several CY8C3866 devices, but no programmer. As far as I know it is an JTAG programmed chip, so it should be fairly easy to put it together on my own.

Early medieval reenactment

As you might rememeber some of my New Year resolutions were not connected with PCs or electronics. One of the things that I wanted to focus on is historical reenactment. Although my early medieval kit is not yet finished I would like to show you couple of old pictures of the textil-part of the whole thing.

The basic set consists of trousers based on the Thorsberg and Damendorf bog finds. Although they are not medieval at all - dated to around IV century - a find from Skjodelhamn resembles this pattern and allows me to claim that this is accurate. The set consists also from two tunics - silk undertunic and a thicker green, wool tunic (unfinished as for now). On the head I have a felt cap and a hood based on the hood found in Skjodelhamn. The hood is made from two layers of wool, one thin for the shell and a thick fluffy layer inside. The belt bag is also made from felt with red felt appliqués and silver silk embroidery. The belt is not period.

For colder weather I have an cloak (half a circle with wooden buttons) or a kaftan made from felt. The kaftan has small glass buttons (hand made) for closing. Good thing about this piece of garment is the fact that this is almost completely waterproof.

This is not everything that I have now for this period. Surely I will post more pictures soon (although I do not know how soon). I have to finish the tunic and belt to have something new. In the mean time I have received period shoes and I'm waiting for some pieces of military equipment.

The photos were made by M. Niedlich