I once took a really crappy RS232 cable to India as part of some equipment to train our remote developers. The cable barely worked in our lab in the States. I told our hardware engineer that it wasn’t going to work in India, and I was right. So in India I ended up having to wrap the entire wire bundle in a wire that I soldered to ground on both sides. Soldered it together with a plumbing soldering iron. I am a software engineer, but I have an electrical engineering degree. The VP that I was traveling with couldn’t believe that the crap I made worked. Realistically, I couldn’t either.
India loves this barely working lifehacks known as “Juugad”
This makes sense actually. The issue with the bundle was regarding some part of it that was subject to RF interference and you shielding and grounding stopped all of that. Packets hate noise. This applies double to coaxial cable, in my experience, especially spanning up.
Okay, don’t get me wrong I’m impressed and I also enjoy macgyvering things like that… But if it’s for a work thing, surely it can’t be that hard to go out and buy a new cable from any old shop nearby? I would think the cable is common enough to still be in stock in a lot of places, even if it’s ancient.
This was a proprietary cable specific to our board design. Believe me, I wish we could have used a standard cable.
I built an RS232 cable from parts from RadioShack 25 years ago, with no soldering, just electrical tape. It’s surprisingly easy if you don’t need speed. Mine capped out at 1200 or 2400 baud. Was it good? No. Did it work? Absolutely.
Yeah, the protocol itself is pretty robust. The cable I had didn’t have enough noise immunity for the dirty power the building had in India (afternoon brown outs when the voltage dipped when the air conditioners ran). The Faraday cage that I made around the cable helped with the noise and also (and I believe more crucially though I had no scope to confirm) gave the two boards a common ground. I had a little trouble with before I left, but it didn’t work at all in India until I modded it. Made the hardware engineer buy me a beer when I got back.
This reminds me of a mod around the time of the TI-83 ish , where you had solder diodes to a cable connecting two devices.
mhmm mhm yerp I know what this means mmmhhhmmmm yes much TI-83 solder diode mhm!
Uh
indubitably, yes
Now lets see the same hack but for the port above.
Port above is COM. It experienced even more abuse than VGA.
I think they meant because it is male
Indeed. Twisting those pins to a male port, with good pin contact and not touching adjacent pins, would be a feat I’d like to see. OP’s picture is just par for the course.
You just solder the wire inside a hypodermic needle
Find someone in telco, wouldn’t be fun but should be possible
I’m not going to go into detail because I don’t know how secure my phone is but I’m pretty sure I’ve done some really heinous things to a com port
Lettuce Sea
Unshielded wire in a guitar amplifier be like: “Ayo, how is everybody doing, let’s go and MAKE SOME NOOOOOOISE!”
Your phone is about to ring
Posted from my 2m aliexpress usb-c cable running at 40gbps
edit: also thanks for fixing that bug I found that one time :>
It appears that we have been graced with the presence of the lead developer of Voyager himself! I wonder how many times he gets this question and if he regrets giving his user a special color :P
What does that mean? I use jerboa and everyone is white except you. You’re black with a white box around your name.
Edit - to clarify I know why the white box is on my app, indicating the OP.
QuinnyCoded is the OP of this thread. I’m guessing your client indicates this with the white box.
The person QuinnyCoded replied to (aeharding) is probably a mod (I’m guessing?), making their name show up blue in their client.
Update: I figured out that @aeharding@vger.social is the dev for Voyager, the lemmy client modeled after the Reddit app “Apollo”. So their name shows up kind of purple/blue in the Voyager app (which is my preferred client as well!).
I think what you’re seeing is that the OP of the post is rendered differently from everyone else. But what OP is referring to is how that one specific user that they replied to has his username in purple, instead of the white everyone else has.
Well I know what the white box is on my app but I was wondering why he was asking about blue. Other commenter said it happened to be the dev of that app
Running… For now.
This image triggers me so much, but mostly because it is truer than I want to admit.
VGA didn’t care much about interference.
Lan party, we didn’t have T connectors, so we cut two coax apart and spliced them with some tinfoil. it worked until someone bumped it hard.
Omg a 10base2 LAN party.
I’m a little stressed thinking about what you even had to do on the software side to get everyone working properly; was it even IP?
The game of choice was Warcraft II, so all we needed was IPX, but I had brought over a bunch of EtherLink II cards. Could have done the TCP in DOS easily enough, but with the ‘substandard’ cables, IPX was a lot more performant.
That’s VGA, it’s gonna be fine. Most wires are either ground or not used for actual image data. R, G and B are analog so noise on those just makes the output noisy, no big deal. That leaves us with HSync and VSync. They are digital signals with 3.3V between on and off and only a single pulse per line / frame so they’re also pretty robust against noise.
So unless you’re going for an extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor over a long distance, the worst that will happen is that your image will look grainy like TV static. It would take quite a bit of interference before the sync signals degrade enough to not get any image at all.
Now I wonder if I can route VGA through unusual items. Cutlery, the railing on a staircase, swords, something like that. As long as I can find six pieces of metal of roughly equal length, it should work.
Q: So do you have any hobbies?
A: Well lately I’ve really gotten interested in routing VGA through unusual items!
Q: Ooooh, that’s so hot right now
There are worse hobbies. There’s also no shortage of items to try.
Ideas:
- eyeglasses
- braces
- bra underwire
- Freddy’s hand
- Edward Scissorhand’s hand
- fake flowers with a wire core
- bread bag ties
- beer cans
- tire tread reinforcement
- a knight in chainmail
- Christmas tree tinsel
- photoframe
- tie clip
- tooth fillings
- a bicycle
- a tricycle
- chain link fence
- chastity belt
- hammer
- aluminum wrapped baked potato
Well… I don’t think it would be the weirdest thing I’ve done with my free time. Would probably barely rank in the top three.
I’m listening.
Let’s see:
- Back in 2007 or 2008 I attempted to create a CPU architecture that directly uses Brainfuck as its instruction set. I had to put it on hold before it was completed because I had a custom FPGA development board with really bad documentation but if I ever get my hands on an affordable FPGA, it will get done eventually.
- I’ve created a nonogram that solves to a rickroll QR code. I had to rely on the error correction because the exact pattern didn’t result in a well-defined solution but I’ve recently learned about some more parameters that you can tweak on a QR code. So now I just need to acquire or more likely build a QR code generator that lets me manually control those parameters and an automatic nonogram solver so I don’t have to manually solve a bunch of 25x25 nonograms to confirm they have a single solution.
- My plan for tonight is to start porting a 22-year-old handheld game to a ~35-year-old home console. I’ve acquired a C compiler but will probably have to learn assembly for a CPU architecture that was barely used for anything else. There is no chance to ever share the resulting game without getting sued to hell and back again.
- I’ve made chainmail bikinis for a couple of friends.
- Edit: One more because it might be my magnum opus. Have you ever played KJumpingCube? That doesn’t only work on grids but on arbitrary graphs. My friends and I chose a Risk board. Not a digital one. A real life physical Risk board with actual dice on every country that need to be turned by hand. A single game took us about 6-7 hours with the winning move alone taking up the last hour.
That’s just what I comes to mind at the moment. I’m sure if I spend some time thinking or digging around old hard drives, I can find more.
This is excellent. This reminds me of when I couldn’t get any hard requirements or specs for a back end tool that I was tasked with making, so to spite everyone, and maybe myself, I wrote it in brainfuck. It was rock solid for years, and then I left due to management actively preventing me from furthering my career. I still wonder how long that process kept being used before someone had to look into the source to make changes.
I’ve been working on developing a CPU architecture based around my own variant of lisp called “dollhouse lisp” the big twist is that DHlisp executes code by reducing a syntax tree, so all code is destroyed once it’s been executed. It’s a very elegant solution, but a very difficult implementation. (Especially when it comes to loops and garbage collection.)
Jumping Cubes is the kind of game that works really well on a PC and has super simple rules but is absolute hell in real life.
That game on the Risk board was fun, though. IIRC North America in particular tended to have those terrible chain reactions that just kept going and going.
I remember that Australia was the exact opposite. It has a single outside connection and once it reaches a stable state, it stays there. Every impulse that goes in will come out again and leave the inside unchanged.
So… how much fabric is in these chain-mail bikinis, exactly?
Because without any, they’re basically going to be see-through, right? Not that I would complain.No fabric at all, just metal rings and a bit of string. They are far from see-through though because they are pretty dense. If you’re close enough you can see a bit of… anatomy… but it’s more on the side of a coarsly knit sweater than transparent fabric.
Through your body with nippleclamps?
I’d need a couple more volunteers to make sure all signals have the same delay.
Ugh… Fine… Let’s get started.
Don’t forget to try bananas
I once routed a SCART signal into cinch with an assortment of different paperclips. Worked perfectly fine
I think it was in Die Hard where there was a scene of the protagonist short-cruiting an alarm system with the help of flower pot water to help extend some cables?
This man VGAs!
So unless you’re going for an extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor over a long distance
Speaking of “extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor,” it took a solid decade and a half before I was able to buy a digital flat-panel monitor capable of resolution comparable to the analog CRT I was using in 2002. VGA was no joke!
(The only problem with QXGA on a 19" CRT, aside from the weight and power draw, was that in a world before decent high-DPI fractional scaling the text was too tiny to read easily. Other than that, it worked fine.)
The last part reminded me of a night my friends and I played Dead Rising on a CRT. Couldn’t read any text so we were just guessing what to do
I have a flat panel from the early 2000s with a resolution of 1600x1200. I use it for old consoles because it also has an s-video input.
Yeah, same here. I had three 21" trinitrons with a max res of 2046 × 1536. I did finally move to LCD monitors when I was able to get something close (1920x1200), but I still miss those things. Except for the massive weight, space, power draw, and heat they put out of course.
Oh man, I’m jealous. I only had two 19" monitors, and they didn’t match. I’ve still got them stored in the basement for eventual use in a retro game cabinet or something, but I’m kicking myself for not swapping them out for Trinitrons when everybody was throwing them out.
I got mine from a guy that had pallets of them and was selling them for cheap because he got them from an action. I definitely lucked out.
I once made my own VGA switch out of a bajillion-pole/throw/whatever switch I found from an old piece of audio equipment. So pressing one button toggled 8 or 16 or some huge number of independent contacts.
I used it to switch between 1280x1024 outputs from my PC or my Xbox 360. Yes I also bought the official Microsoft Xbox 360 VGA adapter so I could play in HD on my CRT monitor, cause I didn’t have an HDTV.
Worked great most of the time, but yeah the switch was a little noisy, and some really freaky stuff happened on the screen if you pressed the switch slowly enough.
I had to do this with a stlink debugger once. It worked.
One time as a kid, I got myself in trouble and I got TV taken away from me - my dad came up to my room with a pair of scissors and just cut my coax cable. I stripped that bad boy and shoved the end back in to my TV, worked a treat. I also had my wifi antenna from my desktop taken from me at some point, so I took a paper clip and stuck it in there - not GREAT reception, but it was good enough!
I’ve got to tell you, when you started with the coax cable I imagined a different era than what was revealed when you wrote about wifi
As someone who works in R&D in software/electronics, I can say I do this kind of thing regularly.
No matter how slick tech gets, peek behind the curtain and this is what you’ll see :)
Yeah, but there is a difference between the research and development phase and consumer usage.
with Dupond I guess? Because this is weird here
Not specifically with a DE15 (for that I’d just chop up an old VGA cable), but I work with a lot of proprietary connectors. Some of the connectors are scarce, and sometimes we just wire them manually if the work isn’t too extensive.
Big Cable is the one generating all the noise to begin with!
those are used syringes found in a 1980s Soviet medical facility.
Same goes for processor “baking”. You can just use a soldering iron and some wires
I made a composite cable for my Sega megadrive by splicing an RCA cable with two pieces of a thick paperclip. Worked great. I just had to remember which were the two holes to stick it in
I’ve done some very dodgy things with VGA cables in an effort to route the cables through narrow bulkheads. For normal computer-to-monitor-lengths this is probably fine.
I haven’t noticed much signal degradation below 4m-ish.
At 12m, you better solder properly and wrap some extra shielding around your splice.
Source: I’ve ran plenty of VGA cables between bridge computers and a deck monitor on ships.
