Celestia Forums

Hi,

while trying out my wife's new 3 Mpixel mobile phone camera, that's what came out of it:

A tour of a "typical" german theoretical physicist's workshop:
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[All images are of course reduced to a width of only 800 pixels.]

1)...including one storage oscilloscope and one normal one and lots of other measurement equipment


2) In the closeup you see a third storage oscilloscope that I developed from scratch and interfaced it with ~5000 lines of 6502 assembler code to a VERY old computer a long long time ago...


3) Well, my VERY precise Swiss lathe...


4) Some other gear...



5) Here is my He-Ne laser that I use to achieve the /precise/ alignment of the Schmidt corrector plate in my 8" Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope (laser interferometry!)


CONCLUSION: My wife's new Samsung D900 handy camera works way better than my 2 Mpixel one from half a year ago...

Enjoy,
Bye Fridger

What is the small (old ?) computer at the left of your desk

Fightspit wrote:What is the small (old ?) computer at the left of your desk

It's what you think it is : a C64!!!

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:3) Well, my VERY precise Swiss lathe...

What a theoretical physicist can do with a lathe?

ElChristou wrote:

t00fri wrote:3) Well, my VERY precise Swiss lathe...

What a theoretical physicist can do with a lathe?

polish it every day, h?¶ h?¶...

Bye Fridger

PS: more seriously: A lathe is an amazing tool. It allows to produce lots of things in lots of materials with GREAT precision having an axial symmetry.

Just think of a few examples : all the interface tubes for my telescope to other gear, for example. But also very trivial things, like if anything "round" broke in the household: you just make "a new one"...

Since you can also do threads on a lathe the possibilities are very large indeed.

Bye Fridger

In the closeup you see a third storage oscilloscope that I developed from scratch and interfaced it with ~5000 lines of 6502 assembler code to a VERY old computer a long long time ago...

I used to know 6502 assembler. I got as far as writing "snake" on a BBC microcomputer with it (in 4-colour graphics! Using sprites!), and a really small-scale text adventure.

Sir...you are truly a boffin!

bh wrote:Sir...you are truly a boffin!

Aha: Merriam Webster ======>

boffin=> chiefly British (!!): a scientific expert; especially : one involved in technological research

Bye Fridger

Nice and neat. And I thought that looked like a C64 keyboard. Wow...

And I am jealous of the lathe. I can think of numerous pieces to add to my telescope...

t00fri wrote:It's what you think it is : a C64!!!

Aha! So you do play computer games!

- rthorvald

Did a little work with the 6809 before 8088's came around... seems like 100 years ago now lol.

Fridger, your lab is far too neat and tidy! Very nice!

rthorvald wrote:

t00fri wrote:It's what you think it is : a C64!!!

Aha! So you do play computer games!

- rthorvald

Runar,

actually, I have NEVER played a single game on the C64 although the C64 games were said to be really cool...

I loved that little machine mainly due to it's VERY versatile interface chip that could be programmed with assembler (machine code).

My most challenging project along these lines was the design of a storage oscilloscope (Figs 1+2 above), with oversampling and automatic range finding and plenty of possible online calculations with the recorded signal. Notably, I had transferred all oscilloscope functions to the C64 keyboard + monitor display via a set of solid state relais and that C64 interface chip.

Of course, the bottleneck was to get the time base sufficiently fast, given the low clock frequency of the C64. This required the use of machine code, obviously. Still the upper frequency limit for displaying non-periodical signals was very modest, about 15 000 Hz, while with oversampling, periodical signals could be displayed up to ~ 1MHz.

The whole thing still works! Perhaps I'll take another closeup shot soon (with my wife's handy camera) to show the oscilloscope in full working condition

Bye Fridger

LordFerret wrote:Did a little work with the 6809 before 8088's came around... seems like 100 years ago now lol.

Fridger, your lab is far too neat and tidy! Very nice!

Aha! I never got around to learning assembler for the 8088 chip on which the ATARIs were based. Quite a difference to the simple 6502, actually.

As to the unusual tidyness in my lab in the basement...well observed . While I usually tend to clean things up after working there, right now it is in a particularly good shape, since during the Christmas/New Year vacations, I got rid of 4 FULL car loads of chunk from the house...This was certainly one reason why I selected it in my tests of my wife's new mobile phone camera


Bye Fridger

Can we see the wife yet? lol J/K J/K

Here is the promised close-up of my self-designed storage oszilloscope. In the metal box in front (lid removed), you can see plenty of solid state relais that I used to map ALL operations of the instrument onto the C64 keyboard and the monitor via the C64 interface chip . In addition the shielded box contains all the most sensitive input hardware, notably the input voltage dividers etc.

The colorful ribbon connects the whole setup with the C64 interface chip.

Next time I'll boot the whole thing up and display some real operations on the monitor with real signals...

Bye Fridger

OK, here is now the booted-up display of my storage oscilloscope on my old C64 monitor. On the left, you see all the adjustments one can do by using the C64 keyboard.
The 1-key operations are transferred via the C64 interface chip and the relais to the external hardware.



Note e.g the toggled adjustments for amplitude (here +- 20 V), time base (here 0.3 ms for the full x-axis), trigger types, grid on/off and many other features like e.g. a Fourier transform of the signal, a sophisticated voltage scanner or a frequency counter!

Note that this beautiful graphics display was not quite OpenGL 2.0 , but rather was also coded in 6502 assembler (directly onto the screen )

Bye Fridger

You're a bigger nerd than me!

PlutonianEmpire wrote:8O

You're a bigger nerd than me!

That's just a display of "museum ware" (>20 years old )...
...Still testing my wife's mobile phone camera

Bye Fridger