ava loveless @aurora@social.bau-ha.us

shoutout to the person that wrote the firmware for this thing back in 1981 and decided that the super slow movement of the laser mechanism should at least be accompanied by a nice led animation, i love it

fixed it! sort of, it reads cds again, but kinda sluggish.
now running on a unholy mix of recycled chinese, east german and one soviet capacitor.
one day the audiophiles are going to hunt me down with pitchforks. 😅

finally something nice and solid to work on, i'm happy to not see that 2000s plastics everywhere for once

ava needs to get rid of stuff, part 2453:
anyone want some bakelite headphones? 4 sets, i'd guess late 60s, east germany, no manufacturer markings, probably military stuff. cables have been cut off, i put new ones on one of them, they sound kinda ok. 1kΩ shells.

there was also an audio installation accompanying the whole thing

we set up a transmitter and taped a bunch of old portable radios to trees or hid them in hedges, the effect was nicer than i thought it would be

i mean our part was ok, someone else fucked up the backend, which - among other things - led to a youtube advertisment being played back at full volume through the whole park

so that was fun

✨

well this turned out to actually look pretty nice

look what i found in the trash yesterday!
never seen a cute little set like this before, i like it. my hands are small, so this is tiny.
i guess no one even knows what it is, but hey, that happens when you have weird special interests 😅

i avoid buying new parts whenever possible and consequently i've unleashed a lot of modern electronics with completely out of place vintage components on the world. combined with the fact that i pride myself on my work looking very clean and factory, i always expect some other technician to be very confused at some point in the future. anyway, the broken bnc plug on this 2000s equipement has now been replaced with a soviet one because that's what i have in stock.

cute electronic kitty

well that was a good pointer, it was nice, haven't been that way in a while
wonderful shitty 640x480px pictures taken with my 2004 wearable digital camera

ah yes, the maine board
that might explain the pine smell

we canceled the one holiday i had planned for this year. just like last year. shit.
i miss having our stupid van and just going anywhere for some days. i even have the matching 80s roof tent for it! imagine parking somewhere in the eastern wilderness, getting up with the sunrise and you're 2.5m up in the air and have the best view ever while you make tea. i want to do that again at some point. maybe we can finally get the remaining bodywork on the van done this winter...

in this case, the circuit was on the negative terminal (positive had a direct connection from battery to pcb), so i used a piece of wire to shortly bridge the negative terminal on the battery to ground on the pcb. works great (also on some dead laptop batteries btw)!

unfortunately (or fortunately?) it didn't contain any photos, but instead a mac os system 7.5.3 folder, guess i used it as an usb stick the last time.

it takes pictures again! terrible pictures. 4/4

anway, it died at some point and i shoved it into a box (in it's original packaging of course, i'm that kind of nerd) and forgot about it until it showed up in a move. disassembly made the problem kinda obvious: that battery was very very much dead. fun fact: you can't read the memory without the battery. great design. anway, after some months of keeping an eye out i found a broken bluetooth receiver with a kinda similar battery, swapped it in, and...still didn't work. 2/4

this is actually my own! i bought this new in, uh, 2005? i had to save up for a long time. it's a philips key007, a "wearable usb camera" aka a 64mb memory stick with an integrated 1.2mp camera. honestly, the photo quality is pretty shit. but this was 2005! cameras on cellphones weren't really a thing yet, so this was like the coolest gadget ever.
(also i think the quality way better when it was new - i dropped it a few times, the focus is a bit wonky now) 1/4

the obvious signs in this unit were the screws that held the cd drive, because they had been glued down as well, and they looked like shit. all the quartzes also looked like shit on close inspection (that brown stuff is rust). as it turns out the reaction had eaten away one of the legs on the quartz for the main computer, replacement (and cleanup of the other quartzes) restored full functionality. 3/3

ok, so i probably (definitely) cut a wrong trace somewhere or fucked up something else while hacking an aux-in into this thing

but apart from this it does work, so i guess i'll leave it at that (the display works normally in tuner mode)

steht hier immer noch im weg – also falls ihr schon immer mal ein todschickes oszilloskop aus den 60ern haben wolltet, noch habt ihr die chance! als deko, heizung, oder auch einfach nur als oszilloskop (es funktioniert!). müsste in #weimar abgeholt werden, kann aber auch bei gelegenheit nach berlin mitgebracht werden

not getting any work, so i'm fixing stuff from "the pile". this is an early 1980s high-end grundig car stereo (digital tuning! that was *the shit* back then) - more cracked belts, and a exploded red roederstein cap (they tend to do that).