Supply of 2068 systems
4 messages · 2010-12-30 → 2010-12-30 · Yahoo Group era · View archive on archive.org
Participants: sirclicksalot, Louis Florit, cheveron, Marvio Santos
Preserved from the Timex/Sinclair 2068 Yahoo Group (2001–2019), which is no longer online. Text reproduced from the archive.org archive; email addresses masked.
Messages
1. Supply of 2068 systems
sirclicksalot · Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:50
My father lives in Buxton, NC and has 10 TS2068s he is looking to give to a good home at no cost to himself. He also has the blue book and some other stuff: 32-(40-?)column printers, 8.5" printers, some streaming tape storage device, a couple of monitors, &c. He just gave away a ton of electronics stuff (fancy VOM, O-scope, drawers of components, &c) to a local fellow.
Email [email] if you are interested in paying shipping, or live in between Buxton and Atlanta, GA where he'll be travelling and moving in the coming months.
So, my dad's moving is an excuse for me to brag about all we've done (see below); I'm sure others have done similar things and would be interested in reading about it.
The TS2068s were originally used by GE Installation and Service Engineering field service technicians to provide initial results after steam turbine performance tests. The 1967 ASME steam tables are in there, and not too shabby with the 5-byte floating point numbers. I replaced one routine (something like Temperature as a function of (Pressure & Entropy)) where successive substitution resulted in a near-infinite-running loop; Newton-Raphson provided a few orders of magitude performance improvement.
After retirement he developed a custom serial A/D interface and hooked up an anemometer so he could choose the right sail when rigging his windsurfers. The first anemometer generated voltage; later ones were optical pulse generators, but he used Frequency-to-Voltage converters with those. The whole unit ran off a car battery with a momentary switch on the monitor for viewing. We developed some strip-chart emulation display and its free-running sample rate was about 2Hz (most of that was updating the screen - sliding it sidways - in Basic). During one hurricane in the 90s the OBX National Weather Service building flooded and they lost their windspeed data; my brother suggested that our dad call them because he had left his running on a battery on top of a local windsurfing shop. Last we heard the NWS was running FFTs on the data. At some point before or after that I calibrated that anemometer up to about 60mph in a wind tunnel. Before that he had run the car up and down Route 12 on the Outer Banks with the anemometer on a windsurfer mast on calm days to get a calibration (and managed to catch a power line in Avon once;-).
2. Re: [ts2068] Supply of 2068 systems
Louis Florit · Thu, 30 Dec 2010 01:05
Awesome stories! I had some fun calibrating anemometers for use on NOAA
meteorological stations. We usually had two on each station to validate the
data. At one station we consistently had one of the anemometers out of
directional alignment with the other (one would say wind is going
north-to-south, the other would say south-south-east). This station was
quite a ways to reach, out in the U.S. Virgin Islands, an extensive car and
boat ride to reach it. When we finally get there, we check everything,
can't figure out what's wrong with it. A day later, we make it out to the
station again and see a Boobie (the bird) perched on one of the anemometers,
throwing the values out of whack. A few weeks later it moved on and things
returned to normal.
Fun times :)
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 4:50 PM, sirclicksalot <[email]> wrote:
> My father lives in Buxton, NC and has 10 TS2068s he is looking to give to a
> good home at no cost to himself. He also has the blue book and some other
> stuff: 32-(40-?)column printers, 8.5" printers, some streaming tape storage
> device, a couple of monitors, &c. He just gave away a ton of electronics
> stuff (fancy VOM, O-scope, drawers of components, &c) to a local fellow.
>
> Email [email] if you are interested in paying shipping, or
> live in between Buxton and Atlanta, GA where he'll be travelling and moving
> in the coming months.
>
> So, my dad's moving is an excuse for me to brag about all we've done (see
> below); I'm sure others have done similar things and would be interested in
> reading about it.
>
> The TS2068s were originally used by GE Installation and Service Engineering
> field service technicians to provide initial results after steam turbine
> performance tests. The 1967 ASME steam tables are in there, and not too
> shabby with the 5-byte floating point numbers. I replaced one routine
> (something like Temperature as a function of (Pressure & Entropy)) where
> successive substitution resulted in a near-infinite-running loop;
> Newton-Raphson provided a few orders of magitude performance improvement.
>
> After retirement he developed a custom serial A/D interface and hooked up
> an anemometer so he could choose the right sail when rigging his
> windsurfers. The first anemometer generated voltage; later ones were
> optical pulse generators, but he used Frequency-to-Voltage converters with
> those. The whole unit ran off a car battery with a momentary switch on the
> monitor for viewing. We developed some strip-chart emulation display and
> its free-running sample rate was about 2Hz (most of that was updating the
> screen - sliding it sidways - in Basic). During one hurricane in the 90s
> the OBX National Weather Service building flooded and they lost their
> windspeed data; my brother suggested that our dad call them because he had
> left his running on a battery on top of a local windsurfing shop. Last we
> heard the NWS was running FFTs on the data. At some point before or after
> that I calibrated that anemometer up to about 60mph in a wind tunnel.
> Before that he had run the car up and down Route 12 on the Outer Banks with
> the anemometer on a windsurfer mast on calm days to get a calibration (and
> managed to catch a power line in Avon once;-).
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
--
Louis Florit - :(){ :|:& };:
AIM: lflorit MSN:[email]
<[email]>Y!: indygolunaria GoogleTalk:
[email]
3. RE: [ts2068] Supply of 2068 systems
Marvio Santos · Thu, 30 Dec 2010 10:03
That is amazing man!!! So very cool to see the lowly TS2068 put to good use, and so recentely also!!
To: [email]
From: [email]
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:50:54 +0000
Subject: [ts2068] Supply of 2068 systems
My father lives in Buxton, NC and has 10 TS2068s he is looking to give to a good home at no cost to himself. He also has the blue book and some other stuff: 32-(40-?)column printers, 8.5" printers, some streaming tape storage device, a couple of monitors, &c. He just gave away a ton of electronics stuff (fancy VOM, O-scope, drawers of components, &c) to a local fellow.
Email [email] if you are interested in paying shipping, or live in between Buxton and Atlanta, GA where he'll be travelling and moving in the coming months.
So, my dad's moving is an excuse for me to brag about all we've done (see below); I'm sure others have done similar things and would be interested in reading about it.
The TS2068s were originally used by GE Installation and Service Engineering field service technicians to provide initial results after steam turbine performance tests. The 1967 ASME steam tables are in there, and not too shabby with the 5-byte floating point numbers. I replaced one routine (something like Temperature as a function of (Pressure & Entropy)) where successive substitution resulted in a near-infinite-running loop; Newton-Raphson provided a few orders of magitude performance improvement.
After retirement he developed a custom serial A/D interface and hooked up an anemometer so he could choose the right sail when rigging his windsurfers. The first anemometer generated voltage; later ones were optical pulse generators, but he used Frequency-to-Voltage converters with those. The whole unit ran off a car battery with a momentary switch on the monitor for viewing. We developed some strip-chart emulation display and its free-running sample rate was about 2Hz (most of that was updating the screen - sliding it sidways - in Basic). During one hurricane in the 90s the OBX National Weather Service building flooded and they lost their windspeed data; my brother suggested that our dad call them because he had left his running on a battery on top of a local windsurfing shop. Last we heard the NWS was running FFTs on the data. At some point before or after that I calibrated that anemometer up to about 60mph in a wind tunnel. Before that he had run the car up and down Route 12 on the Outer Banks with the anemometer on a windsurfer mast on calm days to get a calibration (and managed to catch a power line in Avon once;-).
4. Re: Supply of 2068 systems
cheveron · Thu, 30 Dec 2010 23:20
--- In [email], "sirclicksalot" <drbitboya@...> wrote:
> The TS2068s were originally used by GE Installation and Service Engineering field service technicians to provide initial results after steam turbine performance tests. The 1967 ASME steam tables are in there, and not too shabby with the 5-byte floating point numbers. I replaced one routine (something like Temperature as a function of (Pressure & Entropy)) where successive substitution resulted in a near-infinite-running loop; Newton-Raphson provided a few orders of magitude performance improvement.
Besides the slow (but compact) square root function, there are a few errors in the ROM math, and one 'fix' to the Spectrum ROM actually makes things worse. Homebrew versions of the ROM have solved these issues but adding your own Newton-Raphson routine back in the day ... gnarly :)