14-04-2005 07:14

XCJP

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

We had the same problem. When we were "testing" the base that was given to us by FIRST we accidentally ran our robot brain into a filing cabinet and nearly busted the radio connector off. We have people on our team with the know-how to fix it but our Leader made us send it in so we didn't void the warranty or something. So for the time being we took the brain off of last year's robot and used it.

14-04-2005 07:18

Al Skierkiewicz

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

A great shot of some high quality parts. Thanks, most people don't get a chance to see under the hood. Note all the surface mount electronics, that is how they pack all that stuff in the little box. Imagine if we were still running vacuum tubes.

14-04-2005 07:51

GeorgeTheEng

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Our team looked at them "naked" a few years ago. I think it was the first season they used them. In our zeal to see it work, we neglected to use a fuse. The wires were connected directly from the battery. The ground and power briefly touched. And it seems that the magic smoke escaped.

Remember, the magic smoke it what keeps all electronics working. If you don't beleive me, let it out and see what happens...

Unfortunately I think IFI made us buy a new one. Something about 200amps across the power connector not being a warranty item.

But it is a lesson we never forgot.

14-04-2005 10:53

Dave Scheck

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Al...what's a vacuum tube

14-04-2005 10:54

Al Skierkiewicz

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

It's this glass envelope thingy, that glows in the dark and emits electrons...Oh never mind!

14-04-2005 10:58

IMDWalrus

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

So...it's like a giant record player?

14-04-2005 11:02

Al Skierkiewicz

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

No, they are much smaller, and chronologically earlier than record players although they did coexist for many years. They were the electronic equivalent to tank treads on carpet, functional but not very efficient and probably produce about the same amount of heat.

14-04-2005 11:18

xzvrw2

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

wen i first looked at the pic i thought it was a city from star wars. lol and i thought a vacuum tube was something that you clean your floors with.

14-04-2005 11:27

IMDWalrus

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

That was meant to be a joke. I don't think you picked up on that.

I might be young, but I know what records are. Heck, my family still has one somewhere...

14-04-2005 13:10

Amanda Morrison

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Next, WFA winner Al Skierkiewicz will share with us the technological miracle of computer punchcards...

14-04-2005 13:23

jdhawg

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

These young whipper-snappers these days don't know how good they have it. Why back in my day you walked five miles from the card punch room to drop the card deck off, then waited 45 minutes for the job to get run, then checked your listing to see if you could find the card that was mispunched so you could do it all over again. UNLESS the operators dropped your deck (know as "floor sorting") then you were is real trouble.

Oh... My... Gosh..... I'm starting to sound like my Grandfather!!!!!!

14-04-2005 14:27

Conor Ryan

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

so is this still legal for competition?

14-04-2005 14:44

dlavery

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

At the risk of dating myself, I remember when I wrote my first compiler for an IBM-360 as my junior-year project. I worked on it for a full semester, and carefully crafted it down to about 5000 lines of code - 2-1/2 cases of cards. I did the final edits, certified that it worked, and took the cases of cards back to the apartment to write the final paper on the project. Unfortunately, my apartment-mate was VERY ticked off at me (he kept yelling something about "you haven't paid your share of rent in 5 months!!!" or some such minor annoyance) and decided to get my attention. By shuffling all the cards in the cases.

What happened next was not pretty. Let's just say that it is a good thing that the statute of limitations has expired for most of the infractions...

-dave

14-04-2005 15:09

Al Skierkiewicz

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

I was thinking of expounding on the nature of entering an eight bit binary bootstrap program manually using toggle switches on a DEC PDP-11 to get a paper tape reader going. Have any idea how hard it is to convert decimal to binary in your head and then load it using switches? BTW that was after a memory upgrade from 2K to 4K core (real core that is, wires and donuts) in a computer that was almost a full rack high with power supply and paper tape reader. Oh God, now I am going to have nightmares again! 00010011, 10111010, 1110101, no that was 11101101, oh darn where was I again....

Fortran IV?!?, yea they couldn't get it right in their first three attempts, what make you think it will be any better now?

Ok, the bootstrap is loaded, the paper tape is running, hopefully the program will finish loading before we get back from lunch.

Nice Amanda, now you have me started...Hit the "off" button someone, Quick!

14-04-2005 16:06

Jack Jones

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

We had the same thing happen to our program connector. It happened when someone (initials = JJ) tripped on the cable. He blamed whomever it was that screwed the thing in.

Warranty? We don't need no stinking warranty! Just an old OI and some soldering stuff - voila, good as new.

14-04-2005 16:31

Mark McLeod

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Remember when the next great thing was the printing added to the top of the punch cards and you didn't have to read the holes anymore?

14-04-2005 20:12

Rich Kressly

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Oh nooooo ....

It's like being at the old dinner table from my childhood,

"And we drafted without computers...
forget the calculators - we used slide rules...
the punchcards piled up so high we needed more office space...
and we programmed in three feet of snow...
up hill...
both ways.

That's the problem with you kids, you get everything handed to you. No sense of appreciation for us old 'dinosaurs' as you put it Mr. smarty pants. Just remember that slide rule put dinner on this table for years..."

Make it stop, pleaseeeeeeeeee ...

15-04-2005 03:27

Dan Richardson

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Aren't vacuum tubes those things that get clogged when I'm cleaning my room and tick me off really bad?

15-04-2005 07:27

Al Skierkiewicz

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

OK,
Which one? K+E or POST. I have two Versalogs witting in a drawer. Remember when you could hear an engineer coming down the hall by the thwack of the case against his thigh? Even uphill, both ways in the snow.

15-04-2005 18:15

Rich Kressly

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Al, that's a {sort of} quote from my father who is no longer with us. If you actually handed me a slide rule, I'd only be able to write about it. I have no clue what those names mean. Dad was a Mech E, project manager, and Chief Engineer who specialized in bulk material handling for 36 years and he loved being in the shop and on the job site. He always spoke fondly of his slide rule and the regular old drafting board. He annoyed the heck out of me when I was a kid about "the good old days" and only since his death 12 years ago have I really come to realize how amazing his accomplishments were. Two of them are here

Now that I've completely hijacked this thread (protect me, Pedro), I would like to say that the guts are certainly perty, but I hope to never see them up close. Keeping the magic smoke inside is a good thing, eh George?

08-03-2016 15:33

Ether

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

A quote from the above post just popped up at the top of my screen. Thanks for the laugh

Major big-time Deja Vu. When I was a physics undergrad at Purdue in 69, there was no such thing as a handheld calculator. For my FORTRAN class, I had to get up at 4 am, walk 5 blocks to the Math Science building, and stand in line 2 hours for a seat at a keypunch machine.

08-03-2016 15:55

efoote868

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Back in my day... when we used IFI controllers with backup batteries and Pluto was still one of the 9 planets...

08-03-2016 16:27

Bob Steele

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

I was down the road at Rose Poly in Terre Haute in 70 as an undergrad..(Became Rose Hulman when I was a sophomore)
Yes no calculators... until we got the SR-10 (Slide Rule 10)
I still have one..... I am tempted to give it to students who forget their calculator in my physics class.

Same computer... same keypunch rooms....

its hard to believe we are coming up on 50 years since those times.

08-03-2016 21:27

DonRotolo

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Some days I pine for an LED calculator.
Punchcard chads* made the very best confetti.
But I don't miss the old days. And I never dropped a deck, not even once

*I didn't know they were called that until some presidential election a few years back.

08-03-2016 21:31

Ether

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

My roommate had a 2000-card deck in a shoebox bungee-corded behind his bike seat. He hit a pothole.

Yes, all 2000.

08-03-2016 21:56

GaryVoshol

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

At the risk of joining a "walked to school, barefoot, in the snow, uphill, both ways" discussion ...

We were thrilled when we got to use teletype machines to do DiffEq homework. It printed out graphs using keyboard characters - Ka chunka chunka chunka ... chunka chunk.

08-03-2016 22:42

GeeTwo

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

By 1980 when I took intro FORTRAN, things had improved - I rarely had to wait more than half an hour for a punchcard machine. This is because the upperclassmen had access to teletype terminals - key presses went right to the computer, and paper came rolling out right in front of you!

I also remember my first infinite loop. The 200 page printout quota saved a couple of forests, but left me enough paper to make an awesome Christmas tree for the Physics Club study room.

I still have a couple of small (~100 cards each) decks from the latter days of punch cards at the office around 1991 or 1992. I've had to change the rubber bands at least twice.

Slide Rules! I learned to use a slide rule back in middle school from Isaac Asimov's book. I didn't switch to using a calculator until the eighties when the TI-30 (LEDs, HD batteries last about 2 hours) dropped below about $75. I really wished everyone had used slide rules a few years later when I was teaching labs as a graduate student. By this time, 4-bangers were pretty common, and scientifics not uncommon. It was a distinctive form of torture to grade lab papers in which students measured distance with a meter stick and time with a stopwatch, and reported velocities to eight significant digits. To this day, I have a slide rule on my desk at work. I only use it a few times a year, but sometimes it's quicker than a six-year-old PC.

In hindsight, grading those lab reports did help prepare me for FRC mentoring. A little.

08-03-2016 22:54

Jrizo

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

So after reading this thread i feel so lucky to have had a tape recorder for a drive on my TRS 80 at the high school I went to. But I do know what punch cards are

08-03-2016 23:24

ratdude747

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Off topic:


I actually have one of those. An old Rockwell, rescued it from the local thrift shop. Still works too . I also have a bunch of 1978 vintage HP LED 7-seg displays (the mutiplexed bubble kind) that for a college project I used for a display on a electronic FM radio I built and programmed.



---

I remember IFI controllers... does that make me "old"? But I've only been in FIRST for... going on nine years. Funny how no matter how long I've been around, it seems like I'm still relatively new. In FIRST, nine years isn't really a long time.

08-03-2016 23:35

Tom Line

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Now that's funny. My students look at me cross-eyed when I tell them about crashing the ME server at Purdue by accidentally filling the hard-drive with the output from a c program that was supposed to be calculating hydraulic pressures.

But I had a high tech 19.2k data-over-voice system that let me talk on the phone WHILE I was connected to the school network. Take that ya old fogies!

08-03-2016 23:36

Peyton Yeung

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

I'm just can't wait for me to come back to this thread in 30 years and say, "Man I remember back when I had to actually type the numbers into my scientific calculator. Kids these days and their thought calculators." Man technology moves fast. So glad I didn't have to use a slide rule.

09-03-2016 08:30

philso

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

I have kept a slide rule at my desk at work since the Y2K scare. I have also put a note on it stating "100% Up-Time, 24/7/365" for those times the IT people (who keep crashing the network) come to do upgrades

09-03-2016 14:47

Daria Wing

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

oooooooooo, preeeeetttttyyyyyyyyyyyy. I wanna play with it.

09-03-2016 15:12

pfreivald

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

When I was an undergrad ('97-ish), watching my dad stare in impressed, crestfallen horror as Mathematica completed his PhD thesis in about ten minutes was pretty funny.

09-03-2016 15:27

Xanawatt

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

What does it take to get one of those IFI boards working again? Have some sitting on our old robots and was wondering if they could ever be revived.

09-03-2016 22:27

DonRotolo

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Assuming it 'works', just find the old software; surely someone on CD has a set of those files. (They are probably also online somewhere). If it is 'broken' I would hesitate to recommend attempting a repair, unless there were obviously damaged (and still available) components.

All the other posts: Man, you guys are old!

09-03-2016 23:49

Alan Anderson

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

Software-wise, what you will need is the MPLAB IDE (I think you want version 6.3) with the C18 compiler and the IFI Loader program. You will also need a copy of the default C code.

Start at https://kevin.org/frc/ for lots of useful files. Kevin Watson has always been a great resource for FRC teams.

14-03-2016 19:34

Jay H 237

Re: pic: The warranty, voided

My first year in FIRST, 1999, we had the control systems that they provided. They had to be returned after the season and rendered the robot static display only. I don't remember what type of controller it was or what they called it. Somebody must know and why they wanted them back/what became of them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Trouble_(FIRST)