I know we ripped out similar, a plastic panel/wall mount version, at an old job when we went VoIP. The Centronics came out of the PBX. Probably find on eBay or surplus. Maybe talk to IT and they have one hanging around in a junk pile.
Sure. One end of the 25-pair cable can be cut down on a patch panel. There doesn't need to be a 66 block.
Or a person can buy a patch panel pre-assembled with an Amphenol connector, and just plug in a 25-pair cable between that and their gear. Here's one from Leviton: https://leviton.com/products/49012-j24
And those kinds of things are great for rapid deployment, but we're not trying to do that -- are we? We're just goofing around with old telco stuff for the lulz.
The most tinkering-friendly option is 66 block (wherein: the structure is whatever we want it to be today), I think. Punch down tools are cheap (including those that have interchangeable blades for also doing tidy work of 110 keystone jacks). It only takes a few minutes to land all 25 pairs, and those pairs can do anything a person wants them to do.
Meanwhile, 66 blocks themselves: They're dandy things. I've used them in the field to build simple circuits: The resistor or the capacitor doesn't care that it is hanging off of a punch down block instead of soldered to a PCB. It works, and it's wall-mountable for permanence.
But yeah, there's certainly options. I've got good familiarity with 66 blocks and their ability to quickly (and rather universally) hack stuff together, so that's what I tend towards using.
It's always important to know the specific and most-correct nomenclature, but it's equally important to use terms that others easily understand. :)
Like, the 4-pin Molex connectors in common use for things like PC optical drives (where those still exist). You probably know exactly what I'm referring to, and can picture one in your head whenever someone mentions a "Molex connector" in the context of a PC.
But those aren't from Molex -- they're instead from Amphenol's Mate-n-Lok line. Molex sells compatible-enough versions (as do countless other manufactures), but Molex had nothing to do with the design or introduction of that part.
Meanwhile: The square 4/6/8/20/24-pin jobbies that connect to things like video cards and motherboards, and that seemingly everyone calls ATX connectors? Those actually are Molex parts (from their Mini-Fit Jr line), but people would be confused AF if you called them Molex connectors.
So if we're doing it right in casual discourse, we use the terms that people understand -- even if they're not necessarily maximally-correct.
I've never witnessed the term "micro ribbon connector" used in face-to-face dealings involving telco stuff.
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Up next: The male 1/4" audio connector. Is it a headphone plug? A guitar plug? TR? TRS? A phone plug? A jack plug? "Like an aux cable but bigger?" Yes, any of those terms work. The best term depends on the audience.
The connector originates in the forgotten world of plug-and-socket telephone switchboards, so of all of those options "phone plug" probably gets the history most-correct (and that's also what Radio Shack labeled them as). But that specific terminology is pretty archaic at this point.
It's so archaic that if I asked a sane and rational person for a cable with "phone plug" on it these days, they might go looking for something with 6P4C, 8P8C, USB C, or (maybe!) a TRS -- depending on their age and/or upbringing.
> (as it's been done since the 90s in many schools around the world)
I had computer lab in a catholic grade school in the mid-late 80's. Apple II's and the class was once a week and a mix of typing, logo turtle, and of course, The Oregon Trail.
You take an Xbox game designed to run on an Xbox 360, a 64 bit PowerPC system and decompile its binaries back into source code. You now have the ability to modify the game as well as port it to other systems and architectures such as Windows on X86_64 or Linux on ARM64.
It's more nuanced than that; the approach you're describing is usually called "decompilation."
The difference is how far one goes in hoisting the "source code;" in this "recompliation" approach the source code, while C++, is basically an IR (intermediate representation) between the original game's assembly and a host platform, and the hardware itself is emulated (for example, the original architecture's CPU registers are represented as variables in the host architecture's memory). The machine code is translated to C++ using a custom tool.
In a "decompilation" approach the game logic is converted (using a decompiler, like IDA or Ghidra's) back into something which resembles the original source code to the game itself, and the source code is usually hand analyzed, marked up, rewritten, and then ported across platforms. The product is something that attempts to resemble the original game's source code.
Of course, they lie on a continuum and both approaches can be mixed, but, while they both involve C++ in the middle, the process is starkly different. Recompilation is much more copyright-friendly, because in many implementations only the modifications are distributed and the original binary is translated by the end user (who owns the software/a license to it), whereas decompilation produces an artifact (source code) which is a derivative work encumbered by the original software's license and generally should not be distributed.
> In a "decompilation" approach the game logic is converted (using a decompiler, like IDA or Ghidra's) back into something which resembles the original source code to the game itself, and the source code is usually hand analyzed, marked up, rewritten, and then ported across platforms
There definitely is a lot of scope to apply LLMs here
Seeing this [1], I thought it was something related to taking assembly instructions in the original code, emitting C statements that match the instruction, and then compiling that C code.
Your idea is much more accurate; see my sibling comment. It's basically using C or C++ as an intermediate representation for machine code, rather than trying to recreate the game's higher-order logic/structure or source code.
Yup. You could use a quad opamp to build a PWM controller with closed loop control but then you need all the passives to setup the oscillator and so on.
I went through this years ago making a fan driver for my vehicles HVAC blower. The analog setup was fun to make but you use more board space, higher BOM count, and really, higher BOM cost vs a micro-controller.
It's crazy how far technology has advanced. A μc with RAM and a bunch of input and output ports and some code is cheaper today than a pile of analog components.
You're over thinking it. If the application is very simple and needs to do one thing, an analog system works fine. Once you start needing sequencing, multiple adjustments, and maybe a little smarts then a CPU can get involved.
I worked at a shop that had an old closed loop water-air chiller for a laser. The water temperature controller was a small PCB with an op-amp chip with some passives and the temperature was set by a potentiometer. That thing ran fine until the compressor died and it sent to scrap.
My analog fan control comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but turning a knob on a potentiometer to adjust fan speed has some personal appeal - no digging around for a sw utility, no poking interfaces to see if the motherboard mfr bios exposed the control, of if it exposed it but doesn't actually hook the right plug, no adjusting to see if the right temp input is reading correctly. Fewer layers of things to go wrong can be so nice.
And worse, they're shucking surplus for RAM And SSD's now. I am seeing more and more eBay auctions for surplus PC's sans SSD and RAM. So the second hand market is going to be invaded by the reseller parasites leaving us with $50 CPU-in-a-box and $500+ RAM/SSD parts
And you can also argue that that's overengineered (the original NT design docs were posted on here a while ago), that the UNIX model (while much more primitive and simplified) has proven more successful in the real world, and that the original "clean, overengineered" NT design has been buried under a progressively bigger truckload of crap year upon year and is no longer as clean as it once was.
> the original "clean, overengineered" NT design has been buried under a progressively bigger truckload of crap year upon year and is no longer as clean as it once was.
The original UNIX model has (considering the current state of GNU/Linux) similarly buried under a progressively bigger truckload of crap year upon year and is no longer as clean as it once was.
A central difference is: the NT kernel stayed rather clean (the crapload rather happened in the Windows subsystem).
Once you've taken most all of the other subsystems out of NT (which they pretty much have), all you're left with is is the crapload in the Windows subsystem.
I should have mentioned that I am speaking from a Plan 9 point of view where some of the common mechanisms are provided via the kernel file servers such as /proc.
From the pictures the shot gun appears to be more of a "zip gun" - a home made/improvised gun. The barrel is a tube while the shells seem to have some kind of squib or electric match replacing the shells percussion cap. That removes the weight of a mechanical gun mechanism with firing pin. This feels like a case for moving towards electronic firing case-less ammo perhaps?
I know we ripped out similar, a plastic panel/wall mount version, at an old job when we went VoIP. The Centronics came out of the PBX. Probably find on eBay or surplus. Maybe talk to IT and they have one hanging around in a junk pile.
> The name varies regionally
Micro Ribbon connector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_ribbon_connector
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