Got up before dawn and drove halfway across the state to the Mansfield
Fairgrounds to
the first (non-Dayton) hamfest I've been to in a few years... it was
well attended and at
least as large as I remember it was 10 years ago. I was shopping for
specific items,
and was largely not disappointed...
I mangage to find the following (On and Off-topic items):
20x4 back-lit LCD text displays (for LCDproc -
http://www.lcdproc.org)
A double-fistful of C&K 7101 toggle switches w/mtg hdwr for 1802
front panel projects
Enough C&K pushbuttons for EF4/DMA-in switches for same ($0.65 each)
A pair of 22-pin machine-pin sockets to refurb my Quest Elf with
proper sockets
Two rubberized (look outdoor-safe) 4x4 matrix keypads that look
excellent for a hex-input keypad (via a 74C922) for an 1802 board ($1
each!)
Some oddly-numbered (not the standard one that Radio Shack used to sell)
A pair of 0.6" 24-pin DIP header jumpers that look perfect to extend
RCA 1861 PIXIE signals off-board for an LED dot-matrix-PIXIE-and-CRT
emulator that's under discussion in the 'cosmacelf' Yahoo group
Right-angle yellow RCA jacks for PIXIE video-out for Bob Armstrong's Elf2K
A stack of 2x20 pin headers for my console emulator I/O board
external connections
A B&W Coleco-brand Pong game with 4 games (Tennis, Squash...) for all of $3!
"Loom" (I'm also deeply into adventure games)
A "Pilot" docking station (so original, it's not a "Palm Pilot")
A 6U wall-mount 19" rack for telecom/network gear with a 24-port
Ethernet punchdown block mounted in the top
Several CreativeLabs-brand PCI sound cards to go into Linux boxes
since the old (pre-ALSA) sound libraries do *not* like Vortex 88x0
chips ($2-$3 each)
I did forget to go back and pick up some 27C256s I saw at one
vendor... I'm usually looking for low-power EPROMS for some project or
another (SBC6120, etc...)
One thing I contemplated getting, but left behind, was a 1971
electro-mechanical game
that had a wooden frame, and interchangable 1/4" plexi overlay for
different games
(finance, yacht sailing...) equipped with the football overlay. Each
player had a few
buttons on their end of the box, and each player had a dial to crank a
10-12 light/diode
bar from end to end. It was in pretty good shape (box, rules, a
chipped corner on the
plexi), but I just decided that I'd had a good enough haul for the day
(I might have
gotten it anyway if it had come with more than one overlay)
I was pleased to see a number of component vendors still coming out,
and that modern
PCs, while present, weren't the only thing one could find there. With
the turning of
the wheels of technology and the rise of eBay, I've been worried
lately that Hamfests
would be getting sparse for "interesting" goods.
I had a great day finding specific things on my shopping list for the
1802, one of my
current fixations. It was a good enough day that I may have to see if
the Findlay
Hamfest is still around.
-ethan
Received on Mon Feb 14 2005 - 00:11:31 GMT