EEVblog #331 - Mailbag

Another Mailbag.
And it involves, well, Playboy magazine!

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[aptsys]

Next mailbag: "To: The Secret NSW Narcotics Distribution Centre"

[FakeName]

Did anyone notice the "Power Adapter" is actually labeled "Power A dapeer"?

Gotta love the engrish.

[KeenanTims]

Those little converters are incredibly handy. I've got a bag full of them myself and they're really useful whenever you need a simple buck converter. They're almost cheaper than a linear reg!

[Sine]

I'm not sure if anyone mentioned this already, but when Stephen talks about a electrical charge it is a charge as in explosive charge !
So mind your fingers :)

[AlexTaradov]

And, yes, I remember trying to buy one these magazines. No luck, they've been sold in 30 minutes.

[AintBigAintClever]

12:10 are Cisco WAN Interface Cards (WICs). They plug into the routers to add additional interfaces. 1600 series have a WIC slot, 1700 have two, bigger routers have more or can take a larger interface that has two WIC slots on it.

[BeerTower]

To be pedantic, that USB charger is actually a mainland Chinese plug. The Chinese standard calls for slightly longer pins and, of course, doesn't require insulated pins like the new AS/NZS standard.

[SuperAhmed]

That's right. They're great. I use them in a lot of projects.
Can't beat them.

[bgdwiepp]

the 10 of them cost $6, including postage, for a little bit more you can get them on a pcb with pot to adjust voltage, some small caps and some screw headers, very useful.

[AintBigAintClever]

Hehe, we've used well over a hundred of those here, mainly the WIC-1T cards which are 2Mbit serial cards, with a handful of WIC-1ENET (10baseT) and WIC-2T (2 x 2Mbit serial) thrown in for good measure.

[bcsupport]

There is a manual release for reserve parachute deployment but the electronics is used as a back to automatically deploy it in case the skydiver does not.

[EEVblog]

I love my audience, someone always knows! #CollectiveNerdPower

[BarsMonster]

These are surprising details, and I am sorry to hear that.

[bborkzilla]

That line cutter contains an explosive used to drive the wedge through the line and into the anvil on the other side of the hole. If you can see through it, it's unused - obviously it can only be used once. I've worked with similar units used to cut lines to deploy solar panels and gravity gradient booms for satellites. When set off, they will not release any sort of gas or sparks - but be careful with it - it may surprise you.

[BarsMonster]

I am that Russian guy from zeptobars.ru - initially it will surely work in FPGA for tests & benchmarks, production chips will be full custom ASICs : depending on amount of money I would have by that moment - manufactured at 800nm tech (worst case) or 180nm.

[BarsMonster]

These Video-in-prints were both at Vogue and Playboy magazine. I had 4 of these, from both sources. But this specific one may have actually been from Vogue, it's hard to remember. PS. Great work on the Vogeeky :-)

[Kii]

"I'm a bit concerned."
*zooms in*

Classic Dave.

[Xelbiuj]

Reserve chutes are manual but will go off automatically at 700ft if you're going ~100 mph.

[Psychlist]

"I don't think we should watch this any further" *zooms in*

[leehmz]

That Cisco module with the huge BGA on it is an AIM-ATM module for handling multiple T1/E1 spans. It goes in a Cisco 2600 3600 series router, from what I can tell; that nuber and barcode to the left at 13:22 is the part number.

The BGA itself is apparently Conexant's answer to the Freescale QUICC family of comms processors, and since there's no ROM, I'm guessing all that RAM (2 whole megs of high-speed parity SRAM, no less) is for firmware.