#kludges

[pupydogeyes]

UNSTOPPABLE! UNPOPPABLE!! @kludges

[pluralthey]

Gosh I'd love to see what happened when Liron first moved in with gray and Dupe

it is done

[pluralthey]

I'm making the assumption that, as a teen, Angel lived under their parents' roof and wouldn't have easy access to travel a long distance by themselves, so I'm curious: how did Angel get to the Grand Canyon?

angel lived in arizona iirc. grand canyon is a ~2 hour trip from the general metropolitan area

[pluralthey]

Are you still going to design a new girlfriend for Frankie? I remember you briefly mentioned that once.

yep! i’ve doodled a few concepts for her, but i don’t like to post unpolished/experimental work much anymore after the feedback. she’s a sphynx cat. still thinking of a name but might go with anthy.

[taperwolf]

Whenever I feel bad about my slapdash electronics skills, I can always depend on commercial products to cheer me up.

I'm slowly working on resurrecting an old terminal device I picked up at a thrift store a few years back, the IXO Telecomputing Device Model TC200. It's a decidedly weird beast, with a tiny keyboard and one-line screen, and was meant to hook into the phone lines and dial into a service IXO themselves ran. It went for about $500 in 1982.

The wires coming out from the battery compartment door are to provide the thing with electricity; it was supposed to run on either power over the phone line or a now-obsolete battery meant for Polaroid cameras.

Now, I haven't gotten it working yet; the thing has more wrong with it than just the power supply. But while I had it open to add those leads, I saw some startling bodges on the board.

The first image is the main board; at the bottom, it connects via ribbon cable to a second board that has all the key switches and the LCD. I don't know if there are bodges on that board, but there sure are on this one.

The second image shows one — the large chip (which some quick searches failed to turn up any data on) has a couple of its pins lifted from the board, and both connected to a point a fair distance away. Now, that's not unusual in itself; designing circuit boards is hard, and there are bound to be some errors. Particularly in that era, ordering a whole new lot of boards wouldn't have been trivial in either time or money, and you'll often see thin wires added to printed circuit boards even today. But I'm not sure I've ever seen _diodes_ instead of just wires. My best guess is that both pins need to feed the same thing, but need to not interfere with each other, so the two diodes are acting as an OR gate in what's sometimes jokingly referred to as Mickey-Mouse logic (MML, to compare with actually manufactured transistor-transistor logic, TTL, or older RTL or DTL, where one of the transistors is replaced with a resistor or a diode, respectively).

The third shows a chip where two of the pins have been bridged with both a resistor and a capacitor, in parallel. I'm not sure what's going on there; it looks to be a 45xx-series CMOS logic chip, so it may be some kind of input filtering. The fourth is similar, having resistors bridge pins on each side of an 8-pin chip; I think that's a dual op amp, and suspect that those are extra feedback resistance to stop self-oscillation.

The fifth image is a weird suspended circuit. Three devices are each hooked to the board by one pin each; the cap goes into the transistor and one side of the resistor, while the loose pin on the transistor bridges across the resistor. I'm really unclear on the purpose of this, and why the board didn't have the proper connections.

There's no disrespect meant to the engineers who worked on these boards; to be honest, I admire the ingenuity and problem-solving ability. It's just reassuring to know that even the pros make mistakes and have to kludge around difficulties.

[pluralthey]

What's interesting about the Día de Muertos comic with Sugar is that it doesn't specify who sent "Can we talk?". Is it Angel sending it to Sugar (and Sugar had ignored it initially), or is it Sugar sending it and not knowing Angel had already died? Just makes me think.

it’s an astute observation. i don’t think that’ll be ambiguous forever canonically but i’ll leave it as is for now

[emokiddio]

Tfw you try to make a birthday gift on time but that don't work out for you. But belated (two days late by 30ish minutes rip) birthday gift for @kludges!!!!!!!! I've had this sketch sitting around for a long LONG time and finally got it nice and finished and when commuting to school I had the idea for the background, so *click* nice. This is also a huge af file, it was larger, I decreased it nicely, even though it was a struggle because maintaining pixels rip,,,,,,,,,, lets also forget i didnt rly blend the shading in the black fur, that was too much

[kingjaspy]

[percussion noises]

birthday gift for @legolizard !!