Score of the day

[techknight]

I just scored something that i have NEVER seen before. at least me personally.

I purchased and recieved a load of powerbook parts units off of ebay. for roughly $36 dollars including shipping. I needed them so i can scrounge enough parts to fix up my duo 2300 thats missing things. And i was praying on them having the SCSI HDDs in them. as the auction didnt specify whether they were included or not.

So, i got 3 powerbook Duos. a powerbook Duo 270C with a good screen, and one with a broken screen. both fire up. Got another powerbook duo 270C thats already upgraded 2300c.

got a literally destroyed powerbook 520c and a powerbook 1400c.

As you can imagine, i was quite pissed becuase ALL of the hard drives had been pulled. Bummer.... one of the main reasons i bought them. as the seller hadnt claimed if they were present or not. Also he DID claim the batteries were missing. But i discovered all 3 duos had batteries. only one battery is physically in good shape. the other 2 have broken plastics and its VERY brittle. the plastics on the battery just keep breaking apart.

The powerbook 1400C bezels are totally destroyed by someone attempting and succeeding in removing the HDD. Otherwise ALL the laptops power up, bong and WORK...

But the real gem is the powerbook 520c.

the 520c has a missing hinge plate cover, and busted hinges, plus the plastic bezels are busted in various places. laptop is basically impractical for every day useage. Plus the SCSI HDD is missing, so i cant even use it anyway. But i decided to dig out my old power adapter from a previous 540c that died years and years ago.

I was rewarded with a sign of life. it powered up and screen was good. It booted to a blinking disk icon with a 3D disk like on the newere PowerPC powerbooks. I thought to myself, thats strange. i dont remember seeing that on my old 540c i used to have. but anyway...

attempting to eject the floppy results in the whole computer just shutting off. And the 7.5NAD disk kept saying Not for this macintosh model. id hit restart, and the floppy would attempt to eject, but it would just shut the whole powerbook off. so something is either pulling massive power, and the AC adapter wont hold up, or the AC adapter is weak i thought.

So i hooked a SCSI CDROM and booted the Legacy CD. Low and behold, i was rewarded with this:





How common/Rare are these upgrades?

 

[geeko]

HaHa, I'm glad to see that somebody here got that lot. I'd decided that morning to buy it in the evening if nobody else had, but I guess you beat me :lol: . Nice score, but I agree about the hard drives.

 

[racepres]

I may just have some 1400 plastic... tell me exactly what you need... you can have it for shipping, if I have it.

Also, of course you know that the processor from your 540c is an upgrade for the 520...

RP

 

[Strimkind]

I just scored something that i have NEVER seen before. at least me personally.
I purchased and recieved a load of powerbook parts units off of ebay. for roughly $36 dollars including shipping. I needed them so i can scrounge enough parts to fix up my duo 2300 thats missing things. And i was praying on them having the SCSI HDDs in them. as the auction didnt specify whether they were included or not.

So, i got 3 powerbook Duos. a powerbook Duo 270C with a good screen, and one with a broken screen. both fire up. Got another powerbook duo 270C thats already upgraded 2300c.

got a literally destroyed powerbook 520c and a powerbook 1400c.

How common/Rare are these upgrades?

Lucky you. I thought about buying that but they wanting 76$ for international shipping so it was not worth it even though I badly wanted the duo's.

As for the upgrade, they are uncommon enough that they command a sum on ebay when they do up (which is not often).

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Congrats, I was looking that one over too, but passed in favor of some other goodies.

I'm just starting to inventory my stuff, but I'm sure I've got several 1400PartsBooks and another one on the way! See if you get what you require from RP and then tell me what else (for shipping only) you might need, comrade! [] ]'>

 

[techknight]

Well since all of these are missing the SCSI HDDs, and they are pretty much unobtanium anymore.

Converters are also prohibitvely expensive anymore as well... So pretty much this ensures that I have to finish those 2.5inch SCSI to CF/SD card converters one day, using the AVR SCSI to PCMCIA project as its base. Ive already got the gerber files made up for the board

 

[Bunsen]

Ive already got the gerber files made up for the board

This is relevant to my interests!

 

[techknight]

yea, im just trying to get parts gathered up now. already have the C code figured out, etc....

the transceivers used in the open source project were for the low voltage differential SCSI system while our mac scsi wasn't differential. They may/may not work. i would hate to use standard glue-logic for driving the SCSI bus, as it would take a LOT of room. theres still some figuring out to do. but ill figure it out.

the AVR cant source/sink enough current to drive the SCSI bus directly. have to use the transceivers or tri-state glu-logic. I have the dead WDS-280 drive of mine i can scrounge its connector off the logic board. that way i can "plug it in" to the powerbook SCSI chain. but for experimental reasons, i may build it all on a breadboard and use the external centronics SCSI for testing. Only issue with this is the termination impedance matching might be a bit difficult as being on a breadboard adds extra capacitance/inductance to a high speed circuit.

a single 2.5 board is pretty darned crammed. i may expand it to 2 boards sandwiched together. at least that would give me some wiggle room, and its still within the limits of the 2.5 HDD size constraints.

 

[Theretrogamingroom]

I was going to bid on that too, but I didn't have the money at the time. Good to see that another 68kmla member got it.

 

[techknight]

im probably gonna part with the duos possibly.

 

[beachycove]

So a PPC upgrade for the Blackbird PowerBooks sells for a good price. Any idea how much?

 

[Scott Baret]

I feel like I'm the only one who had no intentions of bidding on the lot! Regardless, this was a nice pickup, especially that upgrade. Bummer about the hard drives--to be honest, that's the one part I like to stockpile (I have two extras to use with one PowerBook, just in case the IBM in there ever fails, and tend to pick up dead PB 1xx machines whenever I find them locally just for the drives).

Apple made PPC upgrades available for many of its 1993-1996 68K machines, although none appear to be very common at all. I think a lot of folks just bought the new machines or went with the lower-priced clones of the day, provided they didn't migrate to Windows (as was commonplace in the mid-90s).

 

[insaneboy]

So pretty much this ensures that I have to finish those 2.5inch SCSI to CF/SD card converters one day

sooner rather than later and sold at a reasonable price too

 

[Bunsen]

Were you planning to etch your own boards, or have a PCB service do them?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Two of my four 500-series machines have PPC upgrades. So at least in my house, they're common. :-D

 

[techknight]

I could never master the PCB etching process at all. I might have a cheap place in china do it.

i used to use expressPCB to do my boards. i had a few designs done through them, but they are bloody expensive. the set-up cost is what gets you. price per board is cheap. setup costs are like $400 bucks or more for ExpressPCB.

might find a cheap chinese PCB maker do it for less than half that. it might be worth it.

the board just about has to be 4 layer. top and bottom layer for traces, then the Gnd, 5V logic layers as well.

 

[Bunsen]

Sparkfun have a service partner set up that does cheap boards, but I think you have to share your designs. Might be worth looking at.

Or if you like I can ask around for other services. I know there's at least a couple around that are pretty cheap these days. What size first run would you be likely to want?

 

[techknight]

I have to share the designs anyway, because its going to be based on source code that's GPL...

also im trying as hard as possible to fit it on one board, the same size dimensions as a physical 2.5 HDD, that way it'll fit within the bay where a SCSI HDD rested. But there are some traces I cannot route as i am running out of room. i use pulsonix, just now getting used to it. And i still need to map out the compact flash card in the definitions files so i can put it on the board. Thats where i might run out of room. hehe.

Worse comes to worse, ill make 2 boards stacked on top of each other. itll still be within the physical height definition of the older style HDDs.

Also sparkfun has the compact flash sockets as well, which is perfect

Actually, i seen there is a FreePCB program out there, and its ALOT simpler to use than pulsonix so i may switch to it.

other than that, the maximum capable throughput using an AVR would be roughly 150 to 200KB/s which isnt too bad considering the old HDDs are slower than that...

 

[insaneboy]

blerg, second PB180 I got was also stripped of its HDD damnit! SCSI to CF adaptor is looking better and better here