Going for some doubleyous, boys.

(Obligatory Letterkenney reference now complete) So it’s a long weekend, and thanks for some confluence of leave, for me it was a four day weekend. Such a nice thing occasionally. Friday I spent mostly working on general chores, but in the evening I thought I’d finally drag out a project to start looking at. Now

The Archimedes is back on the bench

Now I have an oscilloscope, I thought it was time to break out the Archimedes. So far it has resisted my attempts to diagnose exactly what is wrong with it but I will persevere. Symptoms are the same whether I use a Gotek or a real drive.When you try and access the drive you get

Updates and some Smaller Projects

Well I haven’t stopped working on projects and while some of the have been successful, others have not been so successful. It doesn’t help that my desoldering station has broken. I just need to get some specialised glue to fix it. Archimedes The Archie still has a bunged Floppy Disk Drive and I’m stumped as

Upgrades, Problems, Parts

It’s been an exciting few weeks. Archimedes The Archimedes continues to confound me. I finally got a replacement 1772, plugged it in and… No change! At this point I have swapped out all the chips that feed the floppy disk. If you look at the schematics, I have socketed and tested IC29, IC30, IC38, IC

Trying not to get discouraged

So it’s been a frustrating week of stuff not getting fixed. The kind of week where the hobby feels more like a “job” than “something fun”. Firstly the Archimedes is still having problems with the floppy disk, despite me swapping out the 74HC574. I will need some time to put it on the bench and

Broken Archimedes, Working 3D printer

No post last week. I got busy with non “retro nerd” stuff and didn’t have anything to post. So far this week has been a lot more exciting. Poor Archie My Archimedes 440 has decided that, no, it no longer wants to read Floppy Disk images. This has kept me occupied for most of the

Achievement Unlocked: 3D Printing

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been accumulating all the “bits and pieces” to finally properly use my 3D printer. Today everything came together and I finally printed my first 3d print! It’s a little holder for the rotary encoder and OLED display for a Gotek drive. I often mount them externally on some cable,

Deliveries

I’ve put the Microbee away for a bit. I’ve done a lot of work on it, and it’s a LOT more stable. Not completely stable and I’m yet to work out why. (I’ve desoldered the connectors between the boards and completely replaced them. I’ve also replaced the ROM socket for the IC27, which was green

Archimedes Addendum

In the last post, I mentioned that the only thing left to do was to make up a cable and I’d be done with the Archimedes. Well, that turned out to be quite the project, didn’t it? So the point of the cable is twofold. Firstly, it physically connects everything together and secondly it changes

Finishing up the Archimedes

So I have made quite a lot of progress since my last post. I replaced the damaged capacitor on the mainboard.I cleaned the case a bit further to eliminate some corrosion I missed the first time.I replaced the dead cooling fan. (I need to modify this fan as it’s way too loud currently. Time for