Teardowns

Taking stuff apart is fun, but I can't be assed to film it for YouTube. So why not have some website only teardowns here or more detailes here.

Toyota Expert Model 100

I had a gut feeling this machine would be an interesting part of computer history & was not wrong as I bought it on a whim. So meany of my machines have been bought on a whim.

As this machine is not something like a Spectrum & did not play games there is sweet FA on this computer online, kind of similar to the Husky machines. Most people are only interested in the ones from their childhood, common among the retro community. However because I never grew up with 80s machines I take an interest in the history & technology.

So this is essentially the computer that controlled an embroidery machine, basically an sowing machine that sows text on anything textual, it is not a home device based on the build construction & the fact it seems to be covered in factory dirt. This thing would of been expensive back in the day. It does have the ability to load & save programs from & to a cassette tape, however I believe the tape drive connected to the sowing machine part of the system as there is only one serial port on the back. When fired up it always errors by flashing the "please confirm" on the serial cable image. So currently I am limited on what I can get this machine to do. I might link it up to a modern computer & see what I can influence it to do.

Here you can see the CPU board, the PSU & one of the two ROM bank cards that each have 15 EPROMs per card. These would be for the pattern storage. The EPROM on the CPU card is your standard firmware affair. ROM dump to come.

Back of the display modual, the back mostly consists of jelly bean logic chips. However in one corner you have what looks to be to character ROMs & on the other side the DC-DC converted for the VFD display.

The front you can see a 1x32 graphical character VFD tube surrounded by status LEDs that show the different modes & options enabled as well as the status of the actual machine it would control. Up in the top left is what looks to be an EPROM but has more then meets the eye to it.

The "EPROM" is actually a D8748D microcontroler with a window as it uses EPROM memory for the code. This is the first time I have come across such a chip in the wild leaving me to suspect they are exceptionally rare. A dump of the code on this chip will need to be made at some point. This will be the main display driver that pulls the character set from the mask ROMs on the other side & drives the discreet logic chips to multiplex the display.

Pentax ZX-30

This was meant to be a repair but things did not go to plan.

The top removal reviles the main microcontroler that powers the camera.

The wiring nightmare. Removing all this was a pain.

There was no choice but to de-solder the wires leading to the flash tube.

The camera striped of its casing & looking rather naked.

The problem area, all it took was one failed gear to make this camera un-repairable. Use of a resin printer would potentially fix this camera so it's been put in a box for long term storage until I get such a device.