nILS Posted February 24, 2008 Report Share Posted February 24, 2008 After years of keeping it for no reason I decided to through out my (broken) old 486DX4 laptop. As I always do I took it apart first to see what's in there ;-) Turns out the MAXDATA FT6000A "Acrobat" has a YMF262 and a YAC512 on it. How cool is that? ;D-------------- START OFF-TOPIC --------------Other stuff on the board:* MicroClock MK1444-02S Crystal wavetable solution* touchpad is driven by a PIC16C58A* Creative Labs Vibra 16 Driver * Motorola MC34074D High slew rate, wide bandwidth single supply op amp* Maxim MAX211 RS232 Transceiver* ICS AV9155 20-pin frequency generator* SMC FDC37C665IR Floppy disk controller* CSI CAT28F010N* Mitsubishi M38802M2* and a bunch of SR, Inverters and unknown devices This is fun :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stryd_one Posted February 24, 2008 Report Share Posted February 24, 2008 486 laptop? surely that's a collector's item... maybe not the best candidate for parts-raping!Sell it on ebay to some collector and buy some parts from mouser or something man :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nILS Posted February 24, 2008 Author Report Share Posted February 24, 2008 Hehe, it's not really a collector's item. There's tons of them on ebay for ~20 bucks each. Besides, when I said "broken" I meant "broken". Display contrast is so low you can't see anything, hdd is broken, bios battery screwed, battery dead, ram died, fdd drive only accepts floppies it formatted itself (but no other computer accepts those ;-)), case cracked, broken keys... It's been though a lot even before I got it ;D FIxing it was out of the question - the battery pack still costs 150€, the RAM another 50€ and so on... I think it would like to be put to good use by supplying parts for a good cause. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stryd_one Posted February 24, 2008 Report Share Posted February 24, 2008 Most of that stuff makes little difference... maybe the casing could be of use, maybe ram is dead but individual IC's or OK, etc... you never know what half-working machine some geek has, and what parts he needs to complete it ;) But...There's tons of them on ebay for ~20 bucks each.Trash it! ;D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaicen Posted February 24, 2008 Report Share Posted February 24, 2008 I don't suppose you could pull the firmware from that PIC controlling the touchpad?? Maybe it could give some pointers as to how to build a MIDI touchpad controller, I know that's definitely something that i'd be enormously interested in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nILS Posted February 24, 2008 Author Report Share Posted February 24, 2008 I don't suppose you could pull the firmware from that PIC controlling the touchpad?? Well, um kinda hard as I don't have any circtuitry for surface mounted PICs yet... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stryd_one Posted February 25, 2008 Report Share Posted February 25, 2008 Maybe it could give some pointers as to how to build a MIDI touchpad controllerHow hard can it be? Two values to plot a position on a plane... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaicen Posted February 25, 2008 Report Share Posted February 25, 2008 I've no idea how hard it is, but i've yet to come across a decent project for a DIY MIDI touchpad, not least of which one that uses recycled laptop parts! If such a project existed, i'd be building a few for sure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nILS Posted February 25, 2008 Author Report Share Posted February 25, 2008 Well apparently the PIC transforms what ever the touchpad controller does to PS/2, as you can directly plug that thing into the PC. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nebula Posted February 25, 2008 Report Share Posted February 25, 2008 http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,10851.0.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stryd_one Posted February 26, 2008 Report Share Posted February 26, 2008 I've no idea how hard it is, but i've yet to come across a decent project for a DIY MIDI touchpadStep 1) Get touchpads ;)I toyed with a screen I got once, was the touchscreen for a cassiopaeia (or however you spell it), just had two resistances for X and Y, same deal seems to be the standard for touchscreens and touchpads. I know that capacitative touchpads/screens exist, so keep that in mind when finding a candidate. Resistive should be much easier to use w/ midibox. Then you can plug it into the AINs and convert the received position to a value. Easy! (in theory, heh). Just carry your meter to the scrap laptop, and connect it up to the wires and move your finger around and see whet happens...Someone mentioned a touchpad recently that they got stuck on because the X and Y axis ran diagonally from corner to corner, but that shouldn't be a big stumbling block.Getting OT, time to split this thread? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.