Matthew’s Workbench

“It’s okay to cut a competitor down a few notches, but never cut him six feet lower than the soles of his feet. That’s no longer fair competition, folks, that’s murder.”

“One way of landing a client is to fish him out of the river. Which is exactly how I commenced my confidential file on a character named Richie Stimson.”

Barry Craig happens to be on hand to rescue Richie Stimson after he drives his car into the river. Richie is current husband and former chauffeur to Natalie Stimson, a Park Avenue millionaire. Richie claims that he wasn’t drinking, but that he has spells where he gets “dopey all of the sudden” and foggy in his head, with the feeling that he wants to shut his eyes. He claims that he drove through the guard rails during one of those spells.

Craig bills Richie $100 for his ruined clothes and shoes, not expecting payment. He is surprised to receive a check for $1000 from Natalie Stimson with a request for a meeting.

In talking to Natalie, Craig learns that the plunge into the river wasn’t Richie’s first accident. For example, several weeks earlier he fell two stories from a window and was saved only by falling on a terrace on the 26th story. According to her, six doctors have examined Richie this year, with the most recent concluding that he is a “normal neurotic” who is just accident-prone. Her own theory is that Richie feels out of his element in the rich Park Avenue environment and needs someone who “talks his language”. She feels Craig can be that someone and hires him to be Richie’s friend for $4000 for one month.

Everything goes well for a while, with Richie attending burlesque shows just like he did before his marriage. But Craig suspects that something else is wrong, especially after a talk with Richie’s brother. He claims that Richie is a snob and has always been a schemer, but that he has never been accident-prone.

After one final accident, Barry Craig is forced to untangle all of the the lies and discover the real cause for Richie’s problems.

Featuring Paul Dubov, Betty Lou Gerson, Jack Carroll, Jack Moyles

This episode was first broadcast on NBC radio on January 5, 1955. You can download it from the Internet Archive here:

Download Barry Craig - Angel of Death - January 5, 1955

Last year, EchoStar announced the TR-40, their $40 digital converter box. It had the best feature set of any converter box and the $40 price made it free with government coupon. But then the TR-40 was postponed and the DTVPal was released, a different converter box that EchoStar priced at $59.99. The TR-40 remained a separate product that they promised for later release.

Now the TR-40 has been reborn as the TR-40 CRA. You can read the DISH Network press release here. The TR-40 CRA price is $40, which is $20 less than the DTVPal, even though it is the same unit! It says so right on the TR-40 CRA FAQ page:

What is the difference between TR-40 CRA and DTVPal?

TR-40 CRA is a special limited production version of the DTVPal. Offered at the government coupon price of $40, the TR-40 CRA includes the highly-acclaimed features and functionality of the DTVPal.

DTVPal has garnered much praise in recent months and is recommended as a “top choice” by CNET. DTVPal’s amazing features and consumer-friendly technology make it a great value at only $19.99 with a $40 government coupon.

With a limited supply available, you should probably act soon if you want to buy a TR-40 CRA.

Here’s an article from the Wall Street Journal with a startling title: Nuclear Ambitions: Amateur Scientists Get a Reaction From Fusion. It focuses on amateur researchers who have built their own fusion reactors.

Their fusion reactors, or fusors, aren’t used for power generation. That’s because a fusor consumes more energy than it produces. Fusors have been used commercially as neutron sources, but the interest among these researchers seems to be improving the device itself.

I am amazed that so many people would have the dedication necessary to build such an unusual device. I’m also amazed that fusors haven’t been banned by authorities frightened by the idea of a homemade nuclear reactor. In reality, the dangers would be limited to the extremely high voltages used and the possible production of x-rays.

If you’re interested, there are a number of web pages devoted to the topic, including Fusion is Easy and Fusor. Thanks to Scott Haley for the pointer.

With the prices for FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chips coming down all the time, FPGA development has become affordable for the electronics hobbyist. I was looking around at starter boards and saw several recommendations for the Digilent Spartan-3 Starter Board. At $99, it is one of the cheapest boards available, yet it has some pretty impressive features. Take a look at what you get for your $99:

• Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA with twelve 18-bit multipliers, 216Kbits of block RAM, and up to 500MHz internal clock speeds
• On-board 2Mbit Platform Flash
• 8 slide switches
• 4 pushbuttons
• 9 LEDs
• 4-digit seven-segment display
• Serial port
• VGA port
• PS/2 mouse/keyboard port
• Three 40-pin expansion connectors
• Three high-current voltage regulators (3.3V, 2.5V, and 1.2V)
• 1Mbyte on-board 10ns SRAM (256Kb x 32)

It even comes with power supply and programming cable, neither of which is included with many boards. It is designed to work with Xilinx’s free WebPack, a good set of FPGA programming and simulation tools. You will need to learn VHDL or Verilog, but there are many good books and tutorials available. I would recommend Circuit Design with VHDL as a good choice for learning VHDL.

If you have any interest in experimenting with FPGAs, then this looks like a good board to investigate.

LCD clocks powered by a potato used to be sold as novelty items in many stores. I don’t know if they are still available, but that idea is a common science project. But how much current and voltage does a battery like that actually generate? I found a good article by Hans Summers called Homemade batteries that addresses this very question.

The principle behind this type of battery (or wet cell) is very simple: dissimilar metals placed in an appropriate solution will conduct electric current. But the specific materials used are what determines how well it works. To test materials, Hans Summers created batteries using lemons, lemon juice, bleach, salt, and vinegar. Best of all, he logged his results and provided a spreadsheet that you can download including all of his raw data. The article is quite interesting and well worth a look if you have every wondered how far homemade battery technology could be taken.

The Boston Herald published an interesting article recently: Designers on quest to build $12 computer. The idea seems to be to develop educational software for inexpensive 8-bit computers that are commonly available in China and India. What caught my attention was the mention that those 8-bit computer are based on the Apple II.

That didn’t make much sense to me. The ROMs inside an Apple II are very important for compatibility and they are still copyrighted. I would consider it unlikely that Apple would license them, even at this late date. Not only that, but the Applesoft BASIC ROM is owned by Microsoft, not Apple, making that idea even less likely. Any computer with copied ROMs would be illegal, making the whole project suspect.

But a later Computerworld article gave more details: $12 Indian ‘TV computer’ a knockoff of ’80s Nintendo system, not Apple II. According to that article, the computer mentioned is manufactured by Victor and named the Victor-70. It is actually a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) clone. Both the Apple II and the NES used a 6502 processor, which was probably the basis for the confusion. I don’t know how large a boot ROM the NES used, but it would probably have been easier to reverse engineer than the Apple II. Of course, that assumes that the Victor-70 doesn’t just include a copy of the NES ROM.

All of the information available is somewhat contradictory, but you can see a wiki with more details here: The $10 TV Computer Project. I would have thought that NES clones are rare, but there seem to be at least three of them available for sale in the United States:

• Generation NEX
• Neo Fami System Silver/Black US Version
• FC Mobile