I picked up this shop register for 500Yen (~5USD) in Akihabara the other day. It seems liked a steal for a barcode reader, 24V power supply, thermal printer and Windows CE computer. I figured it would be worth the money for a teardown and to salvage the parts. I’d guess this device is from that late 90s or early 2000s. Certainly WindowsCE was all the rage then. The register was manufactured by NEC and for the most part uses Japanese parts. However I was surprised to see a Marvell microcontroller, Intel flash, and Samsung memory. Rather than the more typical SH3, Elpidia RAM, and Toshiba flash produced in Japan.
An interesting find anyway and some useful parts for the junk bin.
I picked up what I assume is a 1960s era phone in Akihabara a couple of weeks ago. It uses parts from a varietty of Japanese manufacturers including what appears to be Riken corp. the design comes from a time when manufacturing in Japan must have just been picking up speed after the second world war.
It’s a model 600A phone, and there’s a great Japanese site detailing this model and its variations. By best guess is that these phones would have been installed by NTT directly.
I also have a British phone from the same era. It was interesting to compare the construction, shown below:
A British telephone from a similar era for comparison:
I found this thing in the Akihabara Hardoff store. I had no idea what is was but figured for 540Yen (~5USD) it was worth a look. From the limited information I’ve been able to find it appears to be part of a card based learning system. The user swipes creditcard like cards through the device, which reads the magstrip and plays back an audio recording. As far as I can tell the device is used for flashcards. Perhaps a Japanese word might be written on the card and the user would have to guess the English. They can then place the card in the device to hear the audio.
The player pulls the card through the read system at a constant speed. It then reads the card and samples the audio, as the name suggests it can repeatedly replay the audio track.
I though this was an interesting analogue storage/digital playback device designed right at the cusp of our transition from analogue to digital media. I’d guess this particular player was built in the early 90s, though I couldn’t see a data code. It’s also interesting the it uses a TI part (TMS3477NL) this appears to have been specifically design for audio recording and playback.
I picked up 50 PKE243DA Oriental motor steppers cheaply on eBay. They came with cables terminated using a funky Molex connector, fortunately Farnell have a knockoff socket for these for about 1USD each (still expensive but I can tolerate that). This board holds an Easydriver (which are crazy cheap on eBay) and interfaces to the Arduino/terminates to the PKE243DA molex connector. Gerbers and Kicad files below!
My name is Nava Whiteford. I’ve worked for a few sequencing companies. I have equity in a few sequencing companies based on my previous employment (I try to be unbiased in my posts). You can contact me at: [email protected]
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