I once took a really crappy RS232 cable to India as part of some equipment to train our remote developers. The cable barely worked in our lab in the States. I told our hardware engineer that it wasn't going to work in India, and I was right. So in India I ended up having to wrap the entire wire bundle in a wire that I soldered to ground on both sides. Soldered it together with a plumbing soldering iron. I am a software engineer, but I have an electrical engineering degree. The VP that I was traveling with couldn't believe that the crap I made worked. Realistically, I couldn't either.

[–] palmtrees2309@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

India loves this barely working lifehacks known as "Juugad"

using a fan as a sprinkler system

[–] collapse_already@lemmy.ml 2 points 18 hours ago

This looks like it is technology that I should borrow for use in Texas. Love it.

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Okay, don't get me wrong I'm impressed and I also enjoy macgyvering things like that... But if it's for a work thing, surely it can't be that hard to go out and buy a new cable from any old shop nearby? I would think the cable is common enough to still be in stock in a lot of places, even if it's ancient.

[–] collapse_already@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This was a proprietary cable specific to our board design. Believe me, I wish we could have used a standard cable.

[–] msfroh@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I built an RS232 cable from parts from RadioShack 25 years ago, with no soldering, just electrical tape. It's surprisingly easy if you don't need speed. Mine capped out at 1200 or 2400 baud. Was it good? No. Did it work? Absolutely.

[–] collapse_already@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

Yeah, the protocol itself is pretty robust. The cable I had didn't have enough noise immunity for the dirty power the building had in India (afternoon brown outs when the voltage dipped when the air conditioners ran). The Faraday cage that I made around the cable helped with the noise and also (and I believe more crucially though I had no scope to confirm) gave the two boards a common ground. I had a little trouble with before I left, but it didn't work at all in India until I modded it. Made the hardware engineer buy me a beer when I got back.

[–] cranakis@reddthat.com 2 points 1 day ago

This makes sense actually. The issue with the bundle was regarding some part of it that was subject to RF interference and you shielding and grounding stopped all of that. Packets hate noise. This applies double to coaxial cable, in my experience, especially spanning up.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

This died with high-freq serial ports.

Honestly, couldn't we just transfer only the changes? Instead of sending the same pic 60, 120, ... times the second over. And how fast it can do the updating is the display frequency.

[–] tenshukun@discuss.online 3 points 10 hours ago

It could be done, the issue is there’s not really any reason to. This isn’t getting streamed over a network, this is one cable going from one device to another, there’s no reason to try and save bandwidth. If you start compressing the image to be able to run at a higher frame rate or such, more complex scenes will literally display worse, due to not being incompressible in that way, which seems.. undesirable

[–] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 96 points 1 day ago (4 children)

That's VGA, it's gonna be fine. Most wires are either ground or not used for actual image data. R, G and B are analog so noise on those just makes the output noisy, no big deal. That leaves us with HSync and VSync. They are digital signals with 3.3V between on and off and only a single pulse per line / frame so they're also pretty robust against noise.

So unless you're going for an extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor over a long distance, the worst that will happen is that your image will look grainy like TV static. It would take quite a bit of interference before the sync signals degrade enough to not get any image at all.

[–] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 42 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Now I wonder if I can route VGA through unusual items. Cutlery, the railing on a staircase, swords, something like that. As long as I can find six pieces of metal of roughly equal length, it should work.

[–] WesternInfidels@feddit.online 50 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Q: So do you have any hobbies?

A: Well lately I've really gotten interested in routing VGA through unusual items!

Q: Ooooh, that's so hot right now

[–] njordomir@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

There are worse hobbies. There's also no shortage of items to try.

Ideas:

eyeglasses
braces
bra underwire
Freddy's hand
Edward Scissorhand's hand
fake flowers with a wire core
bread bag ties
beer cans
tire tread reinforcement
a knight in chainmail
Christmas tree tinsel
photoframe
tie clip
tooth fillings
a bicycle
a tricycle
chain link fence
chastity belt
hammer
aluminum wrapped baked potato

[–] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well... I don't think it would be the weirdest thing I've done with my free time. Would probably barely rank in the top three.

[–] buffing_lecturer@leminal.space 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm listening.

[–] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 26 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Let's see:

Back in 2007 or 2008 I attempted to create a CPU architecture that directly uses Brainfuck as its instruction set. I had to put it on hold before it was completed because I had a custom FPGA development board with really bad documentation but if I ever get my hands on an affordable FPGA, it will get done eventually.
I've created a nonogram that solves to a rickroll QR code. I had to rely on the error correction because the exact pattern didn't result in a well-defined solution but I've recently learned about some more parameters that you can tweak on a QR code. So now I just need to acquire or more likely build a QR code generator that lets me manually control those parameters and an automatic nonogram solver so I don't have to manually solve a bunch of 25x25 nonograms to confirm they have a single solution.
My plan for tonight is to start porting a 22-year-old handheld game to a ~35-year-old home console. I've acquired a C compiler but will probably have to learn assembly for a CPU architecture that was barely used for anything else. There is no chance to ever share the resulting game without getting sued to hell and back again.
I've made chainmail bikinis for a couple of friends.

That's just what I comes to mind at the moment. I'm sure if I spend some time thinking or digging around old hard drives, I can find more.

[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Jumping Cubes is the kind of game that works really well on a PC and has super simple rules but is absolute hell in real life.

That game on the Risk board was fun, though. IIRC North America in particular tended to have those terrible chain reactions that just kept going and going.

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[–] 30p87@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Through your body with nippleclamps?

[–] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 5 points 1 day ago

I'd need a couple more volunteers to make sure all signals have the same delay.

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (5 children)

So unless you’re going for an extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor over a long distance

Speaking of "extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor," it took a solid decade and a half before I was able to buy a digital flat-panel monitor capable of resolution comparable to the analog CRT I was using in 2002. VGA was no joke!

(The only problem with QXGA on a 19" CRT, aside from the weight and power draw, was that in a world before deceent high-DPI fractional scaling the text was too tiny to read easily. Other than that, it worked fine.)

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[–] rustydrd@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Unshielded wire in a guitar amplifier be like: "Ayo, how is everybody doing, let's go and MAKE SOME NOOOOOOISE!"

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[–] owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 38 points 1 day ago (4 children)

As someone who works in R&D in software/electronics, I can say I do this kind of thing regularly.

[–] moonshadow@slrpnk.net 22 points 1 day ago

No matter how slick tech gets, peek behind the curtain and this is what you'll see :)

[–] einkorn@feddit.org 12 points 1 day ago

Yeah, but there is a difference between the research and development phase and consumer usage.

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[–] Tilgare@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

One time as a kid, I got myself in trouble and I got TV taken away from me - my dad came up to my room with a pair of scissors and just cut my coax cable. I stripped that bad boy and shoved the end back in to my TV, worked a treat. I also had my wifi antenna from my desktop taken from me at some point, so I took a paper clip and stuck it in there - not GREAT reception, but it was good enough!

[–] Damage@feddit.it 8 points 1 day ago

I've got to tell you, when you started with the coax cable I imagined a different era than what was revealed when you wrote about wifi

[–] aeharding@vger.social 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Posted from my 2m aliexpress usb-c cable running at 40gbps

[–] QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

edit: also thanks for fixing that bug I found that one time :>

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago

It appears that we have been graced with the presence of the lead developer of Voyager himself! I wonder how many times he gets this question and if he regrets giving his user a special color :P

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[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago

Running... For now.

[–] zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This image triggers me so much, but mostly because it is truer than I want to admit.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

VGA didn't care much about interference.

Lan party, we didn't have T connectors, so we cut two coax apart and spliced them with some tinfoil. it worked until someone bumped it hard.

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[–] lemonSqueezy@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

This reminds me of a mod around the time of the TI-83 ish , where you had solder diodes to a cable connecting two devices.

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[–] JohnSmith@feddit.uk 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Now lets see the same hack but for the port above.

[–] lb_o@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Port above is COM. It experienced even more abuse than VGA.

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[–] Drekaridill@lemmy.wtf 3 points 1 day ago

I had to do this with a stlink debugger once. It worked.

[–] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago

I've done some very dodgy things with VGA cables in an effort to route the cables through narrow bulkheads. For normal computer-to-monitor-lengths this is probably fine.

I haven't noticed much signal degradation below 4m-ish.

At 12m, you better solder properly and wrap some extra shielding around your splice.

Source: I've ran plenty of VGA cables between bridge computers and a deck monitor on ships.

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