Little Guys Ep 10: Heart Healthy Oats

[@CathodeRayDude]

I missed that the fan is an exhaust, not an intake, a mistake I make constantly and intend to continue making. Just drives my point home: The chances of those pin sinks seeing _any_ airflow are miniscule, they need all the help they can get.

[@davidpower6332]

Matrox intellicam App started working because you replaced the ram. It was accessing a bad address before. Seems the most likely cause there.

[@AnotherOtherMan-alive]

practically you could use that as a security system alert thing for the office or other related automation tasks... that said the power consumption would likely make it not worth it in the long run.

[@unmanaged]

if you want a few more I can send you some more send me your address

[@IGGYVIP]

Your replacement RAM is PERFECT! The original stick looks like it had 16 chips with 16MB capacity total of 256MB 👀 (Samsung K4S28 128Mbit SDRAM, 8M x 4Bit x 4 banks synchronous DRAM LVTTL)

[@CathodeRayDude]

@@davidpower6332 nope, it was still failing long after I replaced the RAM; that segment was from the previous take a day earlier

[@BringusStudios]

GOD I LOVE ILL-ADVISED GAMING

[@lkv0315]

I love how big and small of a world KZbin can be, I guess we all exist in little niche content islands where Bringus and CRD happen watch each others videos

[@Yackass]

You two are my most watched KZbinrs.

[@xmlthegreat]

@@lkv0315 it's not just Bringus, f4mi and LGR watch his videos too.

[@jonathansmith8793]

So happy to see you on a CRD video

[@AriaPosting]

BRINGLE LOCATED

[@nickwallette6201]

This reminds me of one of my favorite stories about quality control. There was a factory that made consumer toiletries. The product would ship in a typical paperboard box for display on retail shelves. But sometimes, something would happen and the product would not be inserted into the box properly. The box would be sealed, travel down the assembly line, packed in a larger box, shipped to a retail store, and arrive at its final destination ... empty. This, of course, raised complaints from retail outlets, so the company set to work troubleshooting the problem. Unfortunately, nobody could determine what was causing the machinery to produce empty product boxes, so they took a different approach -- try to eliminate the empty boxes, so at least the shipped product was complete. Since the individual product boxes were not heavy, the first step was to develop a precision scale that could quickly measure each box in-flight to determine whether it had anything in it. This turned out to be difficult and expensive, as the box alone weighed hardly anything, so there were tons of false-positives where the machine detected an empty box when in fact there was nothing on the scale. And likewise, it sometimes did not detect an empty box, which then passed right through and made it its way to the customer. In order to work around the issue, the thresholds were tweaked to err on the side of false detection, but this threw off the handling of empty boxes, so the fix was to ring an alarm and have a person evaluate whether there was indeed an empty box, or just a ghost in the machine. Meanwhile, the company began working with high-tech computer-vision vendors to begin developing a system to automate the process. More money was spent. But... mysteriously, after only a couple of days, the number of empty boxes detected dropped to zero. Nobody had made any changes to the production machinery, so this came as a surprise. What had changed? Did we still need the expensive automation software? They went to the assembly line to find out. They asked the line operator, "hey, we noticed the defective unit count has dropped to nothing -- do you know anything about this?" The operator nodded, "oh, yeah, that alarm kept going off, which was annoying, and stopped production for a moment to take the empty box off the line, so we fixed it." This puzzled management... "Fixed it how?" The operator led them to the line. "I put a box fan after the product chute. It just blows the empty boxes into that cart so they don't get to the part where they set off the alarm."

[@madgaming6667]

When I started to read the story I Immediately thought ohh god they are gonna over engineer it even though just a weak jet of air is just enough to fix this and apparently I was correct Cool story still

[@MurderWho]

Y'know, I've heard this story all over the internet, applied to all sorts of products. A quick google finds it going back at least as far back as 2008, and it seems to be pretty uniformly about toothpaste boxes at that time, but the earliest examples going around in 2008 all mention copying it from emails they were sent. I can't find any records of emails. I doubt the story as written is about a real factory/real occurrence, but I wonder where the story came from and how old it is?

[@nickwallette6201]

@@madgaming6667 Haha... yep. Well, you know, gotta have a solution that is suitably enterprise-y. To be perfectly honest, I actually don't know if this really ever happened. I heard this from a presenter once in a "work smarter not harder" thing. I choose to believe it's legit, but regardless, why let that get in the way of a good story.

[@tekvax01]

the simple solution is ALWAYS the best! Awesome story!

[@Kalvinjj]

@@nickwallette6201 Yep, it's one of those classics we kinda learn from heart in engineering, and never seen something _exactly_ like that, but been through several similar situations at work. KISS methodology is quite underappreciated often enough. What sucks is when the method is just TOO simple and doesn't solve it, but to fully solve it you need to go through hell.

[@FooneTuring]

"who's doing monochrome in 2021?" I was doing gigapixel monochrome images up until last month!

[@anonimenkolbas1305]

omg it's foone

[@TheBaristaGamer]

Oh hey it's foone! Hope your doing well, I loved your twitter back when you were on that!

[@soli-ethd]

@@TheBaristaGamershe's still doing very similar posts on Mastodon! Would highly recommend.

[@TSAlpha2933]

who's doing monochrome in 2021? ASTROPHOTOGRAPHERS! NEARLY ALL OF US!

[@ferpykins]

micro fish :)

[@MrMrCruachan]

"The machine you game on because Dad brought it home when they threw it out." Ah yes, the reason why I've had more experience gaming on Quadro video cards than usual ones.

[@sp0ck1p]

This was me except the job was the city government and the video card was nonexistent, hence why we had to purchase a Riva TNT2 from a neighbor

[@TRS-Tech]

Brings fond memories of playing with my dad's hernia inducing 486 laptop with colour screen. He would always hang around nervously while we played with dos games and windows 3.1 as I expect it was not a cheap machine. It had a trackball and 4 pcmcia slots. I'm sure it was a Compaq but can't remember the model. Good old days 🙂

[@Iristallite]

Same, except my dad was self-employed, so I got to mooch off the scraps of his PC repair business after it shuttered. "Lovely" memories of playing games at sub-20fps framerates, not to mention having a bad stick of RAM that caused random crashes. Good times!

[@sp0ck1p]

@@hyperturbotechnomike Having an ATM machine computer sounds way cooler than it must ultimately be. I'm excited at the thought.

[@0xbenedikt]

Same here. My first computer was a re-purposed and re-painted cash register PC with a Pentium 3

[@corowin1]

There is definitley something satisfying about watching you play Quake on a machine that used to pack Quaker Oats.

[@Toonrick12]

The only more fitting (If slightly ironic) game to play on this would be Chex Quest.

[@Jakepearl13]

Quake(r) is good for you

[@monad_tcp]

finally, someone made that joke , for real. my life is complete, I've seen it all.

[@jrr851]

Aah. The art of analyzing ancient software since your client has this thing they bought in 2003 that they have a long expired aupport contract on, or the company no longer exists. They expect me to figure out how to make it work since they're loosing thousands of dollars and I'm the IT guy. This is a computer... Right? Welcome to my world.

[@owngamesgamer4030]

"Let's make like bringus studios and do some ill-advised gaming" love when all the tech nerds on youtube reference each other

[@tehfedor]

Bau can it run SteamOS?😅

[@paullee107]

I remember when YOU... weren't. And I'm so glad that you're able to be you on videos these days because you are what we tune in for. You'd never used to do those off script monologues, jokes and quips - and they're great. Thanks for another little guy!!

[@joannaforbes520]

About half an hour in, and I'm here for the journey, and any destinations we tangent to along the way :)

[@insipid.dreams8968]

I was only disappointed by the lack of "two of them" when discussing the internals tbh

[@EilonwyWanderer]

28:12 isn't "Mtx4s2" just an abbreviated version of the machine's name? MaTroX 4Sight 2... Yes, I grew up parsing license plates as longer text, why do you ask?! 😅

[@ZiggyTheHamster]

Haven't got through the video yet but repurposing VGA as TV out is actually really common on pro video gear. The typical pinout is that HSync becomes CSync, G becomes CVBS/Y, and R becomes C. You can almost be guaranteed that G will become Y or CVBS on any multi-format equipment because sync-on-green is fairly common, and YPbPr also uses G for Y. I'm sure there is equipment out there that puts C on B, but that equipment is wrong ... if you have a matrix switch with a bunch of BNCs, it would be more work for you if they put C on B because it's cramped and the further down you get the harder it is to get a connector hooked up. A plus side of keeping this arrangement is that multi-format VGA monitors tend to share jungle ICs with multi-format professional video monitors, so such a monitor will happily display RGBS at 15kHz just like it will display RGBHV (VGA) at 31kHz. The only change it effectively requires is that its sync input has to tolerate HSync being CSync and VSync being missing (though not all equipment that does this will actually leave out VSync - so you have CSync and VSync and since CSync is a superset of HSync, as long as the monitor can sync up to the line rate, those monitors will work perfectly fine without even caring that it's getting effectively RGBS)

[@CathodeRayDude]

Wow, that's fascinating, I don't think I've ever encountered this and that seems kind of surprising, I'd think I would have. I'll have to keep it in mind, thank you so much for the details!

[@nickwallette6201]

Was going to say this. RGB on VGA is trivial, since you just reuse the R, G, and B analog outs from VGA, and either combine H and V sync on the HSync pin, or add it to G. :-) It's relatively common. Some CRT monitors support, essentially, 480p video this way. Most projectors do as well.

[@crashputer]

The multiple USB keyboard registries is usually how keyboard manufacturers emulate N-key rollover. The USB spec itself only allows for up to 6 standard keys to be pressed simultaneously.

[@CathodeRayDude]

Ahhh, that's probably it.

[@RaduTek]

They also use it sometimes to pack in the HID Consumer Control device for the media keys (play/pause, volume, browser hotkeys).

[@iykury]

ben eater made a video where he analyzed what an nkro usb keyboard was doing, and the way it works is completely different from that kzbin.info/www/bejne/aJ2zq4eLYpiChKs maybe some manufacturers do it that way, but not all of them

[@slightlyevolved]

​@@iykuryAlmost all *did* do that, but later on they came up with a better solution. Some still do so, and it is more common for it to be only for the likes of RGB and media keys now, with the actual keyboard keys all on one device. Some cheaper keyboards still do the multiple devices trick though

[@EvilCoffeeInc]

Lol "The computer you game on because dad brought it home from work" were macs for me, since my dad owned a graphic design studio. They were most definitely not gaming machines, though I did play Halo CE and Spore on ours so y'know, I was happy.

[@stitchfinger7678]

its wild to think that one of the most ambitious simulators ever (even if it under-delivered), and the second most important shooter ever, were both available on a platform infamous for not supporting games. shit, iirc Halo was even a Mac EXCLUSIVE during early development.

[@evilgibson]

Halo, then Spore... Then Apple decided games were for non-creatives so then nothing 😂

[@monad_tcp]

Spore must have been made for those alien machines, its a very strangely made game, very unusual for PCs

[@FlyingGuy123]

5:00 Go tiny bug go 5:24 OMG NO 5:25 Oh phew 5:27 RIP Tiny Bug 5:46 HE LIVES Tiny Bug lives a thrilling life

[@Tsaukpaetra]

On mobile I can't witness tiny bug! 😭

[@nurtington]

tiny bug reappears at 19:34 !

[@xmlthegreat]

16:18 lmao makes sense you went to the store to grab a drink and some chips

[@lucasrem]

Why he needs it, run what on it ?

[@edd-boy3696]

As soon as you said "machine vision" and after i heard it again and my brain started functioning, I immediately pictured those how its made episodes before you mentioned them. I particularly think of the ones for like potatoes and tomatoes that have little hydraulic fingers that flick the bad vegetables (or fruit) into the trash. That stuff has always fascinated me, being able to recognize some parameters to an image and almost instantly actuate a finger with enough force to completely redirect something before it can get any further

[@ericlooewe]

"A sad day for Cardassia" is a wonderfully weird exclamation to use when faced with mild disappointment.

[@CathodeRayDude]

yeah it came to mind for no reason i can ascertain so i just said it

[@ironlenny]

@@CathodeRayDude Don't you have to be a tailor to say that?

[@benespection]

As you said, Matrox was really popular in the multi-headed business machine market. Their "DVI-V" was found on cards that could output 2-4 heads on a single DVI connector, breaking them out to DVI-I - it was especially common on their low-profile cards.

[@marblemunkey]

Their standard cards were also super flexible for adding multiple displays; they had jumpers or switches to disable the VGA bios, letting them behave well with others at boot. At some time around 1999/2000 I had a Matrix, a Millennium l, and a Millennium II shoved into my computer running four monitors just to see if I could.

[@kepstin]

The cards that could output multiple displays on a single connector had a "DMS-59" connector, not a DVI port. It was kinda similar, but had a lot more pins and didn't have the funky separated analog section. DMS-59 was used on quite a few Matrox cards, and also some ATI/AMD and Nvidia cards. Most often seen in low profile cards for small form factor desktop workstations.

[@benespection]

@@kepstin The Millennium G450 low profile cards we had at work had a "DVI-V" which could connect to a single head output as any DVI-I but Matrox also provided a DVI-V to 2x VGA cable for multi-headed use. It definitely wasn't DMS-59 like the iMacs around the same time, because I'm pretty sure that only appeared later when they were doing digital instead of VGA. I just searched and you can still buy the accessory cables, which I'm not too surprised about given Matrox were also good with after sales support. You can still find second hand low profile multi-head Millenium G450s with this DVI port configuration on eBay and Amazon.

[@JessicaFEREM]

58:47 Windows still has "it's now safe to turn off your computer" turns out there's a group policy setting called "Do not turn off system power after a Windows system shutdown has occurred" that brings this up. probably the same setting matrox has enabled if ACPI does exist.

[@SiliconExarch]

I recently saw a Windows 10 BSOD that ended with "You can restart" and it had me confused but if there's a group policy setting then that makes a lot more sense than modern hardware lacking ACPI.

[@renakunisaki]

But... why?

[@SiliconExarch]

@@renakunisaki perhaps to stop it being shut down unintentionally, since the watchdog will presumably reboot it from that state if power isn't removed within a few seconds.

[@der.Schtefan]

The one custom thing in the BIOS that I immediately clocked is the "AUX IO Interrupt Number" option. It seems you can trigger a system interrupt via a I/O pin.

[@CathodeRayDude]

eagle eyes! Sensible feature, too.

[@grayphox]

I studied machine vision for a bit in school. The industry was indeed thrilled when CUDA came out.

[@TechLeftBehind]

1:06:10 nope, Intel tried to force RDRAM onto late Pentium III machines too! It ended up severely biting them in the ass in not one, but two ways. The i820 chipset was going to be their next generation mid-range consumer chipset after the 440 series. Too bad that they screwed up the design on it, and it was unstable with more than two RDIMMs attached. Then to deal with the cost problem, they made the Memory Translator Hub (MTH) chip to let the i820 talk to SDRAM. The overhead was so high that the resulting systems were slower than an older i440BX machine, and also unstable! This ended up causing a mass recall. :) 28:08 Also "Mtx4s2" driver is almost certainly just the name of the device -- Matrox 4Sight 2 (II). Makes sense that the watchdog routine would be in a special driver.

[@CathodeRayDude]

Oh God I forgot about those p3s. I handled a handful of them at my job. What misery.

[@pjs31416]

Everyone I know who was building a new PC at that time looked at the price performance of RDRAM and decided to buy motherboards with VIA chipsets to use SDRAM, I know I did.

[@SiliconExarch]

There were also a handful of late Socket 370 boards with DDR support, such as the MSI Pro266 series.

[@henryokeeffe5835]

RS-422 is a bizarre format to put video over. It's essentially RS-232 (aka serial) but with differential signals to give it range and robustness.

[@CathodeRayDude]

Right??? It threw me for a (current) loop

[@henryokeeffe5835]

@@CathodeRayDude Also talking of current loops, those relays that click in your power supply probably aren't (just) for current limiting either. They switch between different voltage taps on the transformer to make the linear regulator more efficient as you (or it, automatically) changes the output voltage. When it starts current limiting due to something like a short circuit, the output voltage will be very low, so it has to switch to a low voltage tap to stop it wasting many watts of power in the linear reg. (The efficiency of a linear regulator btw is just Vout/Vin)

[@CathodeRayDude]

@@henryokeeffe5835 Ah, I'd never thought about that. It seemed like they kick in any time the LEDs go from CV to CC so I assumed it was actually switching between two supplies, but given that any time it switches to CC it's almost always dropping below a voltage threshold, that scans

[@andrewcassidy1790]

its also "RS485 but full duplex". Like to use it you just take two RS485 transceivers and fix one in tx mode and one in rx. I ran into it at work and its obscure enough nobody knew where to find devices to test it with

[@MazeFrame]

"Went out for snacks, Gatorade and a stick of RAM" - My favorite lunch break snack!

[@ProtoV33MK1]

Protogens :3

[@femboichik]

​@@ProtoV33MK1 their favourite food :3

[@Toonrick12]

Wasn't Gatorade part of Quaker Oats before they sold it to Pepsi? Edit: Technically it still is owned By Quaker Oats, but Pepsi bought them, lock stock and barrel in 2000. I'm technically correct, which as we know, is the best kind of correct.

[@KILOPOWER]

​@@ProtoV33MK1 lol I'm pretty sure garvis's fursona is a protogen so that checks out

[@ProtoV33MK1]

@@KILOPOWER I'm aware :3

[@opalpersonal]

never apologize for little guys. they are always a joy.

[@truepcs]

Thank You, just got covid for first time and being in the 60's with soso health needed something to distract me

[@CathodeRayDude]

I hope I can bring you some comfort, hang in there!

[@nickwallette6201]

Finally got me in June. So much for my theory of being one of the Chosen Ones who were naturally immune or whatever. haha ;-)

[@EmilFr]

Oh, I hope you're doing okay. I just went through my second time... still coughing and feeling like shit after 3 weeks. Still, better than the first time, when I spent some time in the ICU. Miserable bug like no other.

[@Camman100100]

God I fucking love a feature length KZbin video about a computer so forgettable it looks like it’s been kicked for 10 years straight

[@TomboFry]

0:33 "It's the 4sight II. You know, the sequel to the original 4sight" Wow, I wish I had the foresight to realise that 🤦‍♀

[@Klatchan]

Zebra buying them actually makes sense; they make scanners and now potentially a platform for a hopefully not shitty PoS system.

[@CoffeeOnRails]

Yeah. Their stuff always shows up in library and archive applications too and there’s a lot of use for this sort of thing in the automatic lending/sorting systems they use

[@Iceykitsune]

Zebra buying a machine vision department actually does make sense. I work at the Orange Hardware Store and we recently switched to Zebra phones, and use them to take pictures of the shelves, I can absolutely see Zebra offering a all in one computer vision solution to use said pictures to see if products are actually where they're supposed to be.

[@JackieBright]

My only experience is with zebra QR readers, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out they have (very basic) OCR. It would make sense that their newer products would be much more advanced

[@pjbth]

That orange one looks amazing for an early 2000s Stero Setup in an escalade or something it would match the Amplifiers and custom fiberglass sub enclosures.

[@CathodeRayDude]

hahaha you're absolutely right

[@darkhelmet169]

OnLogic started out (under the name Logic Supply) making car computers in that same kind of orange and aluminum passively cooled case and I guess they kept the aesthetic.

[@jeremiefaucher-goulet3365]

When you described a line scanner, all I had in mind is the photo finish cameras like they have at the 100m track races. Damn Olympics are still on my mind.

[@jameslangridge8849]

At the start you lament doing a lot of the little guys videos, but don't be sad on our behalf, I'm loving it 😄❤️

[@neakmenter]

Love how enthused you were about every tiny new discovery on this one! Well done again dude!

[@ProtoV33MK1]

A great change of pace after the let down of the last one

[@JessicaFEREM]

I was literally thinking "I could watch some CRD rn" and you popped up in my notifs

[@TheRealWulfderay]

I love your "little guys" series. Making underpowered computers do silly things is my jam. By the way, I think the power plug on the mobo is not for a cdrom but for the floppy drive. Note that the parallel port does double service as a floppy connector, right? How many pins is the connector for that on the mobo? Looks like it might be 34 to me. If so, it might take a standard floppy cable in place of the parallel port cable and then you could have an internal floppy if you jad a different bezel. Why you would want to do that baffles me, but perhaps that's it.

[@theinstantcameraguy]

too hot to record content other than obscure small computers trying their best? I see this as an absolute win! Perfect long-form content to listen to while I repair my client's cameras

[@johnstamos1542]

If there's enough interesting specimens, an ARM based little guy series or one off sounds quite fun!

[@CathodeRayDude]

The trouble is that they're basically impenetrable unless you're a high level embedded systems expert. 99% of the devices I've looked at contained nothing but a single SoC, a black box containing all functionality, so there's no real circuitry to analyze, and the software is always completely monolithic. There's rarely a distinct 'operating system' like there is on a PC, or if there is, you can't get to it or it has no UI, so beyond the single task it's supposed to do, there's no way to dig in and see anything 'underneath'. It's not like a PC where (assuming the vendor even bothered to lock down the OS) you can just boot off an external drive and jailbreak it, or put your own software on it. If you don't like what's on an ARM device, changing the software involves spending weeks or months messing with JTAG and/or a logic analyzer, figuring out uboot (or some worse bootloader), working out where memory mapped devices are or some nonsense like that. It's just lightyears over my head.

[@johnstamos1542]

@@CathodeRayDude yeah that makes a lot of sense now that I think of it, thanks for the thorough explanation :>

[@lkv0315]

Hey CRD, this was an interesting clash of information I never knew existed. I work with PC104 on a daily basis, but in the development of CubeSats, and never stopped to think where the PC came from. It’s great for our work as the PC104 board size is very similar to a single rack width for cube sats, so they’re great for modular design. I figured you might find this interesting! Great video

[@xmlthegreat]

Is it okay to watch this if I haven't seen 1Sight to 4Sight pt. 1?

[@CathodeRayDude]

yeah the plots don't really connect it's nbd

[@Fay7666]

Thing is that it later jumps to iSight being a heavy optional, making 5Sight to hSight needed to revisit this and understand it properly.

[@3rdalbum]

The Madness of King George

[@boss_boy_]

I have never been this hyped for oatmeal in my entire life.

[@scott8919]

5:25 that poor ant. 😂

[@fairyball3929]

19:20 No worries, it's still alive.

[@RobTheSquire]

We shall call him Tony the Little Guy in remembrance.

[@martinkretschmer1512]

The Matrox Millenium was praised for its great 2D performance though (which was still a thing back then). Combined with a Monster 3D, you had a great gaming system on your hand!

[@kepstin]

It was a great 2D performer… in Windows. For Windows 3.1 or 95 or similar eras of NT, the Millenium produces a great picture at high resolution and implements all the 2D acceleration for things like smoothly dragging windows around and such. Unfortunately, not a great choice for people who like DOS gaming. There's other options with better compatibility.

[@hiffwelaflare]

I just watch these on repeat until the next one comes out so every time I get a new Little Guys it feels like Christmas if my family loved me

[@Galantium]

I for one love the long videos on these little guys, and also as someone who lives in a hot, old, chicago apartment do I ever understand the hatred of the indoor summer heat 😅

[@RubyRoks]

16:14 Mmmm delicious silicon. Also Sony VX my beloved "The machine you game on because Dad brought it home when they threw it out." for me was those awful early and mid 00s clamshell Dell Dimensions. I mentioned in a comment on a previous episode of Little Guys that my dad sells 911 systems by trade and would bring home tons of stuff to do unpaid and unappreciated after hours IT work. Some of the things he'd bring home were the dispatch computers, and being a small county in a small state, they were the cheapest bulk buy future e-waste you could buy. I played a LOT of Assault cube on those machines between school and home.

[@EmilFr]

My mom brought me an IBM XT from her government job back in the day, when my friends had 486s. Then, when I took out the CMOS battery, I was never able to boot from the hard disk again.

[@CoyoteSeven]

This explains why I remember there being the occasional slightly burnt chip in my bag of Lay's when I was a kid, and then at some point that stopped happening. I miss that actually. Slightly burnt chips have a unique flavor that I enjoyed.

[@porklaser]

The Floppy-over-LPT thing could be found on some older subcompact laptops. I don't know how "standard" it was but it was probably borrowed from that. And speaking of "standards" there's a more-or-less way standard way to route standard video signals over a DE-15. Each uses a subset of the RGBHV lines that VGA uses. You find it in Extron gear (sometimes they call it a universal analog input) and pretty much everyone follows the same convention. IIRC Composite comes in on green. SVideo uses Green and Red, RGB with Sync on Green comes in on R,G and B. RGB with C-Sync uses R,G and B plus c-sync on h-sync line, component puts Y, Pb, and Pr on R,G and B. (Not sure if the order is right but you get the idea)

[@der.Schtefan]

Oh boy, I miss my Matrox graphics card from the 90s. It had S-Video out (which connected to SCART via adapter), I was able to record the Star_Trek Voyager episodes I downloaded in English (Austrian here) onto VHS and then watch them with my friend at his place. Or record decoded Sat TV shows on tape. (you could just barely record SD TV shows onto hard disk, but even with DivX you ran out of space, or transporting that data was tiresome). I remember playing the bundled RayMan game with one of them.

[@Minty1337]

7:20 before i start, im no expert but i have worked on factory hardware and software. im *pretty sure* the difference between a frame grabber and a capture card is how the video is recorded and handled, some capture cards will do stuff like compression and interlacing, making it difficult to deal with small details, meanwhile frame grabbers always pick out a full image in its raw form, no compression or interlacing, making it easier on the computer vision. im sure there are capture cards out there that will record in perfect raw quality, but most factories cant rely on that, so they have dedicated cards that will always give them exactly the output they want. im not an expert and i could be wrong, but im pretty sure that's the difference.

[@lucasrem]

Why he needs it, running what on it ?

[@kraakmanman]

51:35 oh this one will do. Proceeds to grab a working vx1000

[@CathodeRayDude]

as i was doing it i thought "this is absolutely the most pretentious thing i could do. perfect"

[@bepstein111]

The fact that this series is not completely filled with OnLogic devices is amazing. well done

[@bepstein111]

YOOOO THE ONE WITH THE LCD!!!! I bet you could do all sorts of fun homelab-y type stuff with that!!

[@Munekin]

I love Matrox, assuming you could get your hands on the equipment they alone have produced enough little guys to keep this series going on infinitum.

[@ve2vfd]

Funny thing is that Matrox Montreal HQ is a few minutes away from where I live and a few of my friends worked there and only retired a few year ago so it's likely they worked on that system.

[@myleft9397]

Matrox & Zebra makes sense because they're both in Toronto, pull from the same pool of embedded HW/SW engineers, and make ruggedized computer stuff. [half way through edit: makes even more sense. Zebra had a lot of ruggedized and a little machine vision, and it seems Matrox had a lot of machine vision and a little ruggedized. Also they're both used in factories.]

[@tekvax01]

NTSC and PAL were not nescessaily colour system definitions, but were primarily transmission standards.

[@bengraham8833]

Another reason you might not want color video on a system like this is if you're using a camera that doesn't use visible light - I tangentially worked on a system like this that used x-rays to scan for melted globs in freshly spun fiberglass insulation wool. Our system used the linear scan style of cameras; as the fiberglass rolled by it would composite the lines into a big rolling buffer that would then get fed into some off-the-shelf object detection code.

[@jscipione]

8:06 “I’ve never seen that many FireWire ports on any computer in my life.” Mac Pro 2013 has 6, the 2009 model had 4.

[@AsmodeusDeviluke]

@17:05 its Viking 256MB PC100.

[@bryanmakesstuff]

The Fire Tower app may have just been a basic version of Computer Vision (CV) to monitor a site's flare stack for a flame-out. This can happen when the pilot light is blown out, which would cause a dangerous situation if the site had a blowdown event and the flare was not lit to burn off the gas. The serial ports could've been used to talk to any of the control systems or SCADA side to generate a process alarm in case someone wasn't watching the camera full time.

[@matthewf1979]

Microprocessors sit around the CPU cooler telling CRD stories to their grandchips. Best tech story teller on KZbin!

[@HorayNarea]

16:30 wait a minute, you can pause the boot-up sequence by literally pressing "pause"?! :o

[@bobingabout]

1:11:03 A lot of raspberry Pi addons do that actually. I have the TV hat, and that has a connector like that. it actually came with a header extender, where the extender plugs into the Pi's pin header, and it has these REALLY long pins on it, so not only does it raise the TV hat a little, but then the pins stick through to allow you to plug another hat on top of the TV hat.

[@xarin42]

It was probably 256 MB of ram based on the samsung k4S28 chips on it? but I'm really not sure...

[@mintzbuck]

Definitely Zinc chromate plating, the yellow stuff is hexavalent chrome. Zinc chromate is still very common, it's just all trivalent chrome now, because it isn't carcinogenic.

[@dunste123]

You know it's gonna be good when the episode is over an hour long

[@joetoney184]

Fun fact some ASPEED BMC chips for IPMI use matrox GPUs inside them.

[@NatetheAceOfficial]

1:01:16 - "There's two of 'em" - I WANT MY CAT PICTURES!!!

[@KAUSHIKKULSRESHTA]

Awesome video!, Little guys like these are a marvel to computing. Have you ever looked at National Instruments PXI controller PCs? They will surely fit the little guys series with all their quirks.

[@CathodeRayDude]

I'm glad you enjoyed! I don't think I'd looked at the NI PXI yet, but I'm very excited because I looked it up and immediately found a CompactPCI module! I just recently got a CompactPCI chassis and was champing at the bit to find other things to put in it, so I might end up buying one of these. Thank you so much!

[@helmut666kohl]

Well, some Mac G4s DID in fact have three FireWire ports! #3 was just hidden on the inside - standing upright on the motherboard.

[@Hafk]

That is disgusting, hell yeah

[@artofnoise5013]

I had to rewind (yes, rewind) to watch for “two of them”. It’s my favorite recurring gag.

[@hein-pietervanbraam3312]

Is it possible that all of the stuff "just working" now was because you replaced an already marginal DIMM?

[@xmlthegreat]

Yeah this makes the most sense

[@CathodeRayDude]

No, it was all still broken after I did that. But I did disassemble the entire machine and put it back together in the interim so who knows what connections I may have cleaned up

[@LordVarkson]

A fire tower was used by vintage fire fighters to see the whole city and watch for fires. So I'm assuming that the Fire Tower application is designed to have someone sit there and watch the camera output. But who knows really.

[@catfish552]

Thank you for showing us another little guy! They're always an interesting time, so I'm just fine with them accompanying us over this hot summer.

[@kitkatmelon]

hell yea i was just running out of things to watch in my primordial boredom WOO LITTLE GUYS

[@yellowcrescent]

14:10 the isolated I/O from this thing most likely connected up to a 24VDC input card on a PLC, and not directly to any control relays. And if they were extra fancy, maybe even over the local PLC Ethernet network via an I/O bridge from WonderWare or SoftwareToolbox -- both companies produce popular "software drivers" for Modbus Ethernet, Ethernet/IP, and various other protocols that run on Windows and VxWorks. Industrial and computer vision machines are fun.

[@CathodeRayDude]

I thought about that after I said it and I was gonna change the wording, but then I checked the deets on the SSRs, and the datasheet actually says the optoisolation is intended to resist back EMF, so I figured I'd keep it in. I can totally believe that you generally wouldn't, but it's neat that one could.

[@jakalair]

I can't help but wonder if this is the same kind of thing that is in the automated pop bottle recyclers here in Michigan. It seems like this would have everything needed to walk through the whole process.

[@bakonfreek]

We have machine vision all over the place in the company where I work. A couple of machines use three cameras and a laser to tell the machine how big a piece of meat is for automatically slicing, like, t-bone or ribeye steaks at a rate of like 20 per second with this massive rotary blade. It's also used ALL OVER the packaging side of the plant (instead of a barcode scanner, because a lot of packages don't have barcodes, but instead, big printed PLU numbers). That robot machine that scans the position of product on the belt and then grabs and places the product, we recently got one of those in as well, and, quite honestly, it's a big ol' some hundred thousand dollar piece of barely functional overengineered shit (can you tell I work in the machine maintenance department?). Machine vision is also used as a safety mechanism on the bandsaws they have for manual slicing of, like, pork chops and rib strips (and yes, they are based around Windows, I have gotten Starcraft and Diablo running on the bandsaws, don't tell my boss). There's also machine vision with an x-ray machine, I'll let you guess how that's used (hotdogs, meatballs, loafs of ground meat, etc).

[@meatblazestudios3778]

It went from working at Quaker to playing Quake

[@musashigundoh]

29:00 The eye icon that's used for both "Sure Pack" and "BDA Fire Tower" is one of standard icons bundled with an early version of either Visual Basic or Delphi. I don't remember which, but it's definitely familiar.

[@3drakaina]

1:04:30 That zinc coating is cool, but was used heavily in electronics chassis for vacuum tube tech, like radios, test equipment, and tv's before semiconductors became a thing. The downside is when the coating ages, if it's not stored in good conditions, the surface will get a yellow-ish green dust like layer on its surface that you can breathe in if it's disturbed. It's fine if it's just sitting there or inside a case or chassis, but yeah. Not so great for future owners and their lungs. It's not asbestos insulation levels of danger, but like you said, it's toxic.

[@thomasvnl]

Gravis, I like these little guys episodes. Please remain at the bench, don't panic, and keep on keeping on! Cheers. Also, I found the three firewire inputs a bit strange as well (as you were downplaying this little guy's speciality in the intro). I also own such an orange ONLOGIC box ;) They are indeed nothing special, just ruggedized computers for industrial use.

[@NiddNetworks]

Another great Little Guys episode!! Thanks Gravis - that filled some time where I should've been working :D

[@CableWrestler]

I think you should look at a PC that TechMoan covered - The DMP E-BOX 3350DX2

[@CableWrestler]

I've got one and it's so small and cute

[@CableWrestler]

It's got a 933mhz Pentium 1 equivalent with USB, Audio, 512MB DDR3 and is about the size of a floppy disk

[@iRedMCYT]

8:02 Every Mac Pro from 2006-2012 had like 4 or 6 FireWire ports.

[@todleo01]

At 5:25 you put your hand down on a crawling ant. I hope you didn't hurt the lil guy:)

[@SuzukiMitsumitzi]

I have many years of machine vision. Primarily focused on metrology (measuring parts) which has specific challenges. Datalogic made ipcs for generic poe 1.5 mega pixel image sensors. They produced image software as well and it used various techniques to process images for various measurements. We were measuring reliably down to microns for what it's worth using Keyence optical micrometer which are just fancy cameras and image processors.

[@Stefan_Payne]

nope, not all Pentium 3 are SDR SDRAM. There were DDR-SDRAM Chipsets, for example Via Apollo PRO 266, but ALi had something too (but I don't remember much). Serverworks might also have had something as well... BUt those are really really rare and due to the limited FSB, the performance gain was usually negligable, so people tended to not use that... Today its only nice to have because you can find 1GB DDR-SDRAM Modules more easily than 1GB SDR, that's all...

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

1:06:00 - There were DDR Pentium 3 chipsets. And there were RAMBUS Pentium 3 chipsets. (I have a dual slot Pentium 3 dual-channel-RAMBUS system under my desk right now.) This board almost certainly has the Via Apollo Pro 133 chipset which supports PC-100 and PC-133 SDRAM. They later made the Apollo Pro 266 chipset, which supports DDR-266 (PC-2100) memory. For Pentium III/Celeron.

[@wesleymays1931]

regarding the original RAM stick's capacity: (tldr: 256 megabytes) the chip's part number is obscured, but I could see K4S28... knowing it's an SDR memory chip (and most likely 4 bits wide since there's 9 sockets on one side. 1 of them is left vacant, which would have been used for ECC), I suspect it's the K4S280432D. according to the datasheet, each chip holds 32M x 4 bits. with 8 on each side and double sided load (assuming a 32 bit bus, as expected for SDR) that would be 64M x 32, or 256MB.

[@PileOfEmptyTapes]

Regarding the pickiness when it comes to RAM, I reckon the PC133 sticks may have been of the kind that don't play well with the i440BX chipset - it decidedly wants 16Mx8 chips on there and doesn't like the x4 ones that would have worked e.g. on AMD systems with VIA chipsets. 256 meg sticks in PC100 must be quite uncommon, if anyone bothered to do such a thing BX compatibility would have been high on the list of priorities. A Celeron 1200 would be a Tualatin, right? Wild to see one combined with a BX chipset out of the box. That's decidedly not a combination common outside enthusiast circles. Wait, and there's a VIA 686B southbridge? Maybe there's not a BX chipset on there at all but rather a VIA Apollo Pro 133A (694X), it would seem a lot more era-appropriate for sure. Then the PC100 thing may be a wonky BIOS.

[@Stefan_Payne]

As for multiple outputs: Yes, the G400 was the first graphics card to support 2 Outputs. On the other side(s): Geforce 2 MX; then Geforce 4 also had 2 Outputs. ANd Radeon VE aka 7000 and the 7500, but not the "normal" Radeon (later renamed to 7200).

[@Stefan_Payne]

As for Matrox being competitive in the 3D MArket: They were once. ANd only once. With the G400. It was the fastest card on the Market for a short time, before ATi released the Rage 128 PRO and the TNT2 in 1999... That card competed very well with the TNT2 and was the fastest card on the market until the TNT2 came out about 6 Months later. Was a bit slower in 16 bit, but slapped it around with a large trout in the 32bit... The G200 almost got it, but in the end was a bit weak due to only 64bit BUS... The Parhelia was not too bad, but they really lost the plot by that time and everyone else improved just way more than Matrox was able to... Sad, because they did a great job with the G400, but it might have been a bit late to the Market. If they did a good followup in the high end with the G450 (=retaining the 128bit Interface, doubling the Pipeline, adding TnL), it might have looked different. But Matrox chose their niche and gave up on the Consumer market...

[@adampiechockibrown]

Intellicam was used in two ways. As a testing tool - is there video on this input pin and what does it look like. And as a config tool for DCF files - these allowed the frame grabber to be used with non standard sources. Basic framegrabbers like the Meteor2 and Orion would have limited options just for CCIR/RS170/PAL/NTSC sources, such as exposure timings or clock sources. More sophisticated grabbers (Meteor2/DIG, Pulsar, Genesis) would have much more configurable inputs where you could change the timing, clock frequency, sync duration. You could do multi-tap cameras, linescan, asynchronous reset. All sorts. This kind of configuration was necessary until (fairly) recently when digital interfaces based on usb , Ethernet or CoaXpress started supporting GenICam. Which basically uses an XML file to tell the framegrabber which options the camera supports

[@nalinux]

I suppose all of us older guys remember with nostalgia when Matrox still made their own cards, and we had more choice than just Ati . sorry AMD and Nvidia. Sis, Matrox, 3Dfx, S3 Savage, Intel i740 ( :) ). Playing on LAN involved moving km away, included the heavy CRT monitor, plugging network cables to a poor Network hub with no Dhcp, It was a bit of a pain. Or worse, coaxial cables :) End 1990 were really a good time for this crap. Matrox M3D accelerator was quite interesting circa when Voodoo 1 were launched.

[@Godzilla_Jesus]

Judging by the quick still frame, I'm guessing it's 128MB module that failed. Just by the layout of the RAM chips. Oh, and CSNW is Novell NetWare client software.

[@sedrosken831]

The Millennium, Millennium II and Mystique are more known for their superb 2D capabilities than their mediocre, negligible 3D capabilities. There's supposedly an M3D port of Mechwarrior 2 that sounds neat to play with sometime, but as a 2D SVGA card, especially in but not limited to DOS, they are unparalleled -- ridiculously fast, very compatible, and the best, most vibrant, razor sharp image you could get out of VGA of the era. They didn't skimp on the RAMDAC like everyone else did, and they'd have been crucified if they had, as these cards were (with the exception of the Mystique I believe) more targeted at businesses than consumers. They were very expensive. The G450 is a die-shrink and I think underclocked variant of the G400, made to make use of DDR memory if memory serves. It's a DirectX 6 card and it's actually pretty okay, but if you have an AGP slot, a GeForce2 MX would do better all around, and I don't think that's very controversial to say.

[@abbalooga]

Help! I need the surface mount through connector from 1:11:00 in the video. And for the life of me I can't find any! How do I find these slim bad boys. I can find full height (8 or 5mm) square female SMD with through capability but I can't find any slim Bois! Does anyone know where

[@exidy-yt]

I bet that this thing plays a mean game of Shogo or Need for Speed: Porche Evolution! I wanted a Matrox Mystique/Mellinium card in the WORST way in the mid/late 90s, they were THE enthusiast 3D accellerator for those too cool for 3DFX and Nvidia RIVA 128. Good memories!

[@wyrdlg]

These power connectors seem to be based on an old DIN norm. Adapted to IEC/DIN EN 60130-9 types IEC-30 and IEC-31: four-pin, 72°, 216°. Then it probably got stuck in china as a quasi standard?