วีดีโอ

Do you have a recommendation on temperature, maybe around 100C? I will definitely give this a try next time on one of these. I've heard that boiling or just soaking the plastics in warm water can rejuvenate them a bit as well. Thanks for the tip!

Haha yeah! What's old is new again, too bad card slots disappeared around the same time as the optical drives. I'd like to find a sensible USB based cardbus controller, but even then I hear Linux and others are dropping mainline support for card services.

I've seen some HPIB/GPIB cards floating around that look really interesting as well. Though I don't have any of that equipment I still want to collect them all! I wonder if the DAQ Card is some sort of programmable GPIO?

@@RobertsRetro The one I have is a DAQCard-AI-16XE-50. It has 8 digital I/O channels, but I only know their use via the LabView software. Fun fact: the 25 year old LabView scripts that ran with this card can be used on the latest versions of the NI software and hardware requiring only minor (adress) changes!

Thanks for the kind words! I have always been fascinated by these tiny expansion cards. Just a dozen or so ISA or PCI cards take up so much space where I can fit 50 or more PCMCIA cards in a small box. I hope to cover some of the cards individually or just a few at a time in a future video. Let me know if there are any that jump out at you as being interesting!

@@RobertsRetro Right, easy to store and cheap to ship :) I'm really curious if the PCMCIA FFDs work well with other laptops, non-Libretto ones. In pure DOS in particular.

Good luck with the repair! I hope there is enough info in the video and description to replicate the replacement ribbon. My biggest tips are, get a bunch of ribbons to practice on, and take your time opening the Poqet. It probably took about 2 hours between taking sanity breaks.

@@RobertsRetro I'm pretty sure my LCD is cracked, so I'm probably still stuck. It's been in storage for about 20 years. 😂 Good to see it's possible to disassemble things. Maybe I'll try to hook up an 8 bit ISA graphics card to that port and run it on an external screen.

@AdamChristensen Dang that's too bad, and I'm actually working on a project to break out the expansion connector to an ISA card. Apparently all the signals are there but if course the Poqet BIOS is unique to say the least!

I have a detailed write-up for this on my site at xodustech.com/projects/esphome-lego-power-functions

That's awesome! I assume the SL-5000G to be a German variant? I missed out on this line of PDAs entirely, having mostly used early MS-DOS handhelds like the HP 100/200LX and Windows mobile such as Philips Velo or HP Jornada. Glad I was able to get these two units back to working condition, there's a lot I want to cover with Compact Flash cards. The driver support in windows mobile is terrible, whereas on the Zaurus even early as it is has fairly contemporary support for a wide range of cards. Thank's for the kind words!

@@RobertsRetro Yes, the G is the German variant. Yours doesn't look any different from mine, though. So whatever justified the specific name. Apart from the Zaurus I have slight memory of some different PDA which lost its contents when the battery ran out - making the thing completely unusable for anything beyond toying around. The experience was so bad, that I even forgot the device's name. As for CF support - as far as I know, I had two wifi cards. One 802.11b and one 802.11g, and I thing the b worked better (or at all); I would't take any bets on it, though. After all it's been 20 years.

It's a bold claim for sure! Best I can tell the Agenda VR3 released in 2001 by Agenda Computing, Inc may have beaten the Zaurus in 2002 to the punch. The lines get blurred when Sharp released the developer version, the SL-5000D in 2001 as well. Though the VR3 must not have been very successful as almost no trace of it exists in modern times while there are dozens of Zaurus PDAs on various auction sites. Not to mention fairly large communities of mods, apps, and alternative OSs for the Zaurus as well.

That's a really interesting idea! I bet you could create a carrier board that takes one of the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules and then route some of the ports perhaps out of the PCMCIA cutout. I had actually bought some Libretto 100ct units but the plastics are in such bad shape. The hardware itself has held up surprisingly well after all this time.

Yep that sounds like the right chip. There is a discord chat "the cybiko zone" at discord.gg/QTsvsFwP. You should be able to find all the software there and the cybiko tool boot images that Tim has created. Thanks for the kind words and good luck on your repair!

@@RobertsRetro awesome! Thanks 😊

Thanks for the tip! I'm definitely going to try this next time.

Yeah this is certainly an option, I actually have one of these for both the barrel type and the weird square two prong the M3/100ct/110ct uses. The problem is, I tend to misplace them since they are inherently proprietary, while I always have some sort of USB-C charger kicking around and cables all over. The one I made for the barrel type the 50ct uses didn't make it into the video because I still can't find it!

You are absolutely right! The only reason I leave the battery in sometimes with the Libretto is that it tends to tip over without the extra weight in the front, and the battery does help hold the case together somewhat when the screws are removed. I tend to use a known dead battery when doing this, but that can also have its own problems. No excuse for leaving the power connected. DOH! Thanks for pointing this out for anyone else following along!

@RobertsRetro I read my comment again, and it seemed a bit harsh 😅, I actually like your content very much, and everyone makes mistakes

That sounds like an awesome project! I hope you post it here on TH-cam or maybe HackADay once you get it all going. Also a huge fan of www.youtube.com/@dosdude1 and the amazing upgrades they perform. I'm excited to get this Mitsubishi Amity CN going as I bet it will make a fantastic retro DOS games machine.

A ZIF socket may have fit in the bottom on the motherboard, though there is only a small width in the cover above the keyboard. It's really only as wide as the cable itself plus a couple of MM and likely some modification would be required to either that cover or some trimming of the ZIF socket. I did want to try this but got impatient after waiting a few weeks for the cables to arrive and at that point I wasn't sure if the cables were even the right pitch. Definitely worth a shot if I come across another Poqet with a similar issue. There is no way a connector would have fit in the upper LCD housing though.

This is a good idea, I had considered also trying a vinyl or fabric dye but didn't get around to ordering it in time for this video. I was worried about the coloring being uneven or turning out even more unsightly than the the all white cable and somehow looking worse. The white cable is actually growing on me, especially as a reminder of the effort involved in replacing the cable.

@@RobertsRetro Try a black Sharpie. It should look reasonable. You can always remove it if you don't like it with IPA.

Thanks for the kind words! I was sure that once I cut the original ribbon it would be the last time this Poqet PC ever worked again, very pleased the patience paid off. It's a shame how many of these have probably been discarded in the past for the same problem.

I wasn't able to get this bit on video, the process though was to heat the iron to about 200C and melt away the white plastic about 2-4MM at the end of the ribbon. With the thin contacts exposed this was easy to solder onto the back of the LCD driver board. I'll have to improve my camera setup to get better shots of this type of work in the future. Thanks for the kind words!

@@RobertsRetro thank you so much for the insight! I have to deal with FFCs myself from time to time, and particularly with ones that have worn ends in need to be refreshed. Your melting approach sounds very promising. I have used grinding tools and a scalpel knife recently but it's very tedious and the slightest mistake ruins the cable, my fingers, or both. Will try out your idea definitely next time.

I think it's not the LCD, it's the CGA compatible graphics. Due to memory contention, many CGA implementations would blank during scrolling to avoid showing noise.

@@kuro68000 It's been a few years, but as far as I recall, the blanking trick was only used when the code didn't know (or care) where the display was being refreshed. Otherwise the scrolling code would wait for the vertical sync and do the updates when nothing was being output to the display.

@@akiko009 Certainly on early CGA cards and BIOSes, the code that handled printing to screen would blank it when scrolling. Scrolling would have been extremely slow if it tried to do it all in the vertical blanking period. No hardware assist and a slow 8 bit bus, with a slow CPU.

@@kuro68000 I wrote code back in the day that did its updates during the blanking period and it could keep up just fine. But anyway, it's been a while.

I haven't given up on mine yet, hoping to do a follow up to this soon. Signs point to a RAM issue, but Toshiba stacked the onboard memory using an interposer type board making this difficult to probe and check for broken solder points. Are you seeing any parallel POST activity on yours?

@@RobertsRetro Unfortunatelly I just started my adventure with retro electronics 😓 I have no docking station and equipment to check that.

Yeah, this is really annoying about the M3 specifically since I believe the dock is only compatible with that one model. The others like the Libretto 50/60/70 and 100/110 had multiple versions of the dock available and compatible with several models. Since the dock is "mostly" pass-through I may be able to get the pinout for the parallel port at least, in theory you could solder to the internal pins to get the POST code signals.

​@@RobertsRetro I will wait for any update from You :) good luck!