what did you ask for from sandy claws? Watch all the Makers Secret Santa videos here: th-cam.com/play/PLBsfTOjKcQe-dxiUtDUMUkOL3bXDowADb.html Ps for the multiplexing smart alecs you are not wrong! However it made less sense to me as you’d only use 1 row of the uniselector. So I did it like this as i thought it would be a cooler project with the large mass of wires and a simpler description. It’s the age old thing if your gunna build silly you may as well go full hog
this chaser is a work of art! i can't stop pushing the butt. i mean button. blows my mind how you worked that all out. and how does it stop on it's own?! so many questions. Merry & happy to you!
The slow mechanical spool has holes every 6 poles. Button turn one step of the slow spool. The pattern is repeated 5 times around the spool, so it auto-reset at the end
@@johnnylavoie I was about to comment "then keeping the start button held would make it run continuously", but I can't figure out why he has to release the button again (unless it's intentionally turning off supply to left counter to avoid to "burn-on")
The comment section is like a choose your own adventure book from the 80s and 90s. Keep finding new secret Santa gifts! This old tiny led me here via xyla
I love electromechanical stuff. Technology Connections did an episode (I think it may have been a couple) on an old jukebox and all its electromechanical wizardry. It’s just amazing what can be done with just relays and clever cams and things.
When I trained to be a technician, I was taught to adjust stepper uniselectors. A group of (stupid, bored) trainees, including myself, used to tune up the uniselectors to go as fast as possible, drawing bright blue arcs off the solenoid contactors. We even had t-shirts made up for the "Uniselector Racing Team", no one said we had taste. No mater how fast you could get a stepper uniselector to go, it does not come close to the speed of a Siemens motor uniselector - these were massive and used a toothed brake to ensure they stopped on the correct outlet. The big spring loaded brake was held away by a 50V 1 amp solenoid as the uniselector rotated, once it reached the correct outlet, the current was cut and the toothed brake engaged a sort of toothed gear (if you see a toothed wheel, that is a motor uni). Every once in a while, the relays that held the brake up would malfunction and keep the current on, it didn't take long for the brake solenoid to go up in smoke. The motor was an open affair with two coils at 90 degrees and a rotor. I remember all too well servicing and "oil and dagging " (lubricating) these things in batches of 100 at a time. The Motor unis did around 200 steps a second and were very hard to follow by eye.
This reminds me of something: Back when I was a kid (80's), my little town had a BIG arcade/pizza joint, kind of like a Chuck E Cheeze, but cooler, because we could go without parental supervision. Anyway...they had a big light chaser sign outside. The thing was loud as hell, and we could hear all of the mechanical movements inside. One night, we were taking a break from Double Dragon (most likely 👍), standing outside, listening to it, and trying to figure out how it worked. My friend figured that it must be moving a "chain" of some sort, that had conductive contacts that would light up the bulbs as they made contact with the bulb, thus creating the "chasing" effect. Seemed to make sense to 2 kids who didn't have the convenience of seeing inside of it.
From my days building telephone and telex exchanges, it is called lacing. Originally, waxed, natural twine was used, but in later days when plastic insulation came in, we used a cable tie system, these ties were different to the cable ties most people use. We would lace up the rack wiring as one big loom from about 20-30 of 100 -200 pair cables, depending on the rack type. We also block-laced cables together using twine and a thin blade with a hook on the end. These blocks were formed of cables of 5/8 inch (16 mm) or so in diameter, formed up into rectangular blocks of around 25-40 x 20-30 cables, once they were laced together you could walk on them. When a smaller block of cables was fed off to a rack we would use forms to create the sweeping curves, sometimes they would twist as they curved, very complex, very time-consuming to do, very pretty when new, massive dust collectors, so eventually everything, including the brightly coloured silk covered individual wires, would end up a dark grey. I wish I had "acquired" a couple of metres of a big block of cables when one of the exchanges was scrapped, it would have been perfect for wiring up vintage equipment - nothing modern looks right after you have seen silk-covered wire. The guys from the recyclers who scrapped the exchange used big wrecking saws to cut up the cable runs into manageable pieces. No one who built these exchanges should ever witness their destruction, I was just unlucky.
@@robertnicholson7733 Yes! Lacing. I have worked the headends for Comcast and built pay per view bays which required the square bundles of coax, we used plastic cutting boards with the proper holes drilled in them to assemble the runs. The stitching needles and loops are still in my garage. I have pictures of the bundles as they roll and drop off the needed number of cables in specified areas. Never been sliced to the bone by waxed string like I have by a cable tie that was cut off at a 45 degree angle, but I do have scars from the snips!
@@theemiddleone Good that you have photographs, cameras have never been a thing with my family, there are three photos of me total in a 5 year period, and they were all from my University student card. The photos that I wish I had the most were from the Chief Telegraph Office (where I was sent by the management for my sins), Brisbane, Australia, the rows of Motor Uniselectors, but mostly the CTO just before Christmas when it went into congestion and the store and forward system (it used punched tape as the storage medium) would overflow to form massive piles of punched paper tape in front of each reperforator sender. Woe betide the technician who misjudged a step trying to avoid these huge piles of tape while replacing a faulty machine and put a crease in or damaged a tape. Some time in the last 10 years it appears that somebody discarded my carefully preserved Christmas picture tapes that we used to send over the Telex network at night. Another loss.
I used to program PLC Ladder logic and I was just thinking that that uniselector thing is what was implemented as a drum selector in the PLC I used to work on. Each input would advance the selector one tick and the PLC drum selector could set up to 16 different contacts to on with up to 99 possible positions for the selector. Cool stuff. I knew theoretically what the drum selector was based on but until now had never actually seen one in use.
y'know, if you've got an entire retro phone relay, you could do the world's best exhibit on phreaking boxes. The only museums I've seen with anything on them just have old cracked plastic bits with some wires hanging out - Cool enough from a historical perspective, but you could show one in action, from both sides.
After watching all episodes i must say this is my favorite project! The wiring looks stunning, almost like thick hair:) these old chasers are art pieces on their own, but you definitely took it to another level! And I also love the sound, very satisfying^^ i dig your style!
When they upgraded my little tiny island from analogue to digital I got the contents of two telephone exchanges. Unfortunately I threw away all the rotary stuff and just kept all the racks. This stuff was built to be resilient to a nearby bomb blast. All that steel has been used in very creative ways.
Electromechanical stuff is like seeing magic. I’m always hypnotized when looking at stuff from the past like those thingamagingies. I wish I could see and play with the telephone exchange.
All of the creators did an awesome job with the Secret Santa builds loved everyone of them. Thanks to the tested team for getting me started on this playlist and some new channels to add to my watch list.
Your cat is so laid back. My cat freaks out any time I make any sort of noises from a frequency gen, vco, random noise gen, cars outside, my other cat, radios, thunder, fireworks etc. lol. The sound of your apparatus sent him running for the hills, as expected. Then I see your cat's reaction to it just like "oh... that... back to sleep". I'm sure your cat's had plenty of exposure and gotten used to it. But you would expect the same to be true of my cat as well. Even my other cat gets freaked out by frequency generator sounds. Even though I try to keep it quiet.
With all this electromechanical stuff it's a wonder that your museum hasn't blown every circuit in the neighborhood. But maybe one day. Life goals, am I right?
Sam the butt song with synth beats is straight electronic fire.... You have to drop it on Spotify 2nd. That electromagnetic light chaser is so cool, The sound reminds me of a stungun
The highlight for me this year was your foray into building a telephone exchange, and all that went with it! I remember those exchanges back in the 70’s so I was impressed how you learnt so much, so quickly and got it all working. I don’t know how many hours are in your days, but you sure do fit a lot in! Happy new year, and looking forward to more great videos. 😀
It never ceases to amaze me how young people are so impressed by this old tech, for those of us who had to work with it it's still good riddance. It was expensive to make and maintain and wasn't particularly reliable, anybody else remember getting bad connections when using the phone? I remember the noise and smell of telephone exchange rooms, all those Strowger sets moving and resetting and the rotten egg smell from the battery that was on charge.
that telephone exchange alone is more work than I feel I would be capable of drafting and putting together . They used to have hundreds of these and massive buildings as well . Mustve sounded like a modern day casino. Fascinating
When I was in college I used to participate in a lot of hackathons. One year a few of my friends decided to build a 4-bit computer (with proper Von Neumann architecture and everything) entirely out of relays. Their ISA I think just had instructions for loading, storing, and adding two registers, but it was totally legit and you could write programs by flipping some positional switches in a ROM bank they had made. They designed and laid it out beforehand, but it still took all four of them the whole 36 hours with a soldering gun each to get it done and they were definitely in the same mindset as you about it 😂
Back when movie theaters had big glitzi marquees, you could stand under the chaser blinking overhang and hear the rotating and clicking bits quite plainly. As a young mad scientist, I even made a few variations of chaser circuits using motors and cams and microswitches. Just 4 fun.
So TOT is the origination of my Christmas eve tube journey. Followed the knife, and wind up finding someone that is as wonderfully crazy about old tech as I am. The hands danced magic this year. Love the chaser and now, OFF TO THE BUTT BUILD!!!
As a person who works for a telephone company I have to say, decent lacing. I was surprised you did that for this project but very appropriate. Well done.
Wow that is so cool! These old clicky electronics are SO CLEVER! Not having semiconductors really pushed clever minds down amazing avenues. Well done sir! I bet Tony is having such a blast
I spent 40 years working in on electro mechanical Stroger Telephone Exchanges and recognise these items well. All of our exchangers ran at 50 volts, although some smaller Exchanges and PABXs were 24 volts. They all had battery back to protect against power cuts. They were certainly more bomb proof than the current electronic stuff of today and just kept on working. Lighting and electrical spikes were all in a days work for these exchanges. The betting industry used this same equipment as it was ready made for the "TOTE" machines used at tracks for Dog and Horse racing. As this stuff was so well made was also used in Traffic Light control on many road junctions. Plessey and GEC being one of the main UK manufacturers. The switches and keys were also used by the BBC for switching circuits as they well so well made.
This is awesome. Can I recommend looking at wire wrapping wire and tools? The wire is thin, dead easy to strip with the tool, and can be soldered or wrapped, depending on the project. For these types of cray-esque projects, it's a massive time saver. It also lets you solder the wires direct onto fine pitch ICs, which is usually hard to do
Props for the waxed string wire management! I first saw that technique being used in real life in an operating ATT CO outside of Portland Oregon. There is some crazy story why ATT / BT required all cables to be tied down with waxed string. That is a skill that is almost non existent these days.
It’s not insanely difficult of a thing you made if you understand how it works but like, it’s done so well and looks cool. When I was in college the first time, back in like 2002, I remember actually being taught about a device that was functionally the same as those things. Though when I dropped out a year later to work full time as an electrician, that marked the end of my electro-mechanical journey. They actually changed the entire course right after I dropped out to be more electronic based, less mechanical based.
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER a project I had to design using a similar device was what was called a lighthouse light system. Basically, making it so that as you go up the floors, I think there were 5 in the example, the one above turns on when the one bellow turns off. With 5 floors the wiring looked about the same, in terms of number of wires. Again, not hard when you understand but it took a bit for us to wrap our heads around it.
*10:00** Just think of the bizarre journey this song has taken to reach your ears...* (maybe starting even earlier...) some painter WAAAAAY back in time, somehow hears or otherwise acquire the notes to this song, decides (or is commissioned) to paint some horrible hellscape or whatever, and for some reason decides to paint those notes on some dudes ass... years, decades, centuries pass by, many people might see the painting maybe laugh at it, maybe be horrified etc... eventually we invent electricity, computers, whatever... and some person decides to create a synth machine & encode this song inside, which is transmitted through a (inter-)net-work of computers to reach YOUR specific device & be played there... :D
Awesome gift idea for TOT. & impressive work on the neat wiring. If I tried that, it would look like a bird’s nest. The electromechanical vibe is very cool & reminds me of some of the things I saw when I recently had an opportunity to walk through a 60+ yr old, deactivated power plant.
Ok, I think I’ve seen all the Secret Santas now and I’m pretty sure This Old Tony got the coolest one of all, followed only slightly “behind” by yours!
These rare events of human ingenuity cause my stone-cold, misanthropic heart going faster, and me wanting to scream in the middle of the night "I FUCKING LOVE YOU, GUYS!"
That's a lot of work into a project. But with that amount of practice, your soldering skills are likely top-notch. Also some old-timey devices passed on electro-mechanical parts for electro-optical for certain applications. Photo-resistors are one of the oldest solid state electronic devices out there, so they were also around in the time when electro-mechanical things dominated. Basically electro-optical would let a thing operate relatively quietly, and some kind of shadow mask (interruptor disk or punch card) with a backlight would switch the series of photo-resistors to do the thing. Of course before vacuum-tubes that would still drive relays or similar types of switches elsewhere down the line, but the part that programmed the sequence wouldn't be prone to wearing out like something that had brushes or switches dragging over it to interrupt a circuit. (A loop of paper tape going over switches wouldn't last as long, as where one going over lights would only wear on the sprocket holes use to drive the loop around.) So that's how some things like marquee signs were done before what we consider modern computing. The clicky-clack is definitely neat, but some of the old stuff is also ingenious in other ways. Might be neat to try and find examples of those too.
what did you ask for from sandy claws?
Watch all the Makers Secret Santa videos here: th-cam.com/play/PLBsfTOjKcQe-dxiUtDUMUkOL3bXDowADb.html
Ps for the multiplexing smart alecs you are not wrong! However it made less sense to me as you’d only use 1 row of the uniselector. So I did it like this as i thought it would be a cooler project with the large mass of wires and a simpler description. It’s the age old thing if your gunna build silly you may as well go full hog
A new LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER video
A heck of alot of kosmo panels haha, merry christmas sam :)
Thanks for putting them all in one place!!!
@@tylerthefolf1856 whooop! good luck :D
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER all worked first try and the signed filter panel in the centre finishes it off perfectly :)))
this chaser is a work of art! i can't stop pushing the butt. i mean button. blows my mind how you worked that all out. and how does it stop on it's own?! so many questions. Merry & happy to you!
TOT MY CATS SAY HAPPY MERRY TO YOU AND YOURS
Excellent videos mister Tony. Merry Christmas
This was great thank you guys both❤️
The slow mechanical spool has holes every 6 poles. Button turn one step of the slow spool. The pattern is repeated 5 times around the spool, so it auto-reset at the end
@@johnnylavoie
I was about to comment "then keeping the start button held would make it run continuously", but I can't figure out why he has to release the button again (unless it's intentionally turning off supply to left counter to avoid to "burn-on")
We're so glad you like it!
I don't just like it I LOVE it... would kill for one of those, it's Butterific.
The comment section is like a choose your own adventure book from the 80s and 90s. Keep finding new secret Santa gifts! This old tiny led me here via xyla
This is amazing. I‘m sure Hieronimus approves it! 👍
you're fucking amazing
Y’all truly outdid yourselves
I love electromechanical stuff. Technology Connections did an episode (I think it may have been a couple) on an old jukebox and all its electromechanical wizardry. It’s just amazing what can be done with just relays and clever cams and things.
I have a 1950's era pinball machine, in the upright section it has a rotary wheel that connects to contacts, after a impulse it advances to the next
When I trained to be a technician, I was taught to adjust stepper uniselectors. A group of (stupid, bored) trainees, including myself, used to tune up the uniselectors to go as fast as possible, drawing bright blue arcs off the solenoid contactors. We even had t-shirts made up for the "Uniselector Racing Team", no one said we had taste.
No mater how fast you could get a stepper uniselector to go, it does not come close to the speed of a Siemens motor uniselector - these were massive and used a toothed brake to ensure they stopped on the correct outlet. The big spring loaded brake was held away by a 50V 1 amp solenoid as the uniselector rotated, once it reached the correct outlet, the current was cut and the toothed brake engaged a sort of toothed gear (if you see a toothed wheel, that is a motor uni). Every once in a while, the relays that held the brake up would malfunction and keep the current on, it didn't take long for the brake solenoid to go up in smoke. The motor was an open affair with two coils at 90 degrees and a rotor. I remember all too well servicing and "oil and dagging " (lubricating) these things in batches of 100 at a time. The Motor unis did around 200 steps a second and were very hard to follow by eye.
This reminds me of something: Back when I was a kid (80's), my little town had a BIG arcade/pizza joint, kind of like a Chuck E Cheeze, but cooler, because we could go without parental supervision. Anyway...they had a big light chaser sign outside. The thing was loud as hell, and we could hear all of the mechanical movements inside. One night, we were taking a break from Double Dragon (most likely 👍), standing outside, listening to it, and trying to figure out how it worked. My friend figured that it must be moving a "chain" of some sort, that had conductive contacts that would light up the bulbs as they made contact with the bulb, thus creating the "chasing" effect. Seemed to make sense to 2 kids who didn't have the convenience of seeing inside of it.
Love the touch of wax string stitching.
Its fun watching younger folks "discover" what I took for granted and did for a living.
keep it up!
When I saw all the wires I was like "you should dress that up. Please don't use zip ties". I should never doubt.
From my days building telephone and telex exchanges, it is called lacing. Originally, waxed, natural twine was used, but in later days when plastic insulation came in, we used a cable tie system, these ties were different to the cable ties most people use.
We would lace up the rack wiring as one big loom from about 20-30 of 100 -200 pair cables, depending on the rack type. We also block-laced cables together using twine and a thin blade with a hook on the end. These blocks were formed of cables of 5/8 inch (16 mm) or so in diameter, formed up into rectangular blocks of around 25-40 x 20-30 cables, once they were laced together you could walk on them. When a smaller block of cables was fed off to a rack we would use forms to create the sweeping curves, sometimes they would twist as they curved, very complex, very time-consuming to do, very pretty when new, massive dust collectors, so eventually everything, including the brightly coloured silk covered individual wires, would end up a dark grey.
I wish I had "acquired" a couple of metres of a big block of cables when one of the exchanges was scrapped, it would have been perfect for wiring up vintage equipment - nothing modern looks right after you have seen silk-covered wire. The guys from the recyclers who scrapped the exchange used big wrecking saws to cut up the cable runs into manageable pieces. No one who built these exchanges should ever witness their destruction, I was just unlucky.
@@robertnicholson7733 Yes! Lacing.
I have worked the headends for Comcast and built pay per view bays which required the square bundles of coax, we used plastic cutting boards with the proper holes drilled in them to assemble the runs. The stitching needles and loops are still in my garage.
I have pictures of the bundles as they roll and drop off the needed number of cables in specified areas.
Never been sliced to the bone by waxed string like I have by a cable tie that was cut off at a 45 degree angle, but I do have scars from the snips!
@@theemiddleone Good that you have photographs, cameras have never been a thing with my family, there are three photos of me total in a 5 year period, and they were all from my University student card. The photos that I wish I had the most were from the Chief Telegraph Office (where I was sent by the management for my sins), Brisbane, Australia, the rows of Motor Uniselectors, but mostly the CTO just before Christmas when it went into congestion and the store and forward system (it used punched tape as the storage medium) would overflow to form massive piles of punched paper tape in front of each reperforator sender. Woe betide the technician who misjudged a step trying to avoid these huge piles of tape while replacing a faulty machine and put a crease in or damaged a tape.
Some time in the last 10 years it appears that somebody discarded my carefully preserved Christmas picture tapes that we used to send over the Telex network at night. Another loss.
I used to program PLC Ladder logic and I was just thinking that that uniselector thing is what was implemented as a drum selector in the PLC I used to work on. Each input would advance the selector one tick and the PLC drum selector could set up to 16 different contacts to on with up to 99 possible positions for the selector. Cool stuff. I knew theoretically what the drum selector was based on but until now had never actually seen one in use.
I'll never forget seeing footage of an electromechanical phone system working using similar switches. Pulse dialing suddenly made sense!
y'know, if you've got an entire retro phone relay, you could do the world's best exhibit on phreaking boxes. The only museums I've seen with anything on them just have old cracked plastic bits with some wires hanging out - Cool enough from a historical perspective, but you could show one in action, from both sides.
Awesome idea....
I think those only worked with a very specific era of phone equipment which was the stuff around the 60s through the 80s
YES!!
Those uniselectors are beautiful art pieces unto themselves.
After watching all episodes i must say this is my favorite project! The wiring looks stunning, almost like thick hair:) these old chasers are art pieces on their own, but you definitely took it to another level! And I also love the sound, very satisfying^^ i dig your style!
7:00 It's like a Hieronymous Bosch painting. Would not be surprised if that was the inspiration.
Reminds me of Bletchley Park training courses. It was old tech even then.
When they upgraded my little tiny island from analogue to digital I got the contents of two telephone exchanges. Unfortunately I threw away all the rotary stuff and just kept all the racks. This stuff was built to be resilient to a nearby bomb blast. All that steel has been used in very creative ways.
Electromechanical stuff is like seeing magic. I’m always hypnotized when looking at stuff from the past like those thingamagingies.
I wish I could see and play with the telephone exchange.
All of the creators did an awesome job with the Secret Santa builds loved everyone of them. Thanks to the tested team for getting me started on this playlist and some new channels to add to my watch list.
Your cat is so laid back. My cat freaks out any time I make any sort of noises from a frequency gen, vco, random noise gen, cars outside, my other cat, radios, thunder, fireworks etc. lol. The sound of your apparatus sent him running for the hills, as expected. Then I see your cat's reaction to it just like "oh... that... back to sleep". I'm sure your cat's had plenty of exposure and gotten used to it. But you would expect the same to be true of my cat as well. Even my other cat gets freaked out by frequency generator sounds. Even though I try to keep it quiet.
The electromechanical device is amazing! And of course the butt keyboard is simply lovely.
With all this electromechanical stuff it's a wonder that your museum hasn't blown every circuit in the neighborhood. But maybe one day. Life goals, am I right?
That actually sounded awesome with the beat to it!
Sam the butt song with synth beats is straight electronic fire.... You have to drop it on Spotify
2nd. That electromagnetic light chaser is so cool, The sound reminds me of a stungun
The waxed cord lacing is the perfect finishing touch! So great you didn’t do nylon zip ties!
The creations this year have been pure art. Such a good yearly event. Legends
The highlight for me this year was your foray into building a telephone exchange, and all that went with it! I remember those exchanges back in the 70’s so I was impressed how you learnt so much, so quickly and got it all working. I don’t know how many hours are in your days, but you sure do fit a lot in! Happy new year, and looking forward to more great videos. 😀
Woah! Look at it! One beuatiful gift, exchanged for another.
-Ruth & Shawn
I love the choice of lavender and pink wires.
It never ceases to amaze me how young people are so impressed by this old tech, for those of us who had to work with it it's still good riddance.
It was expensive to make and maintain and wasn't particularly reliable, anybody else remember getting bad connections when using the phone?
I remember the noise and smell of telephone exchange rooms, all those Strowger sets moving and resetting and the rotten egg smell from the battery that was on charge.
Ha yeah but it’s just the same as someone your age liking steam engines. There is a place for it. Or there wouldn’t have been any Fred dibnah
that telephone exchange alone is more work than I feel I would be capable of drafting and putting together . They used to have hundreds of these and massive buildings as well . Mustve sounded like a modern day casino. Fascinating
Strong vibe as well , buttechno
That butt song remix was great!
Amazing work of art. I've been following This Old Tony for years, but you've just earned yourself another subscriber.
When I was in college I used to participate in a lot of hackathons. One year a few of my friends decided to build a 4-bit computer (with proper Von Neumann architecture and everything) entirely out of relays. Their ISA I think just had instructions for loading, storing, and adding two registers, but it was totally legit and you could write programs by flipping some positional switches in a ROM bank they had made. They designed and laid it out beforehand, but it still took all four of them the whole 36 hours with a soldering gun each to get it done and they were definitely in the same mindset as you about it 😂
Back when movie theaters had big glitzi marquees, you could stand under the chaser blinking overhang and hear the rotating and clicking bits quite plainly. As a young mad scientist, I even made a few variations of chaser circuits using motors and cams and microswitches. Just 4 fun.
So TOT is the origination of my Christmas eve tube journey. Followed the knife, and wind up finding someone that is as wonderfully crazy about old tech as I am. The hands danced magic this year. Love the chaser and now, OFF TO THE BUTT BUILD!!!
Love those uniselectors. Yeh, i would go down a rabbit hole also with electro mechanical parts.
As a person who works for a telephone company I have to say, decent lacing. I was surprised you did that for this project but very appropriate. Well done.
Wow that is so cool! These old clicky electronics are SO CLEVER! Not having semiconductors really pushed clever minds down amazing avenues. Well done sir! I bet Tony is having such a blast
Nice to see the old painting of a guy that was born in the city i was born in as well is still known all across the world.
Mr Hieronymus Bosch.
I'd love to see a 5 second exposure of it as it runs. Dude, your brain works on a different level. Awesome job!
I spent 40 years working in on electro mechanical Stroger Telephone Exchanges and recognise these items well. All of our exchangers ran at 50 volts, although some smaller Exchanges and PABXs were 24 volts. They all had battery back to protect against power cuts. They were certainly more bomb proof than the current electronic stuff of today and just kept on working. Lighting and electrical spikes were all in a days work for these exchanges. The betting industry used this same equipment as it was ready made for the "TOTE" machines used at tracks for Dog and Horse racing. As this stuff was so well made was also used in Traffic Light control on many road junctions. Plessey and GEC being one of the main UK manufacturers. The switches and keys were also used by the BBC for switching circuits as they well so well made.
I really love your particular brand of insanity.
Sam, TOT and tested we are big fans of all your channels. So happy you all are secret Santas.
Can i just say that the light chaser here is a work of fucking art? The clever use of mechanics just puts it over the top.
The keyboard looks great for sure, but I think you always design the most impressive gifts.
absolutely awesom old telephone tech
the fact that you figured out the tune on the butts is amazing! haha
Analog mechanical switches like those are fascinating. Like the things people thought of to get there. Wild.
This is awesome. Can I recommend looking at wire wrapping wire and tools? The wire is thin, dead easy to strip with the tool, and can be soldered or wrapped, depending on the project. For these types of cray-esque projects, it's a massive time saver. It also lets you solder the wires direct onto fine pitch ICs, which is usually hard to do
I have those tools cheers it didn’t seem right for this the uniselectors had the wrong pins for wire wrapping
i still have some of the uniselectors and telephone relays in the attic ! from 1966, brings back memories.
Awesome stuff.
That's really amazing. The vintage mechanical stuff is so much more interesting than today's IC's
This is aesthetically and technically a incredably beautiful machine!
I've no idea what I just watched but I enjoyed it thoroughly.
That is one awesome contraption... construction? Constraption. Just the sound it makes would be enough. Wow.
That1Guy and the Magic Pipe is the Butt Music Specialist!
I love this so much, it’s like the MCU, but it’s all my favorite TH-cam people
Inspirational wackiness and extraordinary creativity!
Gotta say, the but Butt Song actually kinda slaps when EDM-ified. Bravo! 👏
This is seriously the coolest thing.
7:35 I'm so envious of your storage!!! That's exactly what I need!
The lightchaser is an absolutely fantastic build. I hope you'll get more subscribers due to this awesomeness.
8:07 "The bums have an impressively nice percussive sound to them"
Uni selectors are FUN selectors
Epic Christmas gift to this old Tony!!! That one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time!
Epic collab on an epic piece of music.
Props for the waxed string wire management! I first saw that technique being used in real life in an operating ATT CO outside of Portland Oregon. There is some crazy story why ATT / BT required all cables to be tied down with waxed string. That is a skill that is almost non existent these days.
Having spent many hours hand lacing cables I can tell you that cord really cuts into your fingers after a while. It does look cool though.
@@LesNewell Me too and when it snaps and you punch yourself in the face.
Im glad you fully explained it so Tony can probably shock him self.
Well that's the coolest thing I've seen on TH-cam all year!
Whooop! Cheers haha yeah I seem to be falling considerably down the electro mechanical hole! Gotta make an electro mechanical 555 next 😂
this is so freaking cool!!!!
I worked on an old elevator that used one of these selectors for the landing system to keep track of what floor the elevator was at.
That reminds me of an entry for my radio club construction contest, it was a morse code auto caller using uniselectors
Both of those gifts are very neat, interesting & actually thoughtful. Good year, Makers!
It’s not insanely difficult of a thing you made if you understand how it works but like, it’s done so well and looks cool. When I was in college the first time, back in like 2002, I remember actually being taught about a device that was functionally the same as those things. Though when I dropped out a year later to work full time as an electrician, that marked the end of my electro-mechanical journey. They actually changed the entire course right after I dropped out to be more electronic based, less mechanical based.
Ha yeah this thing is not complicated at all. It’s using it to do the simplest thing it can do pretty much.👍👍👍👍👍
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER a project I had to design using a similar device was what was called a lighthouse light system. Basically, making it so that as you go up the floors, I think there were 5 in the example, the one above turns on when the one bellow turns off. With 5 floors the wiring looked about the same, in terms of number of wires. Again, not hard when you understand but it took a bit for us to wrap our heads around it.
pretty cool piece of work. bonus cred for using lacing cord as well... thanks of behalf of a TOT Minon. :)
SO creative this stuff! Both what you made and what you got...
Absolutely wonderful device! A fun little device with a lovely mechanical hum.
*10:00** Just think of the bizarre journey this song has taken to reach your ears...*
(maybe starting even earlier...) some painter WAAAAAY back in time, somehow hears or otherwise acquire the notes to this song, decides (or is commissioned) to paint some horrible hellscape or whatever, and for some reason decides to paint those notes on some dudes ass... years, decades, centuries pass by, many people might see the painting maybe laugh at it, maybe be horrified etc... eventually we invent electricity, computers, whatever... and some person decides to create a synth machine & encode this song inside, which is transmitted through a (inter-)net-work of computers to reach YOUR specific device & be played there... :D
Best functional gift in this gift exchange that didn't involve fire. Also best use of a gift.
I love fire, so I'm biased.
and a happy festivus to the rest of us
Awesome gift idea for TOT. & impressive work on the neat wiring. If I tried that, it would look like a bird’s nest. The electromechanical vibe is very cool & reminds me of some of the things I saw when I recently had an opportunity to walk through a 60+ yr old, deactivated power plant.
The endtro song is amazing
Best keyboard ever for playing bum-notes.
SAM!! thank you and your friends for saving the internet!! Cheers!
Thanks to last year's gift exchange I started following you. Glad to see it back!
I didn't know butts could sound so beautiful ! Much love !
Ahhhh!!! You got TOT! That's so great! I had a suspicion though when you shared it on patreon ;D Could see some intends in the tape
The crossover that I never knew I wanted.
04:52 - Cat: Hmmm... Stop making noise and make me some food.
This thing is Cool AF!
Ok, I think I’ve seen all the Secret Santas now and I’m pretty sure This Old Tony got the coolest one of all, followed only slightly “behind” by yours!
this guy is so creative, it's brilliant!
Tested AND Sam?! Christmas truly coming early this year!!
These rare events of human ingenuity cause my stone-cold, misanthropic heart going faster, and me wanting to scream in the middle of the night "I FUCKING LOVE YOU, GUYS!"
This is one of the more impressive projects for the secret santa that I’ve seen. Well done!
That's a lot of work into a project. But with that amount of practice, your soldering skills are likely top-notch.
Also some old-timey devices passed on electro-mechanical parts for electro-optical for certain applications. Photo-resistors are one of the oldest solid state electronic devices out there, so they were also around in the time when electro-mechanical things dominated. Basically electro-optical would let a thing operate relatively quietly, and some kind of shadow mask (interruptor disk or punch card) with a backlight would switch the series of photo-resistors to do the thing. Of course before vacuum-tubes that would still drive relays or similar types of switches elsewhere down the line, but the part that programmed the sequence wouldn't be prone to wearing out like something that had brushes or switches dragging over it to interrupt a circuit. (A loop of paper tape going over switches wouldn't last as long, as where one going over lights would only wear on the sprocket holes use to drive the loop around.) So that's how some things like marquee signs were done before what we consider modern computing.
The clicky-clack is definitely neat, but some of the old stuff is also ingenious in other ways. Might be neat to try and find examples of those too.
Love this series of videos. Just found it on Colin’s page and working my way through them.
So cool! I've never heard of Secret Santa between you creators. I've recently found This Old Tony (amazing channel) and YOUR channel. Great stuff!
Electromechanical *pinball machine* could give you loads of ideas for the channel and museum
Stumbled across your channel... when looking for rotating speaker..u still have those around.🙏🙏
I am old enough to actually have worked on machinery that had these types of switches. This is how machines ran before PLC's were installed.