@@ChernobylFamily By the 1980s there were enough Soviet-made LEDs actually. But the design is old, and changing it would take quite much effort [for those old bums in the design bureaus]. So they just stick to "old good" way. IMHO.
Working in a museum, its so sad to see how lots of indescribably rare electronics were just destroyed for profits, even components of that same Computer. Great work, keep up the electronic heritage!
some random soul suggested your channel on a linus tech tips video when he was talking about a keyboard made for Chernobyl power plant. I am happy that he did, this is going to send me down a learning rabbit hole. keep it up!
Your patience with all those bits and bobs is appreciated. This is one of the most fascinating channels I've found. Stay safe and keep up the good work!
There's something apparent in the construction methods used that stands out so much in today's world. The technology is quite poor, quality of the molds is rough, every lens looks different etc., but the amount of careful and meticulous manual labor is immense. I've noticed the pairs of resistors for every lightbulb - I'm guessing each bulb was ran with a low "standby" current even when off, to allow it to respond faster and get longer service life. I'd love some shots in the dark with this one! Stay safe and all the best to you and you family!
The tech seems to be fine for its era. The lenses have very minor irregularities like slightly uneven outer surface (had had my hands on that kind of lights). What makes the lenses look 'rough' is the lamps not perfectly seated in their sockets and shining the light through their pointy tips creating ring-like light spots.
Speaking about lens, there were different modifications of them, but as I had to purchase old stock components, I had no chance to choose - just grabbed what I could as the quantity was insane.
@@u2bear377 Oh, didn't think about that. It makes a lot of sense. I have seen some panel-mount Soviet indicator lights with a pair of metal discs with trefoil-shaped cutouts, situated right behind the lens. One of the discs was tied to the lens part which could be rotated so that the light was not visible even when "on". They've had 28V light bulbs inside, similar to Ba-9s. I've been wondering ever since what could be the reason to "disable" the light, aside from pranking someone of course.
@@MichalKobuszewski These trefoil shades allow adjusting the amount of light in a pure mechanical way without introducing any failure points into the electric circuit. Quite handy in a low-light environment. Some lights could be completely shut off when not needed.
@@ChernobylFamily To control such an amount of lights you will need an Arduino Mega, to use a normal Arduino you would to encode outputs in a multiplexed way to control the lights but even so it would not be enough so you would had to encode the outputs and have a circuit to decode them. The Mega has much more outputs and with them you can use a cross matrix that would use less components to decode. But even with a mega encoding multiplexing tricks would be needed because this thing has so many lamps.
@@ChernobylFamily Or You can use MCP23017 I/O expander or anything from the same category. Any Arduino will do, as MCP23017 uses just 2 pin's used for I2C communication and gives 16 GPIO. Plus, it's I2C and every MCP23017 on line can be set to different address, so it's super easy to add more inputs/outputs MCU.
297 of Soviet style blinkenlights! A painstakingly thorough restoration of an amazingly well built panel. I'm so impressed that you can Keri on making videos in war torn Ukraine, despite all the adversity. Hats off!
That sir, is a fantastic job. I looked at that wiring loom and my heart sank. I couldn't believe it when you started taking it apart. But what a wonderful result. Amazing job Alex! Incidentally doesn't Archibald have the special ability 'running directly under your feet at the most inconvenient moment'? All mine do...
There has been some raspberry pi PDP-11 emulators that can run indicator panels. So it could be hooked up to something like that. For the authentic experience of keying in the bootstrap loader via the switches into it.
Look at the PiDP-11 project for an example. It uses a raspberry pi to run a full pdo-11 emulator under "simh"and blinkenvone to hookup the panel to drive the simulator.
Always love a good blinkenlights panel ❤I can only imagine what a new panel of identical construction would cost these days.. metal and copper and glass and manual labor oh my!
I imagine a lot of these panels are now lost to history precisely because they have been scrapped and stripped down for their copper and anything else that could be sold for money. :-(
Awesome restoration! I love those indicators, it gives the whole control panel a retro-futuristic vibe! It must've been awesome to work with such machine in the 80s... Especially at the duga radar control room. That control room looks like a spaceship from inside!
Thanks! At Duga they had different ESes - 1033 and 1060. For 1060 we are restoring a giant control panel in our lab, see this public post www.patreon.com/posts/computers-of-of-80707861
Great work! My suggestion is a few binary counters connected in different patterns across the board. Then, to make it more interesting connect all the lights at the top with small reed relays for a soft clicking while it counts.
An easyish and fun thing to use that for, would be a synthesizer panel. Like a cool custom panel for a Moog component. Replace a full row of lights with in/out 1/4" jacks, wire oscillators in and use the lights as indicators for the oscillators selected and in feedback lamps for trigger indication, and the switches to play with the sound. I think THAT would be an amazing, meaningful and awesome use for it.
Comment in my fingers before even watching the video: "Sounds like meditative work. Oh wait, old control panel parts tend to fall apart in a different way each time you deal with one, there is so often a judgement call between risking a cold solder joint and/or critique about soldering form ... or risking melting parts out of shape. Wire wound around then soldered, really hard to remove and leaving wires twisted - or too short if you cut the twisted bit off - and insulation melted. Brittle plastics and cross threads. And I can smell soldering through old dust, grease and silver sulfide, rotted flux residue, and either fungus or whatever they put on it to make the fungus dead, from here. Soviet screw sizes very nonstandardized, slots always too narrow. So... respect!" .... while watching the video: Oh, I probably wasn't much mistaken....
Great restro! It's a thing of beauty! Similar to the annunciator panels that we installed in various car factories. Definitely a pain in the ass to wire up. This also could be used for "bootstrapping" a mainframe computer, which is what it was used for on the Burroughs B6600/6700 at the Air Force Academy. The switches (pretty much the same setup as what you have) were set up so that during normal operation the lights would spell out "AFA". This was in the mid-seventies. Assuming that it was designed by a civilized engineer, there will be one wire that lights up all of the lights in a section at the same time. This is the "Lamp test" circuit, and it's used just for that. I didn't see that in the closeups of the wiring. But you can also do that in the programming (just don't use the state of the bulb to trigger other logic). Not sure what the resistors were used for, do you know the resistance of them? A typical circuit for a bulb, or a set of bulbs should they be wired up to interact with each other would be helpful. As for something to do with them, a scrolling display triggered by relays would be sweet. :) Keep the voltage down, and your bulbs will last a lifetime or two.
First I have to say I really adore your dedication and will to restore such a beautiful piece, to be honest when you see it you know, doesn't matter in which condition it is, restored it will be a beauty. one thing that gave me a itch on a place I cannot reach and scratch is before you painted the panel there was some kind of letters you overpainted on the right side. I had to watch the whole thing in pain to be sure you won't do it in the end and then I was finally clear that you forgot it or overseen it. please do me a favor and fix it so I can rest in digital peace
Beautiful piece..! With some patience, an arduino and (maybe) 100+ transistor you can make a randomly lights panel christmas tree like. Take care and have a wonderful time with that panel.
I would like the Adriano to simulate the actual hardware that this panel was connected to and the lights and switches would behave in the exact same way with the 'virtual mainframe' as it did with the real hardware. Just having it sit and blink randomly seems insulting to it somehow.
I have no idea what that device was manufactured for, but it's among the most beautiful electronic things in the world! 🤩 Also looks like it could survive pretty much any EMP attack as well 🤔 Fantastic job!
@@ChernobylFamily so it's the auxillary blinking lights board to an otherwise dark big computer telling whether it works? Gotcha now, thanks! FWIW, it has so many lights that my first instinct would be that the light isn't working instead of a computer issue 😅
Wow, that looks amazing! Only thing I would suggest it so sand down the original color of the panel and maybe use spray paint can to get a more even finish, bu all in all, it looks stunning. Can't believe this wire mess was still all working for the most part.
@@ChernobylFamily yes, the switches are really impossible to remove, would be a huge task and maybe also damage something in the process - not worth it. But I love those light bulbs. They seem so modular with the different mounting styles and different color glass overlays. And real light bulbs have just this warm glow and the short time it gets bright or dim, not instantly like LED but fading in and out. I love to have original lamps on my vintage audio gear but sometimes I swap it for LEDs because with less heat you don't damage the plastic material. Amazing that you could find those old light bulbs still - are they so common?
It is a good thing that soviet era componants are still available in large quantities, I already suceeded some (much smaller scale) restorations with NOS parts from ebay. However these is a particular kind of fuse older cap I was never able to find, it has been so long I am not even sure if I still have the item needing them.
Frankly, it is not very different from IBM machines by which this was inspired. Though yes, understanding them requires a good knowledge of the system architecture.
Excellent video and great job, as always! 👍 End result looks nice! Sometimes, these screws can't be unscrewed because of soviet era tradition for painting threads. And if oxidation and rust occurs, then only solution is drilling out.. For work simulation any Z80 based PC will do the job - lot's of real CPU signals available and some others can be displayed using standard flip-flops etc.. As bulb drivers uln2803 can be used. 😉
Hey man good work on the panel, I highly recommend getting a low torque electric screwdriver for work like this, fanttik is a decent brand you can find on amazon but really any aliexpress clone will do, keep up the good work!
It would be a great background for the studio. I imagine the wall behind you getting covered over time in this kind of things. Also to interface them, I'd go with shift registers: the common 74HC595 can be chained for an arbitrary amount of outputs, all of which you update with one set of 3 or 4 wires at up to a couple megabits if you like. I believe there's not only a Soviet counterpart, but also a version with high voltage outputs for VFDs and Nixies.
That was a lot of hard work! As for ideas for what you could do with it... Maybe you could reach out to Sam from This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete, it looks like something that would be right up his alley.
Lovely Video. I wonder if you or your contacts can find a recording or specification of the warning sound that the Soyuz capsule alarm clock makes and send it to Curious Marc so they can update their clock pulser with an authentic sound.
In English, that lovely orange color is almost always called "amber." Oddly enough you hardly ever hear anything that isn't an indicator light called amber-colored, even if it's the same color. Just a funny quirk of technical parlance!
@@ChernobylFamily ב''ה, there may be earlier usage but LEDs really enforced this as the amber and yellow varieties were different somehow technologically. (Edit: probably something similar though not chemically related with CRT phosphor chemistries.)
Lovely!!!!!! What if you find the way of using it as a test panel for circuits? say the flick of one of the switches powers a circuit or part of one that has to be tested, and if the circuit is good, the corresponding light turns on? just a thought... :)
That's a really cool-looking piece of vintage hardware there. 🙂 I don't know how much meaning it would have independent of other control panels from the same machine (unless that was THE control panel, of course), but I think that connecting it to a microcontroller running an emulator would be pretty neat for visitors at a museum. Or, if it's only part of the machine's controls, perhaps just using a microcontroller to run some sort of operation-like simulator (less than fully functional but more than just flickering random lights). Whatever you do with it long-term, congratulations on having the patience to do that work, especially to replace all the many broken bulbs! Just seeing all that damage on-screen made me tired. ;-)
As others have already mentioned, I would use an Arduino or Raspberry Pi, lots of small Mosfet's and a proper power supply to light up the many small lamps. A really nice piece of computer history!
It would make a nice Christmas decoration if you could get the lights to flash in sequences of patterns. That or turn it in a retro Soviet music equaliser.
These panels had lots of unexplored uses that were overlooked: -Christmas trees for atheist countries -Lite Bright toys for Soviet c.hildren -Prototype LED TV's with 0.5 ipp (not ppi) -Diagnostic tooI to check for Red-Green color blindness. -Enhanced LSD trips... look at the colors... the color... -A control panel used by Number 1 at SPECTRE round-table meetings to punish lower-level agents for ineptitude using booby-trapped chairs... You have failed to kill Bond for the last time, Number 3... Good Bye... Click. Quite a practical device for those of us from older generations.
It would sort of be interesting to make this command a mighty RasberyPi which probably has a couple of magnitudes more calculation power than the mainframe this pannel used to be commanding.
specifying individual bytes is out of question for modern use, but I see it as trigger panel for complex actions in modern games. Bet Arduino, drivers' knowledge and macros specifications on top can be make it a kick ass project.
As I am tinkering with music stuff I would probably turn it into drum machine controls or something like that. I can imagine using those indicator lights to display drum beat I programmed in and switches to actually program it.
13:27 You can make simple CPU based on TTL or CMOS chips. No need to design it from scratch, because many people done this already. With that, that panel can be used with same purpose.
😮😮😮 Jesus Christ that is alot of electronic stuff
Yes! If they would use LEDs that would be one circuit board. But back in 1980, Soviets had a very limited production of thrm.
A wild fake Elon appeared!
@@faultboy a muskrat, not so elongated!
@@ChernobylFamily By the 1980s there were enough Soviet-made LEDs actually.
But the design is old, and changing it would take quite much effort [for those old bums in the design bureaus]. So they just stick to "old good" way.
IMHO.
@@u2bear377 I am struggling to remember which were available in that very year. AL101 & co? Or more types?
Working in a museum, its so sad to see how lots of indescribably rare electronics were just destroyed for profits, even components of that same Computer. Great work, keep up the electronic heritage!
Computer: Has 5g of gold in it.
Slav: Its free real estate.
I can't stand gold scrappers. These old machines are far more valuable to collectors than the piddly amount of gold they had inside them.
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 🤣🤣🤣 I agree with that.
Totally agree - now adays everything is just an app and nobody does anything manually anymore so they take out the original features
@BlackEpyon I'm in USA - but I've heard of scrappers disassembling the old Beta M RTGs over there - not sure but if that's true (Holy S...)
some random soul suggested your channel on a linus tech tips video when he was talking about a keyboard made for Chernobyl power plant. I am happy that he did, this is going to send me down a learning rabbit hole. keep it up!
Thank you! Even deeper layer of rare data is on our Patreon. Welcome and enjoy!
Wow this guy actually disassambled and put it all back, salute
Thanks for a great video
This guy together with his wife made many things like this :) check out our other videos!
Your patience with all those bits and bobs is appreciated. This is one of the most fascinating channels I've found. Stay safe and keep up the good work!
Thank you, we will!
It's an insanely big job to restore the control panel. Now it looks great :)
Thank you!!
another great restoration! Respect for perseverance
Thank you very much!
There's something apparent in the construction methods used that stands out so much in today's world. The technology is quite poor, quality of the molds is rough, every lens looks different etc., but the amount of careful and meticulous manual labor is immense. I've noticed the pairs of resistors for every lightbulb - I'm guessing each bulb was ran with a low "standby" current even when off, to allow it to respond faster and get longer service life. I'd love some shots in the dark with this one! Stay safe and all the best to you and you family!
The tech seems to be fine for its era.
The lenses have very minor irregularities like slightly uneven outer surface (had had my hands on that kind of lights). What makes the lenses look 'rough' is the lamps not perfectly seated in their sockets and shining the light through their pointy tips creating ring-like light spots.
Speaking about lens, there were different modifications of them, but as I had to purchase old stock components, I had no chance to choose - just grabbed what I could as the quantity was insane.
@@u2bear377 Oh, didn't think about that. It makes a lot of sense.
I have seen some panel-mount Soviet indicator lights with a pair of metal discs with trefoil-shaped cutouts, situated right behind the lens. One of the discs was tied to the lens part which could be rotated so that the light was not visible even when "on". They've had 28V light bulbs inside, similar to Ba-9s. I've been wondering ever since what could be the reason to "disable" the light, aside from pranking someone of course.
@@MichalKobuszewski These trefoil shades allow adjusting the amount of light in a pure mechanical way without introducing any failure points into the electric circuit.
Quite handy in a low-light environment.
Some lights could be completely shut off when not needed.
"Look Mum No Computer" would have a incredible fun turning this into some sort of a synth interface.
You could wire it up to an arduino and turn the indicators into a moving letter display!
Hmm...!
@@ChernobylFamily To control such an amount of lights you will need an Arduino Mega, to use a normal Arduino you would to encode outputs in a multiplexed way to control the lights but even so it would not be enough so you would had to encode the outputs and have a circuit to decode them. The Mega has much more outputs and with them you can use a cross matrix that would use less components to decode. But even with a mega encoding multiplexing tricks would be needed because this thing has so many lamps.
@agranero6 thank you for this idea.
@@agranero674574 IC and 8 data bit and controllbits.
@@ChernobylFamily Or You can use MCP23017 I/O expander or anything from the same category. Any Arduino will do, as MCP23017 uses just 2 pin's used for I2C communication and gives 16 GPIO. Plus, it's I2C and every MCP23017 on line can be set to different address, so it's super easy to add more inputs/outputs MCU.
297 of Soviet style blinkenlights! A painstakingly thorough restoration of an amazingly well built panel.
I'm so impressed that you can Keri on making videos in war torn Ukraine, despite all the adversity. Hats off!
Thank you!
Now i get it! You are triyng to built a spaceship undercover, like an alien from "Thing"!
When you spend more time in Chornobyl Zone than out of it, no one will ever know what are your intentions MWAHAHAHAHA
Awesome! You did a realy good on job on making it coming back to life!
Yes! Thank you!
Дякуємо вам,дужу велику роботу робите!!!!)))))) дякуємо за цікавий контент
Буде ще...!
That sir, is a fantastic job. I looked at that wiring loom and my heart sank. I couldn't believe it when you started taking it apart. But what a wonderful result. Amazing job Alex! Incidentally doesn't Archibald have the special ability 'running directly under your feet at the most inconvenient moment'? All mine do...
Yes, Fuzik has Sandevistan Mk. II ability, that is for sure.
There has been some raspberry pi PDP-11 emulators that can run indicator panels.
So it could be hooked up to something like that.
For the authentic experience of keying in the bootstrap loader via the switches into it.
Would need to place optical couplings, though, I think.
Look at the PiDP-11 project for an example. It uses a raspberry pi to run a full pdo-11 emulator under "simh"and blinkenvone to hookup the panel to drive the simulator.
This seems like an AMAZING Arduino project. You have massive patience and the result is beautiful.
Thank you! Check a public post on our Patreon about ES-1060 control panel restoration...) that is even bigger x 10 times:)
It looks absolutely amazing 🤩
It really is!
Beautiful, My friend 😀👍
Thank you!
Always love a good blinkenlights panel ❤I can only imagine what a new panel of identical construction would cost these days.. metal and copper and glass and manual labor oh my!
I imagine a lot of these panels are now lost to history precisely because they have been scrapped and stripped down for their copper and anything else that could be sold for money. :-(
So true
A lot of work was put into this restoration, and it really shows. It looks amazing, you did a great job!
Thank you very much!
I love those indicators. I have used them on several Nixie clock projects.
I think I would consider this the best application: a clock!
Wonderful!
@@basroos_snafu Binary clock
Awesome restoration! I love those indicators, it gives the whole control panel a retro-futuristic vibe! It must've been awesome to work with such machine in the 80s... Especially at the duga radar control room. That control room looks like a spaceship from inside!
Thanks! At Duga they had different ESes - 1033 and 1060. For 1060 we are restoring a giant control panel in our lab, see this public post www.patreon.com/posts/computers-of-of-80707861
Awesome!!!! Wonderful restoration!
Thank you very much!
Congratulations! That is a very good result! You have a lot of patience.
Well, three times I nearly threw it out of a window :)
Awesome ... old school electronic :)
Thank you! :)
Very Very Well Done!! Just Amazing hope to se more of this.. Thanks for your work
Thank you!
This history is amazing and so important. Thank you so much for sharing and for your dedication!
Our pleasure!
Interesting. I have several of those brand new lines of lamps mounted on pcb with resistors. Looks like it is manufactured for such panels
Interesting!
Wow, you are really brave!! I mean, to start to do this repair :) Nice!!!
Thank you very much!
Great work! My suggestion is a few binary counters connected in different patterns across the board.
Then, to make it more interesting connect all the lights at the top with small reed relays for a soft clicking while it counts.
Great suggestion!
Nice restoration of the blinkenlights.
Thank you very much!
An easyish and fun thing to use that for, would be a synthesizer panel. Like a cool custom panel for a Moog component.
Replace a full row of lights with in/out 1/4" jacks, wire oscillators in and use the lights as indicators for the oscillators selected and in feedback lamps for trigger indication, and the switches to play with the sound. I think THAT would be an amazing, meaningful and awesome use for it.
Very illuminating,
the cat audio at the end would make for some eerie audio loops, assuming the recipients have no idea of the source.
He is vibrating, meaning he is functional
Awesome Project, Alex! Thanks for this video, it was again very interesting! Stay safe! Much love from germany!
Thanks again!
Comment in my fingers before even watching the video: "Sounds like meditative work. Oh wait, old control panel parts tend to fall apart in a different way each time you deal with one, there is so often a judgement call between risking a cold solder joint and/or critique about soldering form ... or risking melting parts out of shape. Wire wound around then soldered, really hard to remove and leaving wires twisted - or too short if you cut the twisted bit off - and insulation melted. Brittle plastics and cross threads. And I can smell soldering through old dust, grease and silver sulfide, rotted flux residue, and either fungus or whatever they put on it to make the fungus dead, from here. Soviet screw sizes very nonstandardized, slots always too narrow. So... respect!" .... while watching the video: Oh, I probably wasn't much mistaken....
Hi team! I promoted your channel on my school's Discord. It's an engineering and software development school, so they should like it!
Cool! Thank you!
I'm happy that I learned the necessary aspect in the end of the video to understand a certain object that can be seen on your video's thumbnail. :)
I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 finally and the idea came spontaneously:)
Great restro! It's a thing of beauty!
Similar to the annunciator panels that we installed in various car factories. Definitely a pain in the ass to wire up.
This also could be used for "bootstrapping" a mainframe computer, which is what it was used for on the Burroughs B6600/6700 at the Air Force Academy. The switches (pretty much the same setup as what you have) were set up so that during normal operation the lights would spell out "AFA". This was in the mid-seventies.
Assuming that it was designed by a civilized engineer, there will be one wire that lights up all of the lights in a section at the same time. This is the "Lamp test" circuit, and it's used just for that. I didn't see that in the closeups of the wiring. But you can also do that in the programming (just don't use the state of the bulb to trigger other logic).
Not sure what the resistors were used for, do you know the resistance of them? A typical circuit for a bulb, or a set of bulbs should they be wired up to interact with each other would be helpful.
As for something to do with them, a scrolling display triggered by relays would be sweet. :)
Keep the voltage down, and your bulbs will last a lifetime or two.
Great job! Cheers from Paraguay 🇵🇾🎉
Thank you! Cheers!
those lights remind me of cars from the 60s, Inside the gauges were so beautifully lit at night under an incandescing bulb.
Cheers from Bulgaria !
Превет из Булгария !!
Greetings from Ukraine!
Amazing, man. 🖖🏻
Glad you like it!
Absolutely awesome. That would look great as a wall display. I'm thinking hook it up to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
That's a great idea!
@@ChernobylFamily Thanks
Amazing project!
Thank you! Cheers!
That's awesome!!
Thanks!
First I have to say I really adore your dedication and will to restore such a beautiful piece, to be honest when you see it you know, doesn't matter in which condition it is, restored it will be a beauty. one thing that gave me a itch on a place I cannot reach and scratch is before you painted the panel there was some kind of letters you overpainted on the right side. I had to watch the whole thing in pain to be sure you won't do it in the end and then I was finally clear that you forgot it or overseen it. please do me a favor and fix it so I can rest in digital peace
We gave it to our friends who want to wire it up, as we really do not have mental power for this. They already fixed that :)
Beautiful piece..! With some patience, an arduino and (maybe) 100+ transistor you can make a randomly lights panel christmas tree like. Take care and have a wonderful time with that panel.
Cool idea! Thank you!
I would like the Adriano to simulate the actual hardware that this panel was connected to and the lights and switches would behave in the exact same way with the 'virtual mainframe' as it did with the real hardware. Just having it sit and blink randomly seems insulting to it somehow.
Oh, I like those indicators! Those wiring harnesses gives me Altair 8800 flashbacks, though...
Well noted. Eh, hope to see Altair one day. For now, the only Altair I saw was a soviet-made fridge.
I have no idea what that device was manufactured for, but it's among the most beautiful electronic things in the world! 🤩 Also looks like it could survive pretty much any EMP attack as well 🤔
Fantastic job!
I briefly mentioned that (as much as I myself understand) - it is a diagnostics frontend for an interface controller for biiiiiig computer.
@@ChernobylFamily so it's the auxillary blinking lights board to an otherwise dark big computer telling whether it works? Gotcha now, thanks!
FWIW, it has so many lights that my first instinct would be that the light isn't working instead of a computer issue 😅
monstrous panel with dozens of eyes
Well said! Still it is way, WAY smaller than ES1060 panel we restore in our lab:) (check our Patreon)
Pretty work , very nice !
Thank you! Cheers!
Wow, that looks amazing! Only thing I would suggest it so sand down the original color of the panel and maybe use spray paint can to get a more even finish, bu all in all, it looks stunning. Can't believe this wire mess was still all working for the most part.
That was the plan, but... you saw my comment about switches. They became a blocker.
@@ChernobylFamily yes, the switches are really impossible to remove, would be a huge task and maybe also damage something in the process - not worth it. But I love those light bulbs. They seem so modular with the different mounting styles and different color glass overlays. And real light bulbs have just this warm glow and the short time it gets bright or dim, not instantly like LED but fading in and out. I love to have original lamps on my vintage audio gear but sometimes I swap it for LEDs because with less heat you don't damage the plastic material. Amazing that you could find those old light bulbs still - are they so common?
Amazing work!
Thank you! Cheers!
remember the device tester unit to be used with SKALA drives? maybe this panel could serve similar function in some way for SKALA component ?
It is a good thing that soviet era componants are still available in large quantities, I already suceeded some (much smaller scale) restorations with NOS parts from ebay. However these is a particular kind of fuse older cap I was never able to find, it has been so long I am not even sure if I still have the item needing them.
the panel looks like the fuse board straight out of an old Concorde airplane (the overhead backmost one, directly at the door)
It's worth noting that almost all markings on the lights are incredibly cryptic.
Never let the enemy guess their purpose!
Frankly, it is not very different from IBM machines by which this was inspired. Though yes, understanding them requires a good knowledge of the system architecture.
Excellent video and great job, as always! 👍 End result looks nice!
Sometimes, these screws can't be unscrewed because of soviet era tradition for painting threads. And if oxidation and rust occurs, then only solution is drilling out..
For work simulation any Z80 based PC will do the job - lot's of real CPU signals available and some others can be displayed using standard flip-flops etc.. As bulb drivers uln2803 can be used. 😉
3:22 We had to sort thousands of little charms and jewelry at my old job. The look on your face, I know how you feel right now.
:))
Hey man good work on the panel, I highly recommend getting a low torque electric screwdriver for work like this, fanttik is a decent brand you can find on amazon but really any aliexpress clone will do, keep up the good work!
I'll check it out
You are genius person and I really like watching all your videos. Thank you very much.
Don't make me shy:) this is all my wife, who gives me motivation and cat who writes scenarios :)
Will it be long? Will it be tedious? ... will be amazing !! 😺
Frankly, as some point I started to regret I started all that...)
It would be a great background for the studio. I imagine the wall behind you getting covered over time in this kind of things.
Also to interface them, I'd go with shift registers: the common 74HC595 can be chained for an arbitrary amount of outputs, all of which you update with one set of 3 or 4 wires at up to a couple megabits if you like. I believe there's not only a Soviet counterpart, but also a version with high voltage outputs for VFDs and Nixies.
Hmm... sounds good!
I imagine how it's look like to debugging system with this panel. Maybe I need it in my work :P
A beautiful restoration. Great skills!
Thank you very much!
That was a lot of hard work! As for ideas for what you could do with it... Maybe you could reach out to Sam from This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete, it looks like something that would be right up his alley.
That's awesome. 👏
Lovely Video.
I wonder if you or your contacts can find a recording or specification of the warning sound that the Soyuz capsule alarm clock makes and send it to Curious Marc so they can update their clock pulser with an authentic sound.
Epic work!
Thank you!
A clock! Connect a microcontroller and turn it into a clock! Or a ticker tape to show the ruble stock value countdown!
...in Binary Coded Decimal format.
Great video😊
Thank you 😁
Beautiful, that would look good on the office wall.
It is so heavy, though :)
@@ChernobylFamily Also I don't think we have enough power to power it.
In English, that lovely orange color is almost always called "amber." Oddly enough you hardly ever hear anything that isn't an indicator light called amber-colored, even if it's the same color. Just a funny quirk of technical parlance!
Thank you! I thought that 'amber' is applicable for that color of CRT displays, but really, thank you for the language hint!
@@ChernobylFamily Oh yeah, old CRTs too!
Orange and amber (and yellow) are distinct colors when it comes to signal lights.
@@ChernobylFamily ב''ה, there may be earlier usage but LEDs really enforced this as the amber and yellow varieties were different somehow technologically. (Edit: probably something similar though not chemically related with CRT phosphor chemistries.)
Lovely!!!!!! What if you find the way of using it as a test panel for circuits? say the flick of one of the switches powers a circuit or part of one that has to be tested, and if the circuit is good, the corresponding light turns on?
just a thought... :)
What a beautiful piece 👍
Thank you! Cheers!
That's a really cool-looking piece of vintage hardware there. 🙂 I don't know how much meaning it would have independent of other control panels from the same machine (unless that was THE control panel, of course), but I think that connecting it to a microcontroller running an emulator would be pretty neat for visitors at a museum. Or, if it's only part of the machine's controls, perhaps just using a microcontroller to run some sort of operation-like simulator (less than fully functional but more than just flickering random lights).
Whatever you do with it long-term, congratulations on having the patience to do that work, especially to replace all the many broken bulbs! Just seeing all that damage on-screen made me tired. ;-)
This was a diagnostics panel, so supposedly it was used only sometimes and only for narrow tasks.
Thank you:)
It's beautiful
Thank you!
Absurd amount of work but it looks great!
Sometimes reasonable men have to do unreasonable things..))
👍 good job
Thank you!
@@ChernobylFamily I like to follow you
As others have already mentioned, I would use an Arduino or Raspberry Pi, lots of small Mosfet's and a proper power supply to light up the many small lamps.
A really nice piece of computer history!
It would make a nice Christmas decoration if you could get the lights to flash in sequences of patterns. That or turn it in a retro Soviet music equaliser.
Why didn't you let Fuzik on the table before it was done... 😅
And it turned out amazing! Great job Alex
There was a lot of shredded glass, I'd not risk...
Thank you!
@@ChernobylFamily oh no that would have been bad 😔
Those red,orange and green lights could be used in a soviet zootopia as traffic lights for mice.
Omg))
Damn, that's some work ! GG !
Thank you!
You could rearrange the colored lenses and make it into a miniature RBMK control rod indicator panel.
Well... I guess I will have some news for tou this summer (hint, hint)
Shift registers and drivers to connect them to a microcontroller and simulate activity based on switch status 😉
These panels had lots of unexplored uses that were overlooked:
-Christmas trees for atheist countries
-Lite Bright toys for Soviet c.hildren
-Prototype LED TV's with 0.5 ipp (not ppi)
-Diagnostic tooI to check for Red-Green color blindness.
-Enhanced LSD trips... look at the colors... the color...
-A control panel used by Number 1 at SPECTRE round-table meetings to punish lower-level agents for ineptitude using booby-trapped chairs... You have failed to kill Bond for the last time, Number 3... Good Bye... Click.
Quite a practical device for those of us from older generations.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
In Soviet Russia they used a wall-hung carpet to get some trips. Ain't need no LSD!
@@u2bear377 that was daaark
It would sort of be interesting to make this command a mighty RasberyPi which probably has a couple of magnitudes more calculation power than the mainframe this pannel used to be commanding.
Beautiful panel. Too bad so much of many of these machines were scrapped.
Well, nearly all...
Now that’s Dasblinkenlights
Genau
lot of insights about control panel.
but it is evening, which means beer time!
(your neighbors said hi)
specifying individual bytes is out of question for modern use, but I see it as trigger panel for complex actions in modern games.
Bet Arduino, drivers' knowledge and macros specifications on top can be make it a kick ass project.
Hey..)
Need to think. I have a small experience with Arduino, but I guess it is the time to improve.
As I am tinkering with music stuff I would probably turn it into drum machine controls or something like that. I can imagine using those indicator lights to display drum beat I programmed in and switches to actually program it.
5:56 I recommend a tiny electric screwdriver.
These broken lamps can be easily removed with a toothpick with a bit of superglue on its tip.
Show us the result on a dark room .. You can make some dumb sofware to interact with. Really nice work! Congrats!
I think I'll post some pictures on the community tab.
This is lovely! You could hook the indicators up to a Raspberry Pi, and create an animating matrix panel.
Will think about that.
I think you are only about 350,000 connections away from rebuilding the entire computer 😁
You once more won the internets :)
6:44 I suppose the correct color is "RAL 7035 Lichtgrau".
Thank you!
13:27 You can make simple CPU based on TTL or CMOS chips. No need to design it from scratch, because many people done this already. With that, that panel can be used with same purpose.