As someone who works in R&D in software/electronics, I can say I do this kind of thing regularly.
No matter how slick tech gets, peek behind the curtain and this is what you’ll see :)
Yeah, but there is a difference between the research and development phase and consumer usage.
with Dupond I guess? Because this is weird here
Not specifically with a DE15 (for that I’d just chop up an old VGA cable), but I work with a lot of proprietary connectors. Some of the connectors are scarce, and sometimes we just wire them manually if the work isn’t too extensive.
I once took a really crappy RS232 cable to India as part of some equipment to train our remote developers. The cable barely worked in our lab in the States. I told our hardware engineer that it wasn’t going to work in India, and I was right. So in India I ended up having to wrap the entire wire bundle in a wire that I soldered to ground on both sides. Soldered it together with a plumbing soldering iron. I am a software engineer, but I have an electrical engineering degree. The VP that I was traveling with couldn’t believe that the crap I made worked. Realistically, I couldn’t either.
India loves this barely working lifehacks known as “Juugad”
This looks like it is technology that I should borrow for use in Texas. Love it.
This makes sense actually. The issue with the bundle was regarding some part of it that was subject to RF interference and you shielding and grounding stopped all of that. Packets hate noise. This applies double to coaxial cable, in my experience, especially spanning up.
One time as a kid, I got myself in trouble and I got TV taken away from me - my dad came up to my room with a pair of scissors and just cut my coax cable. I stripped that bad boy and shoved the end back in to my TV, worked a treat. I also had my wifi antenna from my desktop taken from me at some point, so I took a paper clip and stuck it in there - not GREAT reception, but it was good enough!
I’ve got to tell you, when you started with the coax cable I imagined a different era than what was revealed when you wrote about wifi
Unshielded wire in a guitar amplifier be like: “Ayo, how is everybody doing, let’s go and MAKE SOME NOOOOOOISE!”
Your phone is about to ring
I’ve done some very dodgy things with VGA cables in an effort to route the cables through narrow bulkheads. For normal computer-to-monitor-lengths this is probably fine.
I haven’t noticed much signal degradation below 4m-ish.
At 12m, you better solder properly and wrap some extra shielding around your splice.
Source: I’ve ran plenty of VGA cables between bridge computers and a deck monitor on ships.
This image triggers me so much, but mostly because it is truer than I want to admit.
VGA didn’t care much about interference.
Lan party, we didn’t have T connectors, so we cut two coax apart and spliced them with some tinfoil. it worked until someone bumped it hard.
Omg a 10base2 LAN party.
I’m a little stressed thinking about what you even had to do on the software side to get everyone working properly; was it even IP?
The game of choice was Warcraft II, so all we needed was IPX, but I had brought over a bunch of EtherLink II cards. Could have done the TCP in DOS easily enough, but with the ‘substandard’ cables, IPX was a lot more performant.
Now lets see the same hack but for the port above.
Port above is COM. It experienced even more abuse than VGA.
I think they meant because it is male
Indeed. Twisting those pins to a male port, with good pin contact and not touching adjacent pins, would be a feat I’d like to see. OP’s picture is just par for the course.
You just solder the wire inside a hypodermic needle
Find someone in telco, wouldn’t be fun but should be possible
I’m not going to go into detail because I don’t know how secure my phone is but I’m pretty sure I’ve done some really heinous things to a com port
Lettuce Sea
This reminds me of a mod around the time of the TI-83 ish , where you had solder diodes to a cable connecting two devices.
mhmm mhm yerp I know what this means mmmhhhmmmm yes much TI-83 solder diode mhm!
Uh
indubitably, yes
Glares at high-speed DAQ electronics and high-frequency analogue sensing circuits
PCB cries in EMI
Regular circuits: “What’s that? You want to hack me together with a breadboard from 1963 and a hodgepodge of old telecom wire and misc parts? Sure, sounds great!”
DSP circuits: “Being more than 2mm from the IC makes me feel icky :(”
Where’s my emotional support coupling capacitor? I can’t function without my emotional support coupling capacitor!
Hand drawn PCBs from the 60s: look at my beautiful curved tracks, don’t they just accentuate my thick copper fills?
Any PCB since Gerber: you’ll take my 45 degrees and like it!
Big Cable is the one generating all the noise to begin with!
I made a composite cable for my Sega megadrive by splicing an RCA cable with two pieces of a thick paperclip. Worked great. I just had to remember which were the two holes to stick it in
those are used syringes found in a 1980s Soviet medical facility.
I had to do this with a stlink debugger once. It worked.
Same goes for processor “baking”. You can just use a soldering iron and some wires
This died with high-freq serial ports.
Honestly, couldn’t we just transfer only the changes? Instead of sending the same pic 60, 120, … times the second over. And how fast it can do the updating is the display frequency.
