Ten Tons of Trash or How Old Electronics Took Over Our Home

Ted and Louis have been long attendants of Leonardo's Basement, a workshop in our neighborhood. Being in such good standing there, they were invited to "Test & Take Day on Saturday.

An old fellow, a retired electrical engineer, had bequeathed his life collection of electronic gadgets and machines to Leonardo's and they needed to test them to see if they worked and then they planned to integrate some of the inventory into the workshop and give the rest of it away.

How could one resist?!

Thành and I went to the garden and off they went, quivering with excitement about what they might find. Well, it turned out that the Leonardo's folks had pretty much taken what they wanted out of the stock but it sure was fun to look through the rest! Louis and Ted came home with a few fabulous prizes:

A Heathkit Oscilloscope

A functioning light meter

An 8mm movie camera

A laser focusing thingy

The oscilloscope was installed on the dining room table and first the mens hooked an MP3 player up to it and got the wave focused and centered and played with all of the knobs and figured out what they did.

Next they hooked up the kitchen laptop to the oscilloscope and Louis popped into Scratch and wrote a little program to produce infinite random sounds. Watching the waves from the variety of noises that were produced was really fun. The oscilloscope has been a BIG hit.

The camera was taken apart, as was the laser focusing thingy, and the lenses have been carefully stored away for future use. Louis is intrigued and amazed by the different ages of circuit boards that he comes across and is thrilled when he finds a mistake where one weld has to be connected to another with a string of solder, etc. He's also having a grand time with the light meter.

I explained that photographers used to use them to calculate the F-stop, which lead to a discussion of aperatures in general and you could just see the gears turning in his head. He's a funny being that way.

At any rate, we've had the stuff for about a week now and there are cookie sheets of parts all over the dining room. Some of the stuff has made its way down to the basement workshop, but the dining room is definitely a nicer place to work.