@@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!
@@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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.)
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....
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.
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 😅
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.
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.
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. :-(
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...
Evidently cost was no object. At a first glance it would have cut the cost considerably by having one line of display and a switch to select which register to display. As to construction, a flexible PC board would have saved wiring and soldering hundreds of wires and joints. Then again if the computer itself was equally uneconomical designed, there wasn’t much savings in streamlining this panel design. Similar panels on IBM Stretch and SAGE and 370 computers.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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. 😉
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.
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
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.
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?
As a former soviet republic citizen, I still wonder, why soviet's didn't take up on using Ph. Pz, robinson, or whatever screwdriver screwheads and sticked to minus.
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. ;-)
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.
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.
Oh a frontal panel. I love those. But this one is incredibly dense compared to IBM 360 and PDP 11 ones. I always loved those kind of light enclosures, in Brazil they were called bull's eyes.
8:21 I suggest to change that soldering iron to something more "professional" with electronic thermostat - cheapest ones today is around 30$ so its not that expensive. With them, work is faster with much much better results.
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!
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.
Be cool to emulate the computer on something like a raspberry pi and then multiplex the outputs so you can actually run all the lights. TIP120's is the actual way to turn on the lights. But 300 relays would sound cool.
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... :)
Кінцівка крута, котан хакнутий.) Можна взяти якийсь мікроконтролер, регістри зсуву та багато МОСФЕТів і зробити інсталяцію, а з Разпберрі Пай в теорії взагалі земулювати менйфейрм і вивести на панель справжні значення. Але не знаю чи існують емулятори цього. Проте це ж на базі ІБМ? Можливо можна почати з них.
RE: weak screws, I found the screws on the cylinder head of the Uctkam model glow engines are like cheese, the caps of the screw strip off with even light force when trying to remove them.
I will tell you something, when I said they got broken, I actually meant their HEADS broke to half. So a screw is holding, but you cannot turn it. Honestly, I do not recall having this ever before.
