The ware for February 2017 is shown below:
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This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2017 at 4:04 pm and is filed under name that ware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Orbot Orbotech PLC board?
Hmm, there’s RS232 (ADM242AR), pressure sensor, electret microphone…. D3 appears to be a light sensor, but it’s facing down. Is it some avionics device?
The colorburst crystal suggests some sort of thing you plug into an NTSC TV?
Most obvious is the air pressure sensor. Also, that little white three terminal device looks suspiciously like a humidity sensor. Then there’s a microphone and a large LED type device that looks like the ones I used to measure solar radiation.
So some kind of a multimeter, maybe this one https://www.testo.com/en-US/Parameters/CO%2CCO%E2%82%82%2Clight-and-sound/Light/testo-480/p/0563%204800 ‘s little brother.
But there’s no display.
Maybe this thing rides with a shipment and records everything that happens to it, environmentally speaking?
Pressure, sound and light sensors, and maybe ?humidity? (component marked 302 next to the pressure sensor).
The outside interfaces are the pushbutto, LED next to it, and the top 3 connectors, one of them for rs232 because of ADM424.
I think it is some sort of environment monitor/sensor, that is part of a bigger system (lacking user interface it has to be part of something)
It has a 9 volt block battery. Definitely not something that is permanently installed.
The 1/8″ jacks for serial remind me of a TI-89 calculator, which does come with an extensive sensor suite, but I wasn’t able to find anything that would match it.
Barometric sensor and RS232 driver/receivers with a PIC in between seems to say that it is part of a data logger or control system.
Case doesn’t seem to be super-rugged and probably lets the user replace batteries easy-peasy, so not too outdoorsey. On the other hand, one button (assumed to be a reset of some kind) and a LED or two doesn’t mean it’s left alone and kicked when it hiccups.
RS-232 over 1/8″ jacks is a new one, but hey why not?
So it has various sensors, NTSC colour frequency crystal…RS232 and multiple I/O.
Maybe an on-screen sensor display device designed to be in line with an NTSC source?
TV colour frequency crystals may be used if they’re close to the desired frequency, just because they are (or were) comparatively cheap.
Mini weather station, maybe with a clock and/or timer.
Temp, baro, humidity;
The three jacks remind me of a camera remote control trigger, if they are 2.5mm ones.
Is this a camera trigger that can be programmed to be triggered by various sources? Light sensor (similar to a secondary flash), sound level, manual trigger, and maybe even temperature and humidty.
This appears to be a four layer board, so I can’t fully pull it apart. Based on the sensors (light, temperature, and humidity) and RS-232, it’s definitely a sensor for another system, especially since the datecodes are all 1998, so it’s quite fancypants for the time. Those pressure and humidity sensors were big money: I’d ballpark the BOM cost for this thing at $100+.
Also, the four diodes in the middle of the board are a full-bridge rectifier as far as I can tell. My guess is that the batteries are there as a backup, not as a full-time thing. I suspect low-voltage AC comes in on one jack, with the third wire used to send data upstream. The power is tied across to another jack, and data comes in on one of those, so these can be chained, for use in a museum or some other sort of site.
It also has a RTC crystal on the bottom, which suggests that it cares about time, which is another vote for the sensor module hypothesis. Though it is tied to TIMER1 of the PIC, which could be used for power saving (I will admit that I pulled a datasheet to check that one).
Anyway, my guess is that this is part of a datalogger for a conditions-sensitive environment, like a museum or climate-controlled storage. The pressure sensor was way too expensive to put into a bog-standard device back in the day.
As for what the third jack does, I don’t honestly know. Also, why they’d use 3.5mm jacks in something with a handful of super expensive sensors, I have no idea.
Oh, it looks like Pace Scientific, who makes data loggers, is enamored of 3.5mm jacks, and started in 1991, so they could’ve made this. The extra port in some of their models is for a modem connection (of course). They also use the same cheap-looking enclosures. The closest model I can find to this is: https://www.pace-sci.com/XR440mux.htm Though it seems like it has higher-end 3.5mm jacks, they’ve also upgraded (or maybe not) to long-life lithium batteries, which lets them run for a very long time on just battery. So I’m guessing this is an older brother to the Pace Scientific XR440 data logger.
It seems like a sensor/data logger with pressure, humidity and proximity sensors, that use the jacks to multiplex the serial PC port to several units, or with units with different sensors.
Having not seen anything of the sort before, of course this afternoon I saw something rather similar at Bristol Zoo’s reptile dept. I’m certainly not saying it’s the same, but they seemed to have kit of a similar layout for the reptile hatchery. Power in, onboard sensors, local control, external sensor and daisy chain out.
I reckon it’s a temperature and humidity monitor for a greenhouse/glasshouse.
Too late to the game as someone has already identified it down to the product line. This is a generic data logger you can configure and use with various sensors Pace and similar analog data logging companies sell. My high school used to have these for students to conduct experiments, they even have curriculum packs that come with worksheets and slides a teacher can use to teach different scientific concepts.
You can either record data and playback later or use it as a crude DAQ.
This is weather station, model: EcoLog Data Logger
web: http://www.labsupply.com.hk/datalogger%20primary%20001.htm
This EcoLog data logger I just got from a slip but I can not work. no data cable.