Z-5 Analog Abstract Generator

[AshMcFadden]

I was always told to respect my elders, but it's getting harder to find one.

Guess you kids will have to do!

I'm pretty difficult to impress, but the cigar-box-sized projector I saw at Fiske, the fact that DZ's crammed my original fourteen 44-pin edge connector cards onto one smallish motherboard (I was going to say five pounds of.... it's that impressive, but much neater) and now I'm hearing of 1-Watt lasers the size of shoeboxes. I wonder what the power of that box at the Fiske was? Looked like at least a Watt. That's one big 65-foot dome to cover. I know. I've done it.

So, in short... Wow. I'm already impressed and I haven't even been to FLEM yet.

In my day (I effing hate that phrase), any 1+ Watt laser was a 206VAC 3-phase, water-cooled, 5-foot-long skulking lizard with a 120-pound box tied to its tail. We even did a few raves as "Skulking Lizard Productions".

I built a primitive analog colour-mod system in about 1983, at a point where I had an Argon, a HeNe and some dichroic filters, but no A/Os, using my "standard" LFO board as used in the P-4 and three penmotor choppers. When the A/Os arrived a month later, I'd designed the board so they fit where the choppers were, then the penmotors and LFO went back on the lab shelf. I'm really stoked, looking forward to something that will allow the Z-5 to project fancy colour-mod stuff, leaving the computer at home (or busy creating images, instead of drawing multicouloured circles).

So...I'm going to have to get up at 2:00 am Friday morning to catch a flight out of Denver and I can't sleep in airplanes. (Something to do with usually being the pilot, I guess.) I'll probably be a zombie Friday. Resurrection promised for Saturday, if I get a little sleep Friday night (which looks unlikely, with all I'm hearin' from the rest of ye!).

Once enough ethanol or whatever blows the trail dust off everyone, I'll have to tell you guys the truth about how a long-time cosmic laser junkie without a degree in astronomy ended up becoming Director of the only public planetarium in the Republic of Ireland. In short, I was drafted. The long version involves the actress who played Vena Renis in the original iteration of Dr. Who, Florence of Arabia, an Accordion Goddess and a cast of thousands.

I would SO love to come to America in August, but June-August are our three magic months at the museum and planetarium, so it's just about certain I won't be able to make it to SALEM. We've just installed a full-dome Konika-Minolta MediaGlobe II, the grand opening is Easter and they need some eejit with a modicum of astronomical knowledge around to do shows.

N.B. I'm not bringing a laptop to FLEM, just my iPod Touch for email. But I will have the latest iteration of the Z-5 operator's handbook on a USB stick and if anyone has Windoze, we can edit it to fit the machine(s).

It was mostly done until DZ and I brainstormed some cool additions at the last moment. At some point, we've got to put it to bed or rechristen it a Z-6. That's how I ended up with the P-2, P-3 and P-4. Rusty Hystery: I found the P-2, circa 1979-80 in my storage the other day. Tossed it into the "museum" I don't have room for.

Skating away on the thin ice of a new day....

Ash

[Bradfo69]

LOVE the Tull reference and your spelling of Microsoft's flagship product! Looking forward to being regailed with stories and hope we can muddle through an accent if you have a heavy one.

Hopefully you'd be able to figure out some way of stealing away for a little bit in August and, SELEM is a WHOLE different animal that FLEM. I can guarantee a brief "WTF" moment when you see this little boat house we cram into and think, "I flew all the way here for this???" But then the magic happens....

SELEM is on a MUCH grander scale with a couple of venues being used - a theater and large school cafeteria and will probably have 6 to 8 times as many people.

Counting down the minutes until the flight!

[AshMcFadden]

Your Classic Rock literacy scores you ten points. 100 buys you the next round. And I'm always playin' with words, so Microshaft gets no mercy. On a scale of "1" to "Let's invade Russia in the winter", Windows 8 scores an 11.

I've intentionally kept as much of my Colorado accent as possible. Local radio loves Yank accents. And it's got me a lot of smallish-but-nice cheques from the BBC as a part-time science correspondent. When I had the time five years ago, we ran a weekly "Ask Ash" show. I hated the jingle.

I work in a fishing village. I speak fluent boathouse.

Still snowing.

[Bradfo69]

It's one of my all time favorite songs that has been very relatable at periods in my lifetime.

[dsli_jon]

Hello Ash -

Your Classic Rock literacy scores you ten points. 100 buys you the next round. ..Microshaft gets no mercy. On a scale of "1" to "Let's invade Russia in the winter", Windows 8 scores an 11... I work in a fishing village. I speak fluent boathouse.

Man.. Do you have a Fan club? Cheers to your spirit / legacy, and...

..with ya all the way, Cap'n.. ..(..oh, and Yes, you may 'reproduce this artwork' as far and wide as ya like..

Cheers, too, for yer 'love of rocketry', there.. Man, I sure wish I could make this FLEM.. 'back in the day' (sorry.. I was into HP rockets like mad.. all thru my senior year of HS, seems like that's all we did.. (..I'll have to see if I can dig up some pix.. All of them are 'film prints', tho.. wasn't 'rich enough' to own a digi-camera back in '86..

..Then, of course, 'life took over', and that craft went in the closet / shoe-boxes, with most of the other hobbies.. However, later when I lived in NY / got married / had 2 Boys / they grew old-enough, etc, etc, the Boyz and I dug all the stuff out of the closet, and started afresh... They were a bit young to help me on the more 'serious' stuff, but.. Man, we robbed the house / Gramma's house of every paper-towel / wrapping paper / butcher-paper tube we could get our hands on, and built scores and scores of scratchbuilt 'OWRs' - One Way Rockets..

..etc..

..They were only just like C-E Estes motors, but.. we scratchbuilt all parts: cones / fins / motor-mounts, etc, all out of tagboard, etc - even some two-stagers ..but the 'fun part'? .... Well, in lieu of parachutes, we'd fill them with all manner of chopped-up firecrackers / other consumer-pyro ('chunked-up road-flare bits' were funnn and nice lil' balls of toweling-paper filled with FFFg..
..Our little 'rocketry club's motto' was: "What Goes Up... Musn't Come Down"..

..Of course, we did-do the 'full chutes / recovery' thing, etc, but.. cutting their own fins / trying different fin-arrangements / number-of fins, etc - and seeing how those varied-configs / different payloads, etc, shaped the flights, really taught the Boys a lot about the dynamics, and they were both (then) determined to become hardcore 'rocket scientists'..

..Anyhoo, *awesome, awesome* werk on the Controller, here.. You really could find no-better 'custodian' than Sir DZ.. I hope you guys have a great time, and will look forward to seein' lots of Blasin' pix. ..OK, back to the Z-5 channel...

..Cheers..
j

[Bradfo69]

('chunked-up road-flare bits' were funnn [/I] and nice lil' balls of toweling-paper filled with FFFg..
..Our little 'rocketry club's motto' was: "What Goes Up... Musn't Come Down"..

What!?!? They were supposed to?? Oh shit... I didn't know that! Mine seemed to put on a pyrotechnical display as well.

[buffo]

I'm always playin' with words, so Microshaft gets no mercy. On a scale of "1" to "Let's invade Russia in the winter", Windows 8 scores an 11.

HAHAHA!

My take on Windows solutions, as a former Amiga fan:

Micro (as in small)
Soft (as in flaccid)

Even with that, I have to admit that Windows 7 is pretty decent. (Totally agree that Windows 8 blows goats though)

in lieu of parachutes, we'd fill them with all manner of chopped-up firecrackers / other consumer-pyro

Next time try red phosphorus and sodium peroxide. Well, no, actually DON'T try it, as it will auto-detonate in your hand and send you to the hospital with 2nd degree burns on your hands and face. (Trust me, this is 9th grade experience talking here...) It will also set your bedroom on fire.

Amazingly though, you can stabilize it with black powder and it will hold together just long enough for you to fill the nose cone of your one-way-rocket with the mixture. Use a booster-rated engine (C-6-0 is a good example, though we preferred to go big, eg: D-12-0) and once the lift charge is burned up, the whole thing goes BOOM!

Great fun.

Adam

[AshMcFadden]

My favourite pyro trick was to use a D-12-3 motor, so the rocket would coast to apogee before the bang. I once put nearly an ounce of Newco Red photographic flash powder in the nose, then found out that the only motor I had was a D-12-7 upper-stage motor with a long delay charge. "Oh, sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong?" The rocket went up about 1,000 feet, then proceed to speed downward. Looked like it was never going to stop! Then, no more than fifty feet over the roof of my house, KA-BLAMMM! My mother came dashing out the back door, waving a broom, thinking we'd been bombed. (I don't know what good the broom would have done against the Russians.) That was the last time I was allowed to try anything like that around my neighbourhood.

[AshMcFadden]

OK, my all-time best "getting blown up" story, then back to lasers.

A few years after moving to Green Mountain Falls, Colorado in 1981, I returned to my parent's home down in Colorado Springs to retrieve a considerable number of storage boxes that I had left with my folks. They wouldn't fit in my cabin, but I'd just bought the Laser Systems Laboratory building in Green Mountain Falls and I finally had a place to store them. These boxes were filled with books, course notes, old homework projects, etc. that I had kept. I decided to weed through them while my parents were out of town and eliminate as much junk as I could.

Not having the heart to dump all that hard work in the bin, I decided to grab a six-pack, settle down in front of the downstairs fireplace and ceremoniously burn six years worth of college memorabilia. I managed to get through about five of the 15-or-so boxes piled around me when I realized I could not possibly sort through each box page-by-page. In the interest of time, I decided to do a cursory scan of the contents to determine if anything "jumped out" as worth saving. Well, box number six appeared to be loaded with Statistics 101 and Logic 201 junk, so I took the shortcut and tossed the whole box onto the funeral pyre before me.

I popped open beer number four and watched the box smoulder. Raising the can, I gave one last salute to those two unmemorable courses as the box erupted into a roaring inferno.

The papers were consumed rapidly.

So were the ancient contents of the dresser drawer that I had hastily dropped into the bottom of that box when packing, years earlier. Dang, I had forgotten all about that stuff. The toothbrush and hairbrush went up rather well; also that packet of disposable plastic razors, dental floss, contact lens case and a bunch of junk I don't even remember. Of course, I didn't even know that stuff was going up in smoke as I sat there. I just chugged the beer and watched it burn. It burned great...right down to that full aerosol can of deodorant that was in there underneath it all.

I had gotten about half the beer down when the deodorant can finally decided it had had enough. What happened next, I can only compare to the scene from "2001" where Dave Bowman is falling through all those lights with that "ohshit" look on his face. I heard and felt a "Boom!" so loud that my brain only registered it as overpressure, like a sonic boom, not noise. The contents of the fireplace, right down to the last ash, were propelled out with such velocity that all I could see were a multitude of bright streaks emanating from a point about three feet in front of my face (ala “2001”). Big blue shock wave knocked me back on my arse. Spill my beer? You bet. Felt like I jumped on a live grenade. One second I was watching that inferno burn from the outside; the next second I was watching it burn from the inside.

The human brain reverts to "primordial slime mode" when thrown into a situation like this. All higher-order functions vaporize. Guess it's all those endorphins and endomorphins hitting it at once. It took a couple of seconds to get the reasoning capability of my brain back online. I jumped up and, quite astutely, said, “Something's happened."

I looked at my hands and feet, touched my face and realized that I was, indeed, intact. Holy cow, I was completely untouched! Not even a soot mark on me. Although I might possibly qualify as a human cannon ball, there would be no Richard Pryor impersonation tonight, folks.

I looked through the thick smoke toward the fireplace. What was a 6-inch-deep accumulation of one winter's ashes was now squeaky clean. Blasted it all right out. All those burning embers were now sitting on the deep-pile carpet behind me, all over the room. I grabbed the little shovel from the fireplace set and scooped as fast as I could. As soon as I filled the shovel, I'd run to the fireplace, empty it and run back. Some embers were 30 feet down the hallway! I guess I set the Guinness World Record for "Hot ember pickup with a little shovel" in those next few minutes. I did manage to avoid setting my folks' house on fire, and the carpet only had one or two really serious melted spots in it. I did find the deodorant can, too; it had left the fireplace at some ungodly-serious velocity, hit the wall at the far end of the room and come to rest directly behind where I was sitting. It was split wide open along the weld and peeled back almost flat. Burned black; looked like re-entry junk.

After I got the Fire Marshal Bill act under control, I grabbed beer number five, popped the top and thought about how I was gonna get the remaining mess cleaned up. Close examination revealed that everything was coated with a heavy layer of ash. That was much better than everything being coated with a heavy layer of Ash, which had, until moments before, been a distinct possibility. Heck, a vacuum will get this stuff up - no problem.

Gee, how lucky could I be? I didn't get decapitated, the house was still on its foundation, I got a great story for the grandkids and the cleanup was gonna be a cinch. I grabbed my mom's upright out of the closet and started hoovering.

Now...have you ever had one of those split-seconds of consciousness when you realize you've just survived something really nasty, but you sense that it's not quite over yet?

Well, I never have, but I wish to hell I had felt that way at that point.

There I was, sucking up ashes with an upright vacuum. Too bad not all of them were cold. That vacuum swallowed one little bitty hot ember that was sitting there on the carpet. It flew right up inside it and sat on that big pile of carpet lint and dust bunnies, way up in the bag. Hey, that bag hadn't been emptied in a long time. And all that air rushing in made that little bitty hot ember real happy. Next thing I knew, the side of that vacuum was glowing red-hot. By the time I figured out what was happening, there was a two-foot flame blowing out a hole in the side of the vacuum tank! It really looked and sounded kind of pretty, like a fighter jet on full zone-five afterburner. Diamond shockwave pattern and all!

Again, my brain reverted to primordial slime mode. All higher-order functions ceased and all I remember thinking was......."T-h-r-o-w v-a-c-u-u-m".

I pitched it as hard as I could towards the open basement door, hoping it would make it to the sunken patio area outside. The distance was about 20 feet. In slow motion, it looked like one of those old NASA films where the rocket goes psycho right off the pad. There it was, sailing brush-end-first with a nice slow roll, fire belching out the side. As the umbilical pulled out of the wall, the flame settled into a long trail of sparks. The vehicle had plenty of initial velocity and it looked like a good downrange trajectory, right up to the point where it passed through the full-length glass window to the right of the door.

Some days you eat the bear...........

[Bradfo69]

I. Frickin. Love. This. Man's. Style.

My God, FLEM is going to be a mind numbing laughfest coupled with intense learning. I, too, have had similar relatable experiences of torching a Hoover and deformed carbon covered aerosol cans wizzing dangerously past my ears.