Articles by Big Mess o' Wires

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been developing an automated tester for Yellowstone. My goal is to streamline the program and test process for Yellowstone beta cards, and eventually for the first production run. The ugly tangle of wires shown here may not look like much, but I’ve …

With apologies to BMOW readers Down Under, international deliveries to Australia from the BMOW Store have been temporarily suspended. A few weeks ago, Australia Post paused its processing of inbound international mail shipments due to COVID-19-related service impacts, and on September 3 the US Postal Service halted acceptance of …

With apologies to BMOW readers Down Under, international deliveries to Australia from the BMOW Store have been temporarily suspended. A few weeks ago, Australia Post paused its processing of inbound international mail shipments due to COVID-19-related service impacts, and on September 3 the US Postal Service halted acceptance of …

With apologies to BMOW readers Down Under, international deliveries to Australia from the BMOW Store have been temporarily suspended. A few weeks ago, Australia Post paused its processing of inbound international mail shipments due to COVID-19-related service impacts, and on September 3 the US Postal Service halted acceptance of …

A couple of weeks ago I shared some thoughts about an automated tester for Yellowstone boards, including how to test for short circuits. One of the questions that grew out of the resulting discussion was whether short circuits could only be detected by functional test failures (test results don’t …

Firmware version 0.3.7 is now available for the Wombat ADB-to-USB input converter. This version fixes a compatibility problem with some ADB mice that use non-standard communication timing. You can download the new firmware here. This was an interesting discovery. Apple only ever produced a few different ADB mice, with …

After several days of extensive testing with the latest Yellowstone prototype, and several years of development work on this universal Apple II disk controller concept, I’m here to say that Yellowstone v2.2 is looking good. Looking very good. It’s the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, the whole package; it’s …

Hello! I’m Alice, the engineering intern here at Big Mess o’ Wires. I’m a math with computer science major at UC San Diego, and throughout the summer I’ve been working on some fixes and improvements for BMOW products. I started out on the ADB-USB Wombat, but most of my work …

Hello! I’m Alice, the engineering intern here at Big Mess o’ Wires. I’m a math with computer science major at UC San Diego, and throughout the summer I’ve been working on some fixes and improvements for BMOW products. I started out on the ADB-USB Wombat, but most of my work …

Hello! If you haven’t met me already, I’m Alice, the BMOW engineering intern. (You might hear more about what I’ve been up to soon.) I’m excited to share that after several stages of redesign, cases for the Daisy Chainer are finally here! These clear acrylic enclosures will protect your Daisy …