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What is this Strange Gadget in My Car?
VanessaDannenberg asks: "Four months ago my fiancé and I bought a 1997 Thunderbird, which came with a few aftermarket mods. Of particular interest is this strange radio-related gadget that was attached to the windshield above the mirror. It has two 5-pin ports on it (as pictured) which accept a flat cable that runs under the car's headliner. I can't tell where that cable ends, but I figure it's a laptop interface (RS232?). Has anyone seen this thing before? What does it do?"
8 minutes from /. posting to digital smoking crater. (-:
./; within about 1/2 an hour the link was grinding (./ was much smaller in those days, this is not my first ./ ID) and within two hours it died completely (pings went into hyperspace). For three days.
I remember putting an article up on a 64kb (yes, b not B) link some years back, then it got found and posted to
So heavy was the traffic that taking the webserver down didn't make a noticeable difference. Even if they'd been able to get through, the DNS queries alone would have been enough to smash the link flat. Think "trying to fill a thimble from a wide-open firehose".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm not an IC specialist, but after a brief search and some reasoning I have an idea - it might be a stripped-down UHF/VHF transciever (the system board without an enclosure, speaker, channel selection knob, etc.) Possibly the person who used it did this specifically to disguise it from cops - any cop will recognize a transciever enclosure, but this will probably get little attention beyond bewilderment.
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The letters "V.B.O.G.I." could indicate colors....
Could the wires lead to some sort of ricer extra lights somewhere? Possibly 'neon' tubes that were removed by the seller?
Holy crap, am I reading her webpage correctly or has she actually managed to build a Commodore 128 into a Hewlett-Packard tower case???
That's extremely odd -- and therefore, very cool. But I think it needs some lighting mods, you know? Set the case to glow from inside, through all those air-movement slats. It's just BEGGING for a couple of neon tubes.
I'm thinking "radioactive green".
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
(Hint: so that there's no surprises for the trolls to scream about)
To the great-grandparent: Thanks for the compliments on the Commodore tower. I can't say whether or not neon tubes would look particularly good in that thing, but it's something to consider for when I decide to work on it again (lack of interest, lack of money, too lazy, etc.)
Karma: I don't care too much, but it's 0.0% (mostly due to lack of interest)