Inspired by Kelly’s experiments with laser-cut sponges, I cut myself a few Menger sponges* the other week. They’re handy both for light housecleaning and cosmic conundrums!

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I built a fantastically hacky boost converter to light this lovely Soviet nixie tube. One cap, one inductor, one resistor, one mosfet, one diode, and an ATTiny13. Or, as Raph put it, “one of everything”.

Equally tacky, hacky clock coming soon!

Query: what the hell is this thing I’ve been lugging around for the past three years?

An enigma, wrapped in a mystery, under acrylic

It’s some sort of StrongARM development system.  I think it may be related to the Intel “Brutus” eval boards, but I’m not certain.  The daughterboard is labelled “SA1110 daughter card”; there’s nothing useful on the larger board.  There’s a fairly anonymous StrongARM chip in the ZIF socket.  It feels like some sort of demo unit, given how it’s all gussied up and under acrylic.

A profusion of useless geegaws

What’s on the big board?

• one USB client port
• three USB host ports
• two classic RS232 ports
• nine general-purpose indicator LEDs
• eight general-purpose switches
• two four-bit rotary switches
• eight seven-segment w/ decimal LED displays
• six audio jacks
• a CF slot
• a PCMCIA slot
• and innumerable spare headers, LEDs, switches, etc.

Intel sold off all its StrongARM/PXA properties years ago, and scrubbed pretty much anything useful from its website.  Archive.org hasn’t been too helpful.  Anyone have any leads?