galacticprobe
Active member
And not to clutter one reply into another, I move on to this one, regarding "the thingy":
The large wire bundle (right side) has 16 tie-wraps on it (before I can't see to count any others), and a cable retainer near that connector plug. All of the wire ends are soldered to terminal posts (and there is a ton of them), and then there are those small resistors in various places across the board. There are also some small ceramic capacitors in there, not to mention the little labels wrapped around the wires near the ends. That's a frackload of intricate work going into making just a piece of a prop that - if not for this photo - we probably would have never seen in any of the episodes.
What's throwing me is the two silver rectangular things in the center of this thingy. They look like some sort of heat sinks, or possibly small transformers - really can't tell from this angle. They're rather thick, and if you look closely at the red boards you'll see some thick tan colored structure under them, so those are more than just some red board stuff thrown in to make some greeble look nice.
So that connector plug just might actually be part of this, and not an "add-on", and that clear case is so perfectly matched to what's inside it. So I'm still thinking this odd thingy is really a "something" that was found, and someone thought it would be a nice greeble to add to the console, and my cat-like curiosity - not to mention my electronics curiosity - would really love to find out what it is, or what it was part of before it became part of the console.
Dino.
Quite possibly; without knowing what's under that leather sleeve covering the end that connects to the console's rib there's no way of telling. I've asked my friend that used to do some work on buses, but I haven't heard back from him yet. I'll post his reply as soon as I get it.BioDoctor900 said:
Again, quite possibly. I agree completely that it was shoved into a container, and the hexagonal opening around the connector does lend to it being an "add-on" for looks. As for it not being anything in particular, I'm still out on that one. The reason for that is the way it's put together. Having worked with electronics for 31 total years I can tell that this thing was put together with some precision. If this was just a 'throw something together and stick it inside that round clear container for looks' sort of thing, I doubt they would have gone through the trouble of putting that excessive number of tie-wraps around the wire bundles. There are 23 wraps on the thin bundle (left side of the thingy); at least that's how many I could count before it curved around the top and I couldn't see to count any others. (From experience, only engineers that build the electronics use tie-wraps to excess; we technicians usually end up cutting about half of them away as we work on the equipment. When you look at how close together those tie-wraps are, it just smacks of some engineer having built this for a reason: some actual piece of electronics that some poor tech will have a nightmare with as he tries to trace a wire through all of those wraps - hence why we usually cut more than half of them away.) And then there is an actual cable retainer about mid way along that bundle (about the 10 o'clock position when looking at it) that fits around the bundle and holds it in place near the edge of the red board.BioDoctor900 said:
The large wire bundle (right side) has 16 tie-wraps on it (before I can't see to count any others), and a cable retainer near that connector plug. All of the wire ends are soldered to terminal posts (and there is a ton of them), and then there are those small resistors in various places across the board. There are also some small ceramic capacitors in there, not to mention the little labels wrapped around the wires near the ends. That's a frackload of intricate work going into making just a piece of a prop that - if not for this photo - we probably would have never seen in any of the episodes.
What's throwing me is the two silver rectangular things in the center of this thingy. They look like some sort of heat sinks, or possibly small transformers - really can't tell from this angle. They're rather thick, and if you look closely at the red boards you'll see some thick tan colored structure under them, so those are more than just some red board stuff thrown in to make some greeble look nice.
So that connector plug just might actually be part of this, and not an "add-on", and that clear case is so perfectly matched to what's inside it. So I'm still thinking this odd thingy is really a "something" that was found, and someone thought it would be a nice greeble to add to the console, and my cat-like curiosity - not to mention my electronics curiosity - would really love to find out what it is, or what it was part of before it became part of the console.
Dino.
the oxidized look is actually just a happy accident, when I removed the black background from the Magpie logo I was left with a few speckles around the edges of the lettering. 
