Those zoom pedals are amazing. I have a 20+ year old bfx-708 that i use for bass and an ms70-cdr that i mostly use for synth and drum machine.
Have fun with it 
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At Ā£82 including tax, itās just incredibly cheap for so much pedal.
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I found my BFX-708 pedal the other day while looking for something else - I started playing bass in 2000 so it must be from the same time. Had lots of fun with that. It would be nice if it had a higher sample frequency (although 32kHz is plenty for bass) but Iām going to have to get some of my crappy bodged things running through it for my own amusement 
I also found my Zoom MRS-4 recording/mixer thing, but that uses completely defunct and unobtainable SmartMedia cards (as well as being pegged at 32kHz) so I donāt know that itāll ever be used for anything again. I have one card for it, a whopping 64MBā¦
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Iām only a few years older than the pedal but i like it a lot. Itās not hi-fi in any way but it has some cool features
I use it mainly for a few distortion sounds and i have one Rage Against the Machine-ish preset that sounds a bit like their song calm like a bomb.
I donāt know about the recorder youāre talking about or the smartmedia cards. Can you still read the cards with a modern computer?
In case you ever do want to use it, you can buy adapters that fit a SmartMedia card slot and accept other types of memory card. There is certainly an adapter that takes xD cards. Thatās another obsolete type but you may be able to obtain them more readily. It may also be possible to use an adapter that will fit an xD slot and take a micro-SD card.
But there may be better fits for the niche that would end up cheaper than running an MRS-4 in 2022.
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Yeah, thereās still lots of USB card readers with the slot, but the tech is from the 90s and the cards arenāt as robust as SD cards (physically or electronically). Theyāre basically a NAND memory chip and a connector, thereās (ironically) nothing smart about them - no management of the memory cells for balancing the write cycles - so when the other card I had went bad, that was it. A mind-blowing 16MB, gone in an instant.
Yeah, xD cards are more or less successors to SmartMedia, and are compatible at a signal level. The adaptors are literally nothing more than that - redirecting the pins from one to another. Sadly those adaptors were always more expensive than they shouldāve been, and are still more than Iām willing to spend to get this old thing going again.
I got intrigued when I found micro SD to xD adaptors listed, but they rely on device compatibility. By the sounds of it, when Olympus was thinking to themselves that maybe theyād backed the wrong horse, they engineered a way of getting the xD connector to carry SD signals as well, and made the physical connector for the adaptor different (itās like a yellow unicorn!) so that it could only fit into devices with the compatibility baked in. SD cards are entirely different at the signal level and would require a whole load of processing to behave in the same way as the OG xD or SM cards, and thereās just not the demand to justify it, even as an open source project (which is what Iād hoped I might find).
Anyway, Iāve got an MPC One that can do infinitely more the MRS-4 is just a curio from an earlier time now!
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This handsome chap arrived:
Itās a Waltons āMellow Dā whistle.
Iām looking at lots of videos about tin whistles. This is one I find particularly inspiring:
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You canāt stop at just one though
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The first ~50% of my take on the k25utilities from @CTorp have arrived. As this was my second order of PCBs ever I decided to test out the available colors. The next order is allready prepared, just waiting for payday. Spares will pop up in the BST thread for reasonable prices as complete rainbow collection once they are doneā¦
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What company did you use?
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I followed the instructions in the āhow to fabā thread and used JLCPCB because their prices and speed are OK. funny thing: (for me) the shipping option with reasonable costs takes about one week to create the product and get it trough german customs with detailed tracking. and then it takes one more week in silence to deliver it to my doorstep. delivery servicesā¦
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Well, we have one again. 
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It does look as if Zorch is causing the IC shortage.
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Ok so i got a bag of "2n5457"s today. It was only a few euros with free shipping
Iām not sure if this component tester can test jfets, but when i test it it says npn with a hfe of over 40k?
Iāve tried all possible orientations in the tester.
Did i buy fakes? Is there another way to test if theyāre real?
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I remember that gate capacitance might mess with my measurements because it can keep a fet in on or off state. Will have to try resistively discharging the gate and see what happens
Apparently the store owner was unable to accept the package because the address label was missing an essential reference number he would have needed to identify me as the recipient.
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tested just 1 of my 2n5457ās and the hfe was like 86k .
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ah that sucks almost as bad as the disappearing package .
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