Welcome • User Guide
ToS • Privacy • Canary
Donate • Bugs • License

©2025 Poal.co

(post is archived)

[–] • 4 pts

Clean your tip, ffs.

[–] • 2 pts

It's a brand new tip, all the crud is burning off. Give it a minute.

[–] • 3 pts

yeah well last time i had a dirty tip it burned like hell too

just kidding. nice iron.

[–] • 3 pts

Yeah keep your tip clean and it won't burn.

[–] • 2 pts

Keep a dab of sacrificial solder on it as it cools.

[–] • 2 pts

It gets fully coated, as do all my irons.

[–] • 2 pts

Do you actually own it or is there firmware that manufacturers control and use to force people to upgrade for no valid reason like John Deere products.

[–] • 1 pt

Considering it has no connections to the outside world other than power, and doesn't know anything except the temperature of the tip...

[–] • 2 pts

Possible code injection via buttons. /s

[–] • 1 pt

It's just a microcontroller, if you take it apart you can access the serial port and reprogram it. Kind of useless at that point however, you could either make it not work or not work.

[–] • 2 pts

Wasn't aware that pine makes irons. Is it any good?

[–] • 2 pts

It's essentially a TS100 iron like you see all over alibaba and ebay, except that Pine sells them (when available) for a more reasonable cost.

It gets the job done and runs on everything from a USB-C fast charger to a laptop supply. I'm running mine off an old 12V supply from a long-dead external drive. Quality seems to be about what you'd expect for a $30 tech gadget, and tips are both the heater and tip, and are readily available from almost all of the big online names.

[–] • 2 pts

I expected it to be playing Skyrim.

[–] • 2 pts

Why would you expect that? My first machine was a 800kHz CoCo II.

[–] • 2 pts

Same here!

My dad still has a working Coco III

[–] • 2 pts

Same here, I even bought the keyboard upgrade for it.

[–] • 2 pts

More RAM, more storage. Only thing lacking is I/O: smaller display, vastly reduced keyboard.

[–] • 1 pt

You're old. My first computer was a Tandy. It would smoke that iron in processing power.

[–] • 0 pt

There were many machines that Rat Shack made under the Tandy name. Which one did you have?

[–] • 2 pts

I had a trs80 with 4K ram and a cassette drive.

[–] • 1 pt

Mine was a Color Computer II with 16k and a cassette drive.

The Pinecil is a 32-bit RISC-V CPU @ 108MHz, 128k flash and 32k RAM. With a bigger display, you could probably emulate both of our machines, possibly at the same time.

[–] • 1 pt

I was a kid, and I don't remember the exact model. It had Windows 3.11 on it though.

[–] • 0 pt

That was probably one of the Tandy 1000s running a 286. Probably wasn't any more than 12MHz.