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547 items tagged "classic"

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November 13, 2018
4:00
Unique Flat-Screen Display Put to Use in CRT Game Boy
» ‎ Hack a Day

The cathode-ray tube ruled the display world from the earliest days of TV until only comparatively recently, when flat-screen technology began to take over. CRTs just kept getting bigger over that time until they reached a limit beyond which the tubes got just too bulky to be practical.

But there was action at the low end of the CRT market, too. Tiny CRTs popped up in all sorts of products, from camcorders to the famous Sony Watchman. One nifty CRT from this group, a flat(tish) tube from a video intercom system, ended up in [bitluni]’s lab, where he’s in the …read more

Tags: classic hacks
November 12, 2018
8:30
An Apollo Guidance Computer Laid Bare
» ‎ Hack a Day

An Apollo Guidance Computer probably isn’t a machine that’s likely to come the way of most Hackaday readers. The device that played such a vital role in taking astronauts to the Moon and bringing them home again is hardly a common find, even if it is one of the most iconic machines of its type and era.

[Carl Claunch] was approached to assist in the restoration of an AGC, and while he can’t reveal any information about its owner he is at liberty to document his progress. The result is a fascinating in-depth technical examination of the device over multiple …read more

Tags: classic hacks
1:00
How To Evolve A Radio
» ‎ Hack a Day

Evolutionary algorithms are an interesting topic of study. Rather then relying on human ingenuity and investigation to create new designs, instead, an algorithm is given a target to achieve, and creates “offspring”, iterating in an evolutionary manner to create offspring that get closer to the target with each generation.

This method can be applied to the design of electronic circuits, and is sometimes referred to as “hardware evolution”. A team from Duke University attempted exactly this, aiming to produce an oscillator using evolutionary techniques.

The team used a platform called the “evolvable motherboard”, or EM. The EM is a platform …read more

Tags: classic hacks
November 11, 2018
19:00
The Naughty AIs That Gamed The System
» ‎ Hack a Day

Artificial intelligence (AI) is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance in the last few years. There’s been plenty of research into neural networks and other technologies, often based around teaching an AI system to achieve certain goals or targets. However, this method of training is fraught with danger, because just like in the movies – the computer doesn’t always play fair.

It’s often very much a case of the AI doing exactly what it’s told, rather than exactly what you intended. Like a devious child who will gladly go to bed in the literal sense, but will not actually sleep, …read more

Tags: classic hacks
November 08, 2018
8:30
Digital Picture Frame Turned Vectrex Overlay
» ‎ Hack a Day

For Hackaday readers which might not be so well versed in the world of home video gaming before the 1983 crash, the Vectrex was an interesting attempt at bringing vector graphics into player’s living rooms. Priced around $500 in today’s dollars, the machine was unique in that it included its own black and white CRT display rather than requiring the owner to plug it into their television. To spice things up a little bit, games would include a thin plastic overlay you could put over the screen to give the game faux colors. What can we say? It was the …read more

Tags: classic hacks
November 02, 2018
13:00
Eight Player GameCube Adapter is Ready for Smash
» ‎ Hack a Day

With the release of Smash Ultimate fast approaching for the Nintendo Switch, [Patrick Hess] wanted to get ahead of the game and make sure his squad had the equipment they’d need. Namely, support for the GameCube controllers that serious Smash Bros players demand. But it wasn’t enough to have one or two of them hooked up, or even four. Not even six GameCube controllers could satiate his desire. No, he needed to have support for eight simultaneous GameCube controllers, and he wanted to look good doing it too.

Enter his meticulously designed eight player GameCube to USB adapter. Made out …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 31, 2018
16:00
7 Segment Clockwork Display Made From Cardboard
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve seen a variety of oddball 7-segment displays in the past, but this one uses a new material: both for the display and the mechanical mechanism that drives it; cardboard. Yup, the whole thing is made from cardboard, wood and a few rubber bands. [The Q] shows how he put together in this nice video, starting from first principles that show how the segments are made: simple pieces of cardboard painted on one side with fluorescent paint. A piece of wood pushes the element out to blank it, and each element is connected to a cam wheel that pushes the …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 30, 2018
13:01
Apple Introduces What We’ve All Been Waiting For
» ‎ Hack a Day

The biggest news this week comes from Apple. There’s a new Mac Mini (the press copy says it makes a great digital signage platform but we’ll stick to our Raspberry Pis), a gigantic iPad that costs $1900, and the MacBook Air gets a display with more than 900 pixels of horizontal resolution. It’s big news, but this isn’t the biggest news from Cupertino. [Aki-Baidya] reports Apple is bringing back the old-school rainbow logo to t-shirts sold in the Apple Park visitor center. The move follows Apple’s trademark renewal of the rainbow logo earlier this year.

The O.G. rainbow Apple logo …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 26, 2018
4:00
Child’s Pushcar Gets Serious Horsepower
» ‎ Hack a Day

A pushcar is a great toy for a young child. They’re great excercise, and kids love anything on wheels. However, the bigger kids might want something with a little more grunt. [Master Milo] has just the thing – an engine from a concrete saw and the fabrication skills to match. (YouTube, embedded below.)

The build starts with the disassembly of the concrete saw, with covers, the saw drive and handle all removed. This leaves a 70 cc petrol engine with a centrifugal clutch already fitted. A steel frame is then built around the engine to mount the rest of the …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 25, 2018
22:00
DIY Tuning Capacitors from Washers and 3D-Printed Parts
» ‎ Hack a Day

The inside of classic radios holds wonders that the sterile chips and SMD components of today’s circuits can’t hold a candle to. Chunky resistors and capacitors, vacuum tubes with cathodes aglow, and seemingly free-form loops of wire forming inductors will all likely make an appearance. But the most fascinating bit of any old radio was connected to the tuning knob: the big variable capacitor with its interdigitating metal plates. Watching one at work, with its plates evenly and finely spaced, is still a joy to behold.

In an attempt to recapture a little of that magic, [Jeremy S. Cook] came …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 24, 2018
8:00
Camera Obscura On Wheels Hits the Open Road
» ‎ Hack a Day

A camera obscura is a very simple device. Consisting of a dark chamber, with only a pinhole to let light in, it focuses an image on its inside surface. If you want to take a permanent copy, it’s as simple as installing a photosensitive film inside and managing the exposure time. Sounds like a normal camera, right? The difference is the scale — a camera obscura is large enough that humans can stand inside and view the image. Usually, they are large stationary rooms. [Physics Girl] took the show on the road by building a camera obscura out of a …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 23, 2018
13:00
Racing the Beam and Dropping Some Beats
» ‎ Hack a Day

The heart of the Atari 2600 wasn’t the 6502 (or the 6507 for the pedants), it was the TIA chip. This is the chip responsible for drawing graphics on the display, racing the beam, and extremely limited support for sound generation. We haven’t seen many attempts of using the Atari 2600 for chiptunes, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. [John Sutley]’s Syndrum, a take on an Atari 2600 drum machine is nearly a work of art. It’s a custom cartridge for the wood-paneled Atari, and an impressive input device that turns this classic console into a beat machine …read more

Tags: classic hacks
4:00
Slack on the SNES via Satellite
» ‎ Hack a Day

We love seeing hardware and software from bygone eras getting a new lease on life through modern hacks, as longtime readers can surely attest to. Why leave this stuff to rot in a closet somewhere when it can be pushed into service today? Granted it might not always be the most efficient way to accomplish a task in the 21st century, but at least you’ll net some precious Internet Points for originality.

As a perfect example, take a look at this project which lets you read Slack messages through a Super Nintendo game. If your first thought was that such …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 17, 2018
8:30
Balancing Robots From Off-The-Shelf Parts
» ‎ Hack a Day

In this day and age, we are truly blessed as far as the electronics hobby is concerned. Advanced modules such as gyros and motor controllers are readily available, not just as individual parts, but as pre-soldered modules that can be wired together with a minimum of fuss and at low cost. This simple balancing robot is a great example of what can be done with such parts (Google Translate link).

The robot has an ESP32 running the show, which provides both the processing power required, as well as the WiFi interface used to control the ‘bot from a smartphone. This …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 13, 2018
22:00
Arcade Asteroids, Now In Colour
» ‎ Hack a Day

Asteroids is one of the classic games of the early arcade era. Launched in 1979 by Atari, it relied upon using an XY vector monitor to deliver crisp graphics for its space-based gameplay. One of the limitations of the original arcade games was that the game was only rendered in a single colour, white. Over 30 years later, [Arcade Jason] decided to see what it would take to build a color Asteroids machine.

The hack relies on the fact that the original game used a four-bit resistor ladder DAC to draw vectors in different intensity levels. Through some ingeniously simple …read more

Tags: classic hacks
1:00
Save A Linotype Machine For Future Generations
» ‎ Hack a Day

The journalist’s art is now one of the computer keyboard and the internet connection, but there was a time when it involved sleepless nights over a manual typewriter followed by time spent reviewing paper proofs freshly inked from hot lead type. Newspapers in the golden age of print media once had entire floors of machinery turning text into custom metal type on the fly, mechanical masterpieces in the medium of hot lead of which Linotype were the most famous manufacturer.

Computerised desktop publishing might have banished the Linotype from the newsroom in the 1970s or 1980s, but a few have …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 11, 2018
16:00
Swedish Front Plus Japanese Back Makes For Useful Hybrid Camera
» ‎ Hack a Day

Professional or amateur, doing things the hard way doesn’t always make for better results. Take photography as an example. Once upon a time, the success or failure of what happened during the instant that the camera’s shutter was open was only known hours or days later after processing the film. Ruin the shot with bad exposure or suboptimal composition? Too bad. Miss a once-in-a-lifetime moment as a result? Ouch.

Once instant photography came along, pros were quick to adopt it as a quick and dirty way to check everything before committing the shot to higher-quality film. Camera manufacturers made special …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 10, 2018
1:00
Adding Bluetooth to Original SNES Controllers
» ‎ Hack a Day

There’s a bunch of companies selling wireless Super Nintendo style controllers out there. You can go on Amazon and get any number of modern pads that at least kinda-sorta look like what came with Nintendo’s legendary 1990’s game console. They’ve got all kinds of bells and whistles, Bluetooth, USB-C, analog sticks, etc. But none of them are legitimate SNES controllers, and for some people that’s just not good enough.

[sjm4306] is one of those people. He wanted to add Bluetooth and some other modern niceties to a legitimate first-party SNES controller, so he picked up a broken one off of …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 07, 2018
19:00
The Bells! The Bells! One Battery since 1840
» ‎ Hack a Day

It is good advice to change batteries in your fire alarms at least once a year. Even our low-power LCD calculators need new batteries from time to time. But at the University of Oxford, they have an electric bell that has been ringing essentially non-stop on one set of batteries for about 178 years! Is the energy crisis solved then? Perhaps not. The bells require a high voltage but very little current and the pair of batteries — piles in the parlance of 1840 — have kept the charge flowing for about 10 billion rings. As you can see in …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 06, 2018
19:00
Bus Raider Allows Classic Micro Emulation On An RC2014
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you were lucky enough to own one of the crop of 1980s 8-bit computers, did you ever pause to consider how its graphics worked? Maybe the really expensive ones had dedicated CRT controller subsystems akin to the graphics cards you’d have found on a PC a few years later, but most of the affordable models would have stopped what they were doing every TV line interval period to allow access to their memory for their graphical output to be created.

The RC2014 retrocomputer dodges all this, by using a serial port as an interface and expecting your serial terminal …read more

Tags: classic hacks
16:00
Amplifier Controlled Motorized Display
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s easy to get jaded by gadgets like the Chromecast or Sonos, which let the user control AV equipment remotely from a mobile device or computer. You can pick something to play from your phone and send it off to your speakers via the magic of Wi-Fi. But it’s still nice to have a display to look at for music visualizations and that sort of thing, at least occasionally.

To address this only occasional desire to have a display on your media setup, you could follow in the footsteps of [Steven Elliott] and create a DIY motorized display which only …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 04, 2018
19:00
We Got Your Sega Chiptunes Right Here
» ‎ Hack a Day

Chiptunes are cool, but when you get into it, you realize you’re mostly dealing with Commodore SID tunes, Atari POKEY tracks for the cool kids, bleeps and bloops from a Game Boy, and maybe some NES tracks thrown in for good measure. There’s another option out there – the sound chip in the Sega Genesis. This thing could do drums, man, and [Aidan Lawrence] built the perfect player for the tuneful silicon tucked inside the classic 16-bit console.

[Aidan] had previously built a tiny little music player based on the YM3812 chip, the Yamaha chip found in SoundBlaster and …read more

Tags: classic hacks
October 02, 2018
19:00
Artistic Collaboration With AI
» ‎ Hack a Day

Ever since Google’s Deep Dream results were made public several years ago, there has been major interest in the application of AI and neural network technologies to artistic endeavors. [Helena Sarin] has been experimenting in just this field, exploring the possibilities of collaborating with the ghost in the machine.

The work is centered around the use of Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs. [Helena] describes using a GAN to create artworks as a sort of game. An apprentice attempts to create new works in the style of their established master, while a critic attempts to determine whether the artworks are created …read more

Tags: classic hacks
September 29, 2018
22:00
This Nixie Device is Useless, But Pretty
» ‎ Hack a Day

Nixie clocks, they’re a bit of a cliché, aren’t they? But still, they’re pretty to look at.

[Marcin Saj] has completely got our number, and with his Useless Nixie Device has stripped away any pretence of functionality from his Nixie and concentrated solely on the looking pretty part. It’s a box that steps through the display on any Nixie tube through the use of a set of pluggable socket modules, and it’s encased in an extremely attractive lase-cut acrylic enclosure. Internally it’s an extremely simple device, with a trusty 555 oscillator clocking a 4518 counter that in turn …read more

Tags: classic hacks
September 28, 2018
10:01
Retrotechtacular: Here’s How They Programmed the EDSAC Computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

When you write a program for your computer, whether it is a desktop machine, a microcontroller, or a supercomputer, the chances are that you use software tools to help you get the job done. High level languages, compilers, linkers, assemblers, debuggers, and code libraries have become so integrated that in many cases you will barely be aware of their existence. To all intents and purposes this huge toolchain will be the computer. But the first computer programmers had none of these luxuries. They had to hand assemble their own binaries, check them by hand, and debug them by guessing what …read more

Tags: classic hacks
September 26, 2018
16:00
Apple’s Best Computer Gets WiFi
» ‎ Hack a Day

The greatest computer Apple will ever make isn’t the Apple II, it isn’t the Bondi Blue iMac, it isn’t the trash can, and it certainly isn’t whatever overheating mess they’re pushing out now. The best computer Apple will ever make is the SE/30, at its time a server in a tiny portable shell, and capable of supporting 128 Megabytes of RAM thirty years ago.

Over the years, people have extended and expanded the SE/30 to absolutely ludicrous degrees, but now we have a simple way of adding WiFi to this classic computer. Over on the 68kmla forums, [ants] discovered a …read more

Tags: classic hacks
13:00
Bask In The Warm Glow Of DIY Incandescent Bulbs
» ‎ Hack a Day

With most of the apparatus and instruments we now take for granted yet to be developed, the early pioneers of the Electric Age had to bring a lot to the lab besides electrical skills. Machining, chemistry, and metallurgy were all basic skills that the inventor either had to have or hire in. Most of these skills still have currency of course, but one that was once crucial – glassblowing – has sadly fallen into relative obscurity.

There are still practitioners of course, like [2SC1815] who is learning how to make homemade incandescent light bulbs. The Instructable is in both English …read more

Tags: classic hacks
10:01
Building a Hardware Store Faraday Cage
» ‎ Hack a Day

Most Hackaday readers are no doubt familiar with the Faraday cage, at least in name, and nearly everyone owns one: if you’ve ever stood watching a bag of popcorn slowly revolve inside of a microwave, you’be seen Michael Faraday’s 1836 invention in action. Yet despite being such a well known device, the average hacker still doesn’t have one in their arsenal. But why?

It could be that there’s a certain mystique about Faraday cages, an assumption that their construction requires techniques or materials outside the realm of the home hacker. While it’s true that building a perfect Faraday cage for …read more

Tags: classic hacks
September 24, 2018
10:01
Box Forts For Adults: Best Practices and Design Strategies
» ‎ Hack a Day

Many a grown up can reminisce about building various architectural wonders in their youth. Forts, whether based on boxes or blankets, were the order of the day, and an excellent way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon.

It just so happens that there is no law against scaling up such activities once one has reached the age of majority. However, to build a structure at this level takes some careful planning and consideration, and that is the purpose of our article here today.
Location, Location, Location
The first major consideration when starting your build should be the area in which …read more

Tags: classic hacks
September 23, 2018
22:01
World’s Smallest LED Blinky
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Mike Harrison] is known for incredibly tiny soldering. Now he’s claiming a “world’s smallest” in the form of a stand-alone LED blinker, and we think he’s got the record.

He brought it along with him to Friday’s Beagleboard Bring-a-Hack, and we got a close look at the diminutive assembly. The project was dreamed up when [Mike] saw an announcement from Seiko about a new supercapacitor in a tiny package (likely the CPH3225A giving the blinky a footprint of 3.2 x 2.5 mm). With that in hand he added a PIC 10f322 microcontroller in a SOT23 package, an 0603 smoothing capacitor, …read more

Tags: classic hacks
September 18, 2018
22:00
Soldering Like It’s 205 BC
» ‎ Hack a Day

Did you ever stop to think how unlikely the discovery of soldering is? It’s hard to imagine what sequence of events led to it; after all, metals heated to just the right temperature while applying an alloy of lead and tin in the right proportions in the presence of a proper fluxing agent doesn’t seem like something that would happen by accident.

Luckily, [Chris] at Clickspring is currently in the business of recreating the tools and technologies that would have been used in ancient times, and he’s made a wonderful video on precision soft soldering the old-fashioned way. The video …read more

Tags: classic hacks
September 14, 2018
22:00
A Dozen Tubes Make An Educational Amplifier
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you asked [Hans_Daniel] what he learned by building a tube audio amplifier with a dozen tubes that he found, the answer might just be, “don’t wind your own transformers.” We were impressed, though, that he went from not knowing much about tubes to a good looking amplifier build. We also like the name — NASS II-12 which apparently stands for “not a single semiconductor.”

Even the chassis looked really good. We didn’t know textolite was still a thing, but apparently, the retro laminate is still around somewhere. It looks like a high-end audio component and with the tubes proudly …read more

Tags: classic hacks
September 06, 2018
13:00
Transistor Logic Clock Gets Stacked Up
» ‎ Hack a Day

A couple years back we covered a very impressive transistor logic clock which was laid out so an observer could watch all of the counters doing their thing, complete with gratuitous blinkenlights. It had 777 transistors on 41 perfboards, and exactly zero crystals: the clock signal was extracted from the mains frequency of 50 Hz. It was obviously a labor of love and certainly looked impressive, but it wasn’t exactly the most practical timepiece we’d ever seen.

Creator [B Brett] recently wrote in to share news that the second version of his transistor logic clock has been completed, and we …read more

Tags: classic hacks
September 05, 2018
4:00
LED “Candle” Gets the 555 Treatment
» ‎ Hack a Day

Regular readers may recall we recently covered a neat Arduino trick that allowed you to “blow out” an LED as if it was a candle. The idea was that the LED itself could be used as a rudimentary temperature sensor, and the Arduino code would turn the LED on and off when a change was detected in its forward voltage drop. You need to oversample the Arduino’s ADC to detect the few millivolt change reliably, but overall it’s pretty simple once you understand the principle.

But [Andrzej Laczewski], like many of our beloved readers, feels the Arduino and other microcontrollers …read more

Tags: classic hacks
September 04, 2018
19:00
Make The Surface Dial Do More Things, Such As MIDI
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Surface Dial is a $100+ rotary control. You can turn it, and it’ll make some basic stuff happen on your Microsoft Surface. It’s silver and sleek and elegant but fundamentally, it just works via emulated keyboard shortcuts. This doesn’t really do much for translating analog rotational motion into digital feedback in a nice way, so [SaveTheHuman5] created Elephant to fix this issue.

As standard, there are two ways to work with the Surface Dial as an end-user. The easiest way is to use existing utilities to map dial actions to shortcut keys. However, for interfacing with knobs and sliders …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 28, 2018
13:00
Recreating The Amiga 1200 PCB from Pictures
» ‎ Hack a Day

In the past we’ve talked about one of the major downsides of working with vintage computer hardware, which of course is the fact you’re working with vintage computer hardware. The reality is that these machines were never designed to be up and running 20, 30, or even 40-odd years after they were manufactured. Components degrade and fail, and eventually you’re going to need to either find some way to keep your favorite classic computer up and running or relegate it to becoming a display piece on the shelf.

If you’re like [John Hertell], you take the former option. Knowing that …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 25, 2018
16:01
UnMaker 2.0 Is Wile E Coyote’s Dead Blow Hammer
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hammers! They’re good for knocking in nails, breaking things apart, and generally smashing up the joint, if you’re in such a mood. Typically, they’re made of iron or steel and come in a variety of sizes depending on the purpose — from tiny chipping hammers for delicate sculpture work, to the heavy-duty sledge for tearing through building materials. But what if you built your own comically large mallet? Enter UnMaker 2.0.

Basically, it’s a really big hammer. It’s vaguely reminiscent of a dead blow type design, in that it consists of a moderately shock-absorbing outer shell filled with heavier material. …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 24, 2018
22:01
RC Boat Goes Brushless For Speed & Reliability
» ‎ Hack a Day

Remote control boats can be great fun, and come in all manner of forms. There are unpowered sailcraft, speedboats that scream under the power of internal combustion, and of course, those that move under electric power. The brushless motor revolution of the past 20 years in particular has proven capable of creating some exciting RC watercraft, and [Matt K] decided he wanted to get on board.

[Matt] had owned a Kyosho Jetstream 1000 for several years, but found the nitro engine to be temperamental and not the most fun for high-jinx down at the lake. An old-school brushed motor setup …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 23, 2018
13:00
Using Modern Nintendo Controllers On The C64
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are plenty of people out there who still enjoy playing games on vintage computers like the Commodore 64. But while they likely return to these classic games themselves out of a sense of nostalgia, the feeling doesn’t always extend to the hardware itself. For example, one can enjoy playing Impossible Mission without having to use a contemporary C64 joystick.

Thanks to an open source project developed by [Robert Grasböck], C64 owners who want to take advantage of the improvements made to gaming controllers in the nearly 40 years since the system’s release now have another option. Called Nunchuk64, it …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 22, 2018
16:00
An Incredible ATX Amiga 4000 Motherboard
» ‎ Hack a Day

No matter how far modern computer hardware advances, there’s still a fairly large group of people who yearn for the early days of desktop computing. There’s something undeniably appealing about these early systems, and while even the most hardcore vintage computer aficionado probably wouldn’t be using one as their daily computer anymore, it’s nice to be able to revisit them occasionally. Of course the downside of working with computers that may well be older than their operators is that they are often fragile, and replacement parts are not necessarily easy to come by.

But thanks to projects like this impressive …read more

Tags: classic hacks
13:00
Build Your Own Two-Stage Water Rockets
» ‎ Hack a Day

Water rockets are one of the most fun and exciting science-adjacent activities one can take part in during the summer, and are popular with children and adults alike. Designs range from a bike pump with a cork in a bottle, up to significantly more advanced hardware. [Air.command]’s two-stage water rocket definitely fits into the latter category.

The build is initially somewhat confronting in its complexity, but after a thorough read-through the operating principles become clear. It’s an all-mechanical setup which relies on the weight of the upper stage and the initial acceleration of the rocket to keep the two stages …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 18, 2018
19:00
PC in an SNES Case is a Weirdly Perfect Fit
» ‎ Hack a Day

For better or for worse, a considerable number of the projects we’ve seen here at Hackaday can be accurately summarized as: “Raspberry Pi put into something.” Which is hardly a surprise, the Pi is so tiny that it perfectly lends itself to getting grafted into unsuspecting pieces of consumer tech. But we see far fewer projects that manage to do the same trick with proper x86 PC hardware, but that’s not much of a surprise either given how much larger a motherboard and its components are.

So this PC built into a Super Nintendo case by [NoshBar] is something …read more

Tags: classic hacks
16:00
How The 8087 Coprocessor Got Its Bias
» ‎ Hack a Day

Most of us have been there. You build a device but realize you need two or more voltages. You could hook up multiple power supplies but that can be inconvenient and just not elegant. Alternatively, you can do something in the device itself to create the extra voltages starting with just one. When [Ken Shirriff] decapped an 8087 coprocessor to begin exploring it, he found it had that very problem. It needed: +5 V, a ground, and an additional -5 V.

His exploration starts with a smoking gun. After decapping the chip and counting out all the bond wires going …read more

Tags: classic hacks
4:01
JB Weld – Strong Enough To Repair a Connecting Rod?
» ‎ Hack a Day

JB Weld is a particularly popular brand of epoxy, and features in many legends. “My cousin’s neighbour’s dog trainer’s grandpa once repaired a Sherman tank barrel in France with that stuff!” they’ll say. Thankfully, with the advent of new media, there’s a wealth of content out there of people putting these wild and interesting claims to the test. As the venerable Grace Hopper once said, “One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions“, so it’s great to see these experiments happening.

[Project Farm] is one of them, this time attempting to repair a connecting rod …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 16, 2018
16:00
A Surprisingly Practical Numitron Watch
» ‎ Hack a Day

Regular Hackaday readers are surely familiar with Nixie tubes: the fantastically retro cold cathode display devices that hackers have worked into all manner of devices (especially timepieces) to give them an infusion of glowing faux nostalgia. But unfortunately, Nixie displays are fairly fragile and can be tricky to drive due to their high voltage requirements. For those who might want to work with something more forgiving, a possible alternative is the Numitron that uses incandescent filaments for each segment.

There hasn’t been a lot of prior-art that utilizes Numitrons, but that might be changing, given how fantastic this wristwatch created …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 13, 2018
22:00
Raspberry Pi Foosball Scoreboard
» ‎ Hack a Day

Foosball, also known as table football, is a classic game from the 1920s that is completely devoid of the bells and whistles of modern gaming. Players control stoic little figures with the most simplistic of input devices in order to move a tiny ball to and fro on the playing field. So naturally, somebody thought they should add a Raspberry Pi to it and drag the whole thing kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

The team at [Matmi] spend a good portion of their down time huddled over a foosball table, but they found the experience was significantly less …read more

Tags: classic hacks
4:00
Modern PC Crammed Into an Original Xbox
» ‎ Hack a Day

When the original Microsoft Xbox was released in 2001, one of the most notable features of its design was that it used a number of off-the-shelf computer components. Inside contemporary offerings from Nintendo and Sony you’ll see almost nothing but proprietary components, whereas cracking open the Xbox reveals an IDE hard drive, a customized PC DVD-ROM drive, and an Intel Pentium III CPU. Depending on which team you were on, the Xbox’s close relation to PC hardware of the day was either a point of honor or ridicule in the early 2000’s console wars; but regardless of politics, it ended …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 11, 2018
22:00
Get Nostalgic with these GameCube Themed Joy-Cons
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are a lot of good reasons to think fondly of the Nintendo GameCube. Metroid Prime and Rogue Leader knocked it out of the park. The Game Boy Player was cool. There’s even something to be said for having a convenient carrying handle on a system designed for couch multiplayer. But if you ask anyone who played Nintendo’s sixth generation console what part they missed the least, it would probably be the controller. With all the visual flair of a Little Tikes playset and ergonomics designed for an octopus, it’s a controller that works well for first-party Nintendo titles …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 10, 2018
7:01
Rediffusion Television: Early Cable TV Delivered Like Telephone
» ‎ Hack a Day

Recently I spent an enjoyable weekend in Canterbury, staying in my friend’s flat with a superb view across the rooftops to the city’s mediaeval cathedral. Bleary-eyed and in search of a coffee on the Sunday morning, my attention was immediately drawn to one of her abode’s original built-in features. There on the wall in the corner of the room was a mysterious switch.

Housed on a standard-sized British electrical fascia was a 12-position rotary switch, marked with letters A through L. An unexpected thing to see in the 21st century and one probably unfamiliar to most people under about 40, …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 09, 2018
10:01
Using Acoustic Levitation for Applications Going Way Beyond Novelty
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve all seen acoustic levitation, it’s one of the scientific novelties of our age and a regular on the circuit of really impressive physical demonstrations of science to the public. The sight of arrays of ultrasonic speakers causing small objects and beads of liquid to float in mid-air without any suspension is magical, captivating people of all ages. Thus a lecture at Hackaday Belgrade on the subject from Asier Marzo, a research scientist with a speciality in the field of ultrasonics at the UK’s University of Bristol, was a particularly fascinating and informative one.

He started by explaining acoustic levitation …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 06, 2018
4:00
Mouse Trap Game used as an Actual Mouse Trap
» ‎ Hack a Day

Just when you thought you had explored all the weird stuff on YouTube, along comes [Shawn Woods] with his channel dedicated to testing different types of mouse traps. His weekly videos demonstrate the construction and ultimate effectiveness of everything from primitive traps that can be made in the field from sticks and rocks to 3D printed creations sent in from viewers. But his latest video might just be the weirdest one yet, as he found a way to use the classic “Mousetrap” board game to capture an actual rodent.

Well, sort of. For one, [Shawn] admits the “trap” is …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 04, 2018
16:00
Help Save Some Of Australia’s Computer History From The Bulldozers
» ‎ Hack a Day

When multiple tipsters write in to tell us about a story, we can tell it’s an important one. This morning we’ve received word that the holding warehouse of the Australian Computer Museum Society in the Sydney suburb of Villawood is to be imminently demolished, and they urgently need to save the artifacts contained within it. They need Aussies with spare storage capacity of decent size to help them keep and store the collection, and they only have a few days during which to do so.

The ever-effusive Dave from EEVblog has posted a video in which he takes a tour, …read more

Tags: classic hacks
August 02, 2018
8:30
Lasercut Gears – A Learning Experience
» ‎ Hack a Day

Lasercutters are fantastic tools: they’re highly useful for making flat things, or even flat things that you later bend! This makes them particularly well suited for making gears out of flat stock. [sharvfish] needed to get his hands dirty with producing some gears for his automaton, and decided to share what he learned in the process.

The gears in question are cut out of MDF board, which is readily usable on all but the feeblest lasercutters you’ll find in the average makerspace. The first problem faced was when producing gears with low tooth counts – depending on the exact geometry …read more

Tags: classic hacks
4:00
!Sinclair !ZX Vega To Lose The Sinclair Name
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s not a good time to be a backer of the crowdfunded Sinclair ZX Vega retro console. After raising a record sum on Indiegogo, a long series of broken promises and missed dates, and a final loss of patience from the crowdfunding site, it has emerged that the owner of the Sinclair and ZX brands is to withdraw the right to use them from the console.

The Vega itself should have been a reasonable proposition, a slick handheld running the FUSE Spectrum emulator rather than Z80 hardware, and from Retro Computers Limited, a company that boasted a 25% ownership from …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 31, 2018
4:00
Add-On Board Brings Xbox 360 Controllers to N64
» ‎ Hack a Day

Many of the games released on the Nintendo 64 have aged remarkably well, in fact a number of them are still considered must-play experiences to this day. But the years have not been so kind to the system’s signature controller. While the N64 arguably defined the console first person shooter (FPS) genre with games like “Goldeneye” and “Perfect Dark”, a modern gamer trying to play these classics with the preposterous combination of analog and digital inputs offered by the N64 controller is unlikely to get very far.

Of course, you could play N64 games in an emulator …read more

Tags: classic hacks
1:00
Building the Terminator’s Arm
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Cyberdyne Systems Series 800 Terminator is a highly capable robot that happens to look an awful lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger. It boasts an advanced metallic endoskeleton, which has been the inspiration for many DIY prop builds over the years. [KenToonz] has decided to take on just such a project and invites viewers along for the ride. (YouTube, embedded below.)

The project is a particularly interesting one, as it involves the recreation of a robotic imitation of a human hand and arm. Thankfully, due to the hard work of dedicated individuals, blueprints of the original movie item are available online. …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 30, 2018
22:00
Vintage Silvertone Cabinet Gets Bluetooth Treatment
» ‎ Hack a Day

This Bluetooth speaker is full of delightful surprises. The outer shell is an antique radio cabinet, but its practically empty interior is a combination of Dead Bug circuitry and modern BT receiver.

[PJ Allen] found the BT receiver on Groupon and decided to whip up amplifier and threshold detector circuits using only parts he already had in order to make this vintage-looking Bluetooth speaker. The cabinet is from a Silvertone Model 1955 circa 1936. Don’t worry, no antiques were harmed in the making of this hack, the cabinet was empty when he bought it.

The amplifiers, one per speaker, began …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 29, 2018
10:01
Flexible PCB Becomes The Actuator
» ‎ Hack a Day

An electromagnetic coil gun takes a line of electromagnets working together to form a moving electromagnetic field. These fields accelerate a project and boom, you have electricity moving matter, often at an impressive rate of speed.

[Carl Bugeja] has taken the idea and in a sense turned it upon its head with his flexible PCB actuator. Now the line of electromagnets are the moving part and the magnetic object the stationary one. There is still a line of flat PCB inductors in the classic coil gun configuration, but as the title suggests on a flexible substrate.

The result is a …read more

Tags: classic hacks
7:01
1950’s AM Transmitter is Fun but Dangerous
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Mr. Carlson] bought a Globe Scout Model 40A ham radio transmitter at a hamfest. The 40A was a grand old transmitter full of tubes, high voltage, and a giant transformer. It is really interesting to see how much things have changed over the years. The transmitter is huge but has comparatively few parts. You needed a crystal for the frequency you wanted to talk. There were two little modules that were precursors to hybrid circuits (which were precursors to ICs) that were often called PECs or couplates (not couplets) but other than those, it is all tubes and discrete components …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 26, 2018
1:00
Data Logging Like It’s 1982
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you want to log voltages or resistance these days, no problem. You can buy a multimeter with Bluetooth for a hundred bucks, and if you’re really fancy you can spring for the Fluke with a graphical display that will log values automatically. Things weren’t always this cheap and easy, but there was always a way to do it.

Back in the 80s, HP had GPIB, or HP-IB, or IEEE-488 connectors on the back of their benchtop equipment. This was an 8-bit interface not unlike a parallel port that allowed for remote control of test equipment. In a great demonstration …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 24, 2018
1:00
Sad Without a SID? This Comes Pretty Close
» ‎ Hack a Day

The MOS Technologies 6851, popularly known as the SID, is a legendary sound synthesiser integrated circuit from the early 1980s that is most famous for providing the Commodore 54 home computer with its ability to make noise. At the time it was significantly better than what could be found in competitor machines, making it a popular choice for today’s chiptune and demo scene artists.

There’s a snag for a modern-day SID-jockey though, the chip has been out of production for a quarter century and is thus in short supply. Emulation is a choice, but of little use for owners of …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 21, 2018
10:00
Hacking A Very Special 486
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s fair to say that Moore’s Law is not delivering on its promise of advancing semiconductor capabilities as fast as it used to, as the limits of current fabrication techniques are being met. Where this is being written for example there are two laptops, one from the last year and one that is 11 years old, and while the new one is undeniably faster it has not overtaken the other by as much as a ten year gap between 1990s machines would have revealed.

So with older laptops being still so relatively quick, what possible attraction could there be for …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 20, 2018
19:00
Bananas Against Racism
» ‎ Hack a Day

This is a tale as old as time. Not love, it is about keeping something you made safe from those who would destroy something beautiful. In this case, the thing of beauty is a talking banana who reads Twitch and Youtube comments. The ne’er-do-wells are trolls seeking to ban-anana the account by forcing it to recite restricted words.

The problems stem from a visit from [Greekgodx], whose followers tend toward the dark side. When they set their sights on [Mike Nichols]’ yellow automaton, things slipped into a bleak place, and a twenty-four-hour ban falls on the fruit. A bunch of …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 14, 2018
4:00
A Tale Of More Than One Amiga 1500
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you were an Amiga enthusiast back in the day, the chances are you had an Amiga 500, and lusted after a 2000 or maybe later a 3000. Later still perhaps you had a 600 or a 1200, and your object of desire became the 4000. The amusingly inept Commodore marketing department repackaged what was essentially the same 68000-based Amiga at the bottom end of the range through the platform’s entire lifetime under their ownership, with a few minor hardware upgrades in the form of chipset revisions that added a relatively small number of features.

We’ve probably listed above all …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 12, 2018
22:00
Old Time Traffic Signal Revived with a Raspberry Pi Controller
» ‎ Hack a Day

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the classic animated shorts of the 1940s will recognize the traffic signal in the image above. Yes, such things actually existed in the real world, not just in the Looney world of [Bugs Bunny] et al. As sturdy as such devices were, they don’t last forever, though, which is why a restoration of this classic Acme traffic signal was necessary for a California museum. Yes, that Acme.

When you see a traffic signal from the early days of the automotive age like this one, it becomes quickly apparent how good the modern equivalent …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 11, 2018
16:00
A Graph Plotting Metal Detector
» ‎ Hack a Day

Metal detectors can be a great source of fun, and occasionally even found wealth. They allow the detection of metal objects at a distance, enabling hidden treasures to be discovered. They’re also highly critical to the work of minesweepers and unexploded ordnance disposal teams. [Andrius] wanted to add such a device to his kit when motorcycling through the woods of Lithuania, and thus decided to undertake a build of his own.

The detector is a thoroughly modern one – fans of the 555 may want to look away now. A Collpits oscillator, built from two transistors, is used to generate …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 10, 2018
1:00
An Amiga 600 With An FPGA Inside
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Amiga is the platform that refuses to die. It must be more than two decades since the debacle surrounding the demise of the original hardware, yet the operating system is still receiving periodic updates, you can still buy Amiga hardware now sporting considerably more powerful silicon than the originals, and its worldwide community is as active as ever.

One of those community projects is the MiSTer FPGA Amiga-on-an-FPGA, and it was this that caught the attention of [Mattsoft]. Impressed with the quality of its recreation of an Amiga, he decided to turn his into a “real” Amiga, so found …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 09, 2018
22:00
Eight Transistor Stereo Amplifier From The Days Of Yore
» ‎ Hack a Day

Reading an article about the first transistorized Hi-Fi amplifier, [Netzener] got the itch to make one. But what to use for the starting point? Enter an old Radio Shack P-Box stereo amplifier kit. After a few modernizations and tweaks, the result is an 8-transistor stereo amplifier that’s aesthetically pleasing, sounds great, and is fully documented.

The Radio Shack kit used germanium transistors, but with their high leakage current and low thermal conductivity, he decided to convert it to work with silicon transistors. He also made some improvements to the push-pull bias circuit and limited the high-frequency response. As for the …read more

Tags: classic hacks
10:01
Rocket Bullets: The Flame and Fizzle of the Gyrojet
» ‎ Hack a Day

In the 1950’s and 60’s, the world had rocket fever. Humankind was taking its first steps into space and had sights on the moon. Kids could build rockets at the kitchen table and launch them in the schoolyard. On the darker side, the arms race was well underway with the US and USSR trying to close the fictional missile gap.

All around the world, engineers were trying to do new things with rockets. Among these were Robert Mainhardt and Arthur T. Biehl, who thought rockets could be useful as small arms. Together they formed MBA (short for Mainhardt and Biehl …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 07, 2018
10:00
Pinball Wizard Hacks Table for Tommy Stage Show
» ‎ Hack a Day

Ever since he was a young hacker
[Mark Gibson] has messed with the silver ball.
From Soho down to Denver
he must have fixed them all.
But we ain’t seen anything like this
in any amusement hall.
That darn devious hacker
sure hacks a mean pinball.

He hacks it like an expert,
Becomes part of the machine
Automating all the bumpers
Always wiring clean
His table plays by automation,
And radio control for all
That darn devious hacker
sure hacks a mean pinball.

He’s a pin ball hacker
There has got to be a twist
A pin ball hacker,
With
…read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 06, 2018
13:00
A 38-Year-Old Vocoder Project
» ‎ Hack a Day

It is hard to remember that scant decades ago, electronic magazines — the pre-Internet equivalent of blogs — featured lots of audio circuits based on analog processing. Music synthesizers were popular for example, because microcontrollers were expensive and unable to perform digital signal processing tasks in the way you would use them today. [Julian] has been trying to build a vocoder from that era from ETI magazine. Along the way, he’s making videos documenting what he’s found and how’s he resolving issues.

The circuit generates levels for particular input frequencies. It does so with a two-op-amp bandpass filter, a two-op-amp …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 04, 2018
16:01
Build Your Own Rowing Machine, Now With Digital Readout!
» ‎ Hack a Day

An ergometer is a fancy fitness word for a rowing machine, a device which can be used to work out the muscles used in rowing. It’s an excellent cardio workout that can also build upper body strength, and resistance can be varied depending on the individual’s fitness goals. But perhaps you need to measure your workout to see your progress – in which case, [Dave]’s instrumentation package might be right up your alley.

The basic mechanical build involves a wooden frame, fitted with a rowing setup built around a modified bicycle wheel. The wheel has vanes attached, made of what …read more

Tags: classic hacks
July 01, 2018
22:00
Furniture And Motors Make A Strange Bedfellow
» ‎ Hack a Day

Beds! They don’t move around enough, so the young people say. They need more motors, more horsepower, more self-driving smarts – right? Honestly, we’re not sure, but if that’s the question being asked, [randofo] has the answer.

Aptly named, Bedfellow is an art project that sought to create a bed that could explore and socialise with occupants aboard. The core principle was not just to create a bed that could move under its own power, but one that could intelligently drive around and avoid obstacles, too. This is achieved through the use of ultrasonic sensors, with an Arduino Mega as …read more

Tags: classic hacks
7:00
Heartwatch Monitors Your Ticker
» ‎ Hack a Day

The heart! A pump of the most fantastical kind, it is capable of operating for decades without rest. It’s responsible for supplying vital oxygen to the body’s subsystems, and can be readily monitored with modern technology. [Dave Vernooy] wanted to build a watch that could take heartrate and blood oxygen measurements – so he did.

Named Heartwatch, the device is a DIY smartwatch build with a bunch of exciting features. Heart monitoring is taken care of by the MAX30102 sensor which integrates all the hardware to sense heart rate and oxygen saturation into a single tiny plastic package. There’s then …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 30, 2018
4:00
The BBC Computer Literacy Project From The 1980s Is Yours To Browse
» ‎ Hack a Day

In the early 1980s there was growing public awareness that the microcomputer revolution would have a significant effect on everybody’s lives, and there was a brief period in which anything remotely connected with a computer attracted an air of glamour and sophistication. Broadcasters wanted to get in on the act, and produced glowing documentaries on the new technology, enthusiastically crystal-ball-gazing as they did so.

In the UK, the public service BBC broadcaster produced a brace of series’ over the decade probing all corners of the subject as part of the same Computer Literacy Project that gave us Acorn’s BBC Micro, …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 29, 2018
4:00
A LIDAR Scanner Build in Glorious Detail
» ‎ Hack a Day

LIDAR is a very exciting technology that is only just now starting to become accessible to the DIY market. Think radar, but with lasers. There’s a few different modules starting to pop up for just a few hundred dollars. But what is one to do with a LIDAR module? Well, [David] decided to build a room scanner with his Garmin LIDAR Lite, and it’s a wonderful sight to behold.

The scanner consists of a rotating platform, which is driven by a stepper motor. The platform then contains a second motor which runs a tilt axis, upon which the LIDAR is …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 22, 2018
10:00
VCF East XIII: Another Day in Retro Paradise
» ‎ Hack a Day

While the weather alternated between mist and monsoon for most of it, the thirteenth annual Vintage Computer Festival East was still a huge success. People came from all over the country, and indeed the world, to show off computers and equipment that was easily older than many of those in attendance. From 1980’s robots to recreations of the very first machines to ever carry the name “computer” as we understand it today, there were a dizzying array of fascinating exhibits to see for those who made the pilgrimage to the InfoAge Science Center in Wall, New Jersey. The people who …read more

Tags: classic hacks
7:10
There’s RC2014 Life In The TMS9918A Display Chip Yet
» ‎ Hack a Day

One of the outliers in the home computer wars of the early 1980s was the Texas Instruments TI99/4A. It may not have had the games library of its rivals and its TMS9900 processor may not have set the world on fire with its registers-in-RAM architecture, but its range of support chips included one whose derivatives would go on to delight subsequent generations. If you had an MSX or one of the 8 or 16-bit Sega consoles, the TMS9918A graphics chip provided the architecture that sat behind Sonic in his adventures.

A few decades later, there is still significant interest in …read more

Tags: classic hacks
4:00
When Vortex Rings Collide
» ‎ Hack a Day

Intrigued by a grainy video from 1992, [Destin] from Smarter Every Day decided to jump in and fund his own research into the strange phenomenon of vortex ring collisions.

This hack started with a scientific publication and a video from back in 1992. The paper, written by Dr. T T Lim and TB Nichols, illustrated what happens when two vortex rings collide perfectly head-on. The rings collide and spread out forming a thin membrane. Then smaller rings form at a 90-degree angle to the original collision. It’s a beautiful effect when created with multicolored dye in water. But what causes …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 18, 2018
1:01
Dissecting the Elusive Wax Motor
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’d wager most readers aren’t intimately acquainted with wax motors. In fact, a good deal of you have probably never heard of them, let alone used one in a project. Which isn’t exactly surprising, as they’re very niche and rarely used outside of HVAC systems and some appliances. But they’re fascinating devices, and once you’ve seen how they work, you might just figure out an application for one.

[AvE] recently did a complete teardown on a typical wax motor, going as far as cutting the thing in half to show the inner workings. Now we’ve seen some readers commenting that …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 13, 2018
4:00
Unlocking Animal Crossing’s Debug Mode
» ‎ Hack a Day

Originally released on the Nintendo 64 in 2001, Animal Crossing was the first entry into what has become a massively successful franchise. But while the game has appeared on more modern Nintendo consoles, most recently Android and iOS, the version released on the GameCube holds a special place in many fan’s hearts. The GameCube version was the first time those outside of Japan got a taste of the unique community simulation offered by Animal Crossing, and maintains a following nearly 20 years after its release.

[James Chambers] has recently been investigating creating mods for the GameCube version of Animal …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 12, 2018
1:00
555 Ways to Speed Control A DC Motor
» ‎ Hack a Day

The 555 timer IC is a handful of active components all baked into one beautifully useful 8 pin package. Originally designed for timing purposes, they became ubiquitous parts that can achieve almost anything. In this case, they’re being used to create a basic PWM motor controller.

The trick is to set the 555 up in astable mode, and use diodes and a potentiometer in the charge/discharge loop. By hanging a diode off either side of a potentiometer, leading to the charge and discharge pins, and connecting the center lug to the main capacitor, you can vary the resistance seen by …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 11, 2018
13:00
Tricking A Vintage Clock Chip Into Working On 50-Hz Power
» ‎ Hack a Day

Thanks to microcontrollers, RTC modules, and a plethora of cheap and interesting display options, digital clock projects have become pretty easy. Choose to base a clock build around a chip sporting a date code from the late 70s, though, and your build is bound to be more than run-of-the-mill.

This is the boat that [Fran Blanche] finds herself in with one of her ongoing projects. The chip in question is a Mostek MK50250 digital alarm clock chip, and her first hurdle was find a way to run the clock on 50 Hertz with North American 60-Hertz power. The reason for …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 09, 2018
4:00
Restoring an Atari 800 XL that’s Beyond Restoring
» ‎ Hack a Day

Sometimes the best way to get a hacker to do something is to tell them that they shouldn’t, or even better can’t, do it. Nothing inspires the inquisitive mind quite like the idea that they are heading down the road less traveled, if for nothing else to say that they did it. A thrown gauntlet and caffeine is often all that stands between the possible and the impossible.

So when [Drygol] heard a friend comment he had an old Atari 800 XL that was such poor shape it couldn’t be repaired, he took on the challenge of restoring the …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 08, 2018
7:01
VCF East: SDR on the Altair 8800
» ‎ Hack a Day

You’d be forgiven if you thought software defined radio (SDR) was a relatively recent discovery. After all, few outside of the hardcore amateur radio circles were even familiar with the concept until it was discovered that cheap USB TV tuners could be used as fairly decent receivers from a few hundred MHz all the way up into the GHz range. The advent of the RTL-SDR project in 2012 brought the cost of entry level SDR hardware from hundreds of dollars to tens of dollars effectively overnight. Today there’s more hackers cruising the airwaves via software trickery than there’s ever been …read more

Tags: classic hacks
1:00
Space Invaders Sound Chip Went Old School With I2L
» ‎ Hack a Day

It must be everyone’s birthday today because [Ken Shirriff] has come out with a gift for us. He’s done another pass at reverse engineering the 76477 Space Invaders sound chip from the 1970s and found it’s full of integrated injection logic (I²L), making it a double treat: we get to explore the more of this chip which made sounds for so many of our favorite games, and we explore a type of logic which was to be the successor to TTL until CMOS came along.

This article has a similar shape to his last one, first introducing I …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 06, 2018
4:00
Cracking the Case of Capcom’s CPS2 Security
» ‎ Hack a Day

We love a good deep-dive on a specialized piece of technology, the more obscure the better. You’re getting a sneak peek into a world that, by rights, you were never meant to know even existed. A handful of people developed the system, and as far as they knew, nobody would ever come through to analyze and investigate it to find out how it all went together. But they didn’t anticipate the tenacity of a curious hacker with time on their hands.

[Eduardo Cruz] has done a phenomenal job of documenting one such system, the anti-piracy mechanisms present in the Capcom …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 04, 2018
7:01
A 100th Birthday Celebration for the Flip Flop
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of creation as we’re building our latest widget. By the same token, it’s sometimes difficult to fully appreciate just how old some of the circuits we use are. Even the simplest of projects might make use of elements that were once a mess on some physicist’s or engineer’s lab bench, with components screwed to literal breadboards and power supplied by banks of wet-cell batteries.

One such circuit turns 100 years old in June, which is surprising because it literally is the building block of every computer. It’s the flip-flop, and while …read more

Tags: classic hacks
June 02, 2018
22:00
Bringing Back A Spectrum’s Rails
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was to most Brits the computer to own in the early 1980s, it might not have had all the hardware features of its more expensive competitors but it had the software library that they lacked. Games came out for the Spectrum first, and then other platforms got them later. If you didn’t have a rubber keyboard and a Sinclair logo, you were nothing in the playground circa 1984. That low price though meant that in true Sinclair tradition a number of corners had been cut in the little micro’s design. Most notably in its power supply, …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 31, 2018
4:00
Accurate Coffee Billing Through Reverse Engineering
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’ve ever worked in a stingy office, you’ve become familiar with the communal coffee maker that runs on some variant of the honor system. There’s bits of paper, a coin jar shabbily sealed with sticky tape, and the routine note every six months telling people off for not paying for their daily brew. It all gets a bit much. Thankfully, if you work with [Fabian], it’s no longer a problem (PDF link).

The project forms the basis for [Fabian]’s thesis, in which a DeLonghi coffee maker is reverse engineered. This is undertaken with the explicit goal of properly metering …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 30, 2018
13:00
Convert A Kerbside CRT TV Into An Arcade Monitor
» ‎ Hack a Day

While an old CRT TV may work well enough on a MAME cabinet project, the real arcade purists are quick to point out that a proper arcade monitor and a TV aren’t the same thing. A real arcade board uses RGB to connect to the monitor, that is, direct control over the red, green, and blue signals. Conversely video over coax or composite, what most people associate with old CRT TVs, combine all the video information down into an analog signal. Put simply, RGB allows for a much cleaner image than composite.

Many in the arcade restoration scene say that …read more

Tags: classic hacks
10:01
VCF East: The Mail Order App Store
» ‎ Hack a Day

Today we take the concept of a centralized software repository for granted. Whether it’s apt or the App Store, pretty much every device we use today has a way to pull applications in without the user manually having to search for them on the wilds of the Internet. Not only is this more convenient for the end user, but at least in theory, more secure since you won’t be pulling binaries off of some random website.

But centralized software distribution doesn’t just benefit the user, it can help developers as well. As platforms like Steam have shown, once you lower …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 27, 2018
22:00
Rolling Old School with Copy Protection from the 1980s
» ‎ Hack a Day

Oh, for the old days when sailing the seas of piracy was as simple as hooking a couple of VCRs together with a dubbing cable. Sure, the video quality degraded with each generation, but it was so bad to start out with that not paying $25 for a copy of “Ghostbusters” was a value proposition. But then came The Man with all his “rules” and “laws” about not stealing, and suddenly tapes weren’t so easy to copy.

If you’ve ever wondered how copy protection worked in pre-digital media, wonder no more. [Technology Connections] has done a nice primer on one …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 24, 2018
10:01
VCF East: The Desktop ENIAC
» ‎ Hack a Day

The ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, is essentially the Great Great Grandfather of whatever device you’re currently reading these words on. Developed during World War II for what would be about $7 million USD today, it was designed to calculate artillery firing tables. Once word got out about its capabilities, it was also put to work on such heady tasks as assisting with John von Neumann’s research into the hydrogen bomb. The success of ENIAC lead directly into the development of EDVAC, which adopted some of the now standard computing concepts such as binary arithmetic and the idea …read more

Tags: classic hacks
8:01
A Smarter PSU Converter Leaves the Magic Smoke Inside
» ‎ Hack a Day

Over the years, computers have become faster, but at the same time, more power hungry as well. Way back around the 386 era, most PCs were using the AT standard for power supplies. Since then, the world moved on to the now ubiquitous ATX standard. Hobbyists working on older machines will typically use these readily available supplies with basic adapters to run old machines, but [Samuel] built a better one.

Most AT to ATX adapters are basic passive units, routing the various power lines where they need to go and tying the right pin high to switch the ATX supply …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 22, 2018
1:00
A Parallel Port Synthesiser For Your DOS PC
» ‎ Hack a Day

It is a great shame that back in the days when a typical home computer had easy low-level hardware access that is absent from today’s machines, the cost of taking advantage of it was so high. Professional PCBs were way out of reach of a home constructor, and many of the integrated circuits that might have been used were expensive and difficult to source in small quantities.

Here in the 21st century we have both cheap PCBs and easy access to a wealth of semiconductors, so enthusiasts for older hardware can set to work on projects that would have been …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 21, 2018
8:31
Wireless Headphone Hack Dangles Batteries Like Earrings
» ‎ Hack a Day

Koss Porta Pro headphones are something of a rarity in the world of audio gear: they’re widely regarded as sounding great, but don’t cost an exorbitant amount of money. Since the line was introduced in 1984, they’ve been the go-to headphones for those who don’t subscribe to the idea that you should have to take out a loan from the bank just to enjoy your music.

[Jake Bickhard] is a confirmed Porta Pro disciple, owning enough pairs of them that he’s cagey about confirming how many are actually kicking around his home. The only thing he doesn’t like about them …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 16, 2018
16:00
Prop WWII Machine Gun Courtesy of Home Depot
» ‎ Hack a Day

There’s perhaps nothing worse than working on a project and realizing you don’t have the part you need to complete it. You look through all your stuff twice, maybe three times, on the off chance it’s hiding somewhere. Perhaps even reach out to a few nearby friends to see if they might have something you can use. Forget local stores, what you need is so specific that nobody’s going to keep it in stock. You’re stuck, and now everything has to be put on hold.

That’s precisely what happened to [Nathan Cragun] recently. He needed a Japanese Type 96 Light …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 15, 2018
16:01
Lucky Cat POV Display Ditches the Waving and Windmills Out of Control
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’ve been in a Japanese restaurant, you’ve probably seen a maneki-neko, the lucky cat charm, where a cat welcomes you with a beckoning arm. It’s considered to bring good luck, but we’re not sure if [Martin Fitzpatrick] is pushing his luck with this Lucky Cat POV display. He hacked one of the figurines so the arm forms a persistence of vision (POV) display, where blinking LEDs on the paw create a dot-matrix style display.

Inside the hapless neko is a Wemos D1, motor driver, and a few other components that turn the cat into a working display. The five …read more

Tags: classic hacks
1:00
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in 2018
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s been 25 years since Microsoft released Windows for Workgroups 3.11. To take a trip back to the end of the 16-bit era of operating system, [Yeo Kheng Meng] got WFW 3.11 running on a modern Thinkpad.

To make things difficult, a few goals were set for the project. Obviously, this wouldn’t be much fun in a virtual machine, so those were banned. A video driver would be needed, since WFW 3.11 only supports resolutions up to 640×480 in software. Some basic support for sound would be desirable. Finally, TCP/IP networking is possible in WFW 3.11, so networking hardware would …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 11, 2018
7:00
Scratch-Built Ornithopter: Here’s How I Flapped My Way to Flight
» ‎ Hack a Day

Enclosure: [download]

One of humankind’s dreams has always been to fly like a bird. For a hacker, an achievable step along the path to that dream is to make an ornithopter — a machine which flies by flapping its wings. An RC controlled one would be wonderful, controlled flight is what everyone wants. Building a flying machine from scratch is a big enough challenge, and a better jumping-off point is to make a rubber band driven one first.

I experimented with designs which are available on the internet, to learn as much as possible, but I started from scratch in terms of …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 10, 2018
9:01
VCF East XIII is Right Around the Corner
» ‎ Hack a Day

The middle of May is a very special time at the Jersey Shore. It’s finally warm enough that business owners decide they might as well unlock their doors, but still cool enough that you can go on the boardwalk without having to bump into sweaty strangers. It’s a time for saltwater taffy without the risk of skin cancer, for hot dogs without seagulls trying to steal them from you. You get the idea.

This year it’s also when the Vintage Computer Festival East will be held in Wall, New Jersey. Running from May 18th to the 20th, VCF East XIII …read more

Tags: classic hacks
4:00
1960’s Console Stereo gets Raspberry Pi Touch Screen
» ‎ Hack a Day

When he was but a wee hacker, [WhiskeyDrinker] loved to play with the big console stereo his grandparents had. The idea of a functional piece of furniture always appealed to him, and he decided that when he grew up and had a place of his own he’d get a similar stereo. Fast forward to the present, and a Craigslist ad for a working Penncrest stereo seemed to be a dream come true. Until it wasn’t.

As difficult as it might be to believe, sometimes things we read on the Internet are not true. The “working” Penncrest radio turned out to …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 09, 2018
4:00
8-bit game uses our favourite IC and Zero lines of code
» ‎ Hack a Day

If a hacker today wanted to build a simple game, he or she could whip it up using an Arduino board and a few other bits and pieces in about an hour, only to be greeted with “where’s the hack?” But when you look at [OiD]’s SPEBEG (Single Player Eight Bit Electronic Game), you’ll understand why building anything using old-skool 70s tech is so awesome and educational.

The SPEBEG is a simple 8-bit game where you aim with the joystick at the target and fire to gain points. As your score increases, so does the game speed. It doesn’t need …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 07, 2018
13:01
Raspberry Pi Becomes Cycle Exact Commodore Drive Emulator
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Commodore 1541 disk drive is unlike anything you’ll ever see in modern computer hardware. At launch, the 1541 cost almost as much as the Commodore 64 it was attached to ($400, or about $1040 at today’s value). This drive had a CPU, and had its own built-in operating system. Of course, anyone using a Commodore 64 now doesn’t deal with this drive these days — you can buy an SD2IEC for twenty dollars and load all your C64 games off an SD card. If you’re cheap, there’s always the tape drive interface and a ten dollar Apple Lightning to …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 04, 2018
4:00
Commodore 64 to Raspberry Pi Conversion is Respectful & Complete
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’re big fans of taking old computers and giving them a new lease on life, but only when it is done respectfully. That means no cutting, no hot glue, and no gouging out bits to make the new computer fit. It’s best if it can be done in a way that the original parts can be restored if required.

This Commodore 64 to Raspberry Pi conversion from [Mattsoft] definitely fits our criteria here, as it uses the old keyboard, joystick connectors and output portholes for the required authentic look. It does this through the clever use of a couple of …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 02, 2018
16:00
Oddball Mercury Vapor Rectifier Is A Tube Geek’s Delight
» ‎ Hack a Day

Even if you aren’t a tube aficionado, you can’t help but be mesmerized by the blue glow inside a mercury vapor rectifier when it operates. It looks less like early 20th century tech and more like something that belongs on a Star Trek set. [Uniservo] acquired an 866 rectifier that was interesting due to the markings, which he explains in detail in the video below. Most people though will probably want to skip to closer to its end to see that distinctive blue glow. The exact hue depends on the mercury vapor pressure and usually contains a fair amount of …read more

Tags: classic hacks
8:00
The Internet of Claw Machines
» ‎ Hack a Day

Remote administration of machines is a very useful tool for all manner of commercial, industrial, and home applications. Now, it’s available for claw machines, too – thanks to [Code Your Venture Free].

The project uses an ESP32 board that includes a battery case on the back for a standard 18650 lithium battery that makes getting small battery powered projects off the ground much easier. You can find them at Banggood and AliExpress, but we’re not 100% sure that they’re kosher because they’re branded WeMos, but don’t show up on WeMos’ website or their official online retail store. Anyway, it’s a …read more

Tags: classic hacks
May 01, 2018
13:00
See-Through Rotary Engine Reveals Wankel Magic
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Wankel rotary engine is known for its troubled life in the mainstream automotive industry, its high power-to-weight ratio, and the intoxicating buzz it makes at full tilt. Popular with die-hard enthusiasts and punishing to casual owners, it stands as perhaps the most popular alternative internal combustion design to see the light of day. There are myriad diagrams out there to explain its operation, but what if you could see inside?

The video comes courtesy of [Warped Perception], and features a small Wankel rotary engine intended for model aircraft. The engine’s end plate is removed and replaced with a transparent …read more

Tags: classic hacks
8:30
Recycling and Casting Styrofoam with Solvents
» ‎ Hack a Day

Styrofoam is an ever-present waste material in modern society, being used to package everything from food to futons. It’s also not the easiest thing to deal with as a waste stream, either. With this in mind, [killbox] decided to have a go at recycling some styrofoam and putting it to better use.

The process starts by combining the EPS styrofoam with a solvent called D-limonene. This was specifically chosen due to its low toxicity and ease of use. The solvent liquifies the solid foam and the air bubbles are then allowed to make their way out of the solution. If …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 28, 2018
19:00
The Interesting Fate Of Kenya’s First Computers
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you are an enthusiast for 1950s computer hardware, you are probably out of luck when it comes to owning a machine of your own. Your best chance will be to join the staff of one of the various museums that preserve and operate these machines, at which you can indulge your passion to your heart’s content. But what if we told you that there is a 1950s computer available for pick-up at any time, to whoever is prepared to go and get it and has suitable transport? You’d be making plans straight away, wouldn’t you? The computer in question …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 25, 2018
13:00
Adventures In Gas Filled Tube Arrays
» ‎ Hack a Day

Vacuum tubes are awesome, and Nixies are even better. Numitrons are the new hotness, but there’s one type of tube out there that’s better than all the rest. It’s the ИГГ1-64/64M. This is a panel of tubes in a 64 by 64 grid, some with just green dots, some with green and orange, and even a red, green, blue 64 by 64 pixel matrix. They’re either phosphors or gas-filled tubes, but this is the king of all tube-based displays. Not even the RGB CRTs in a Jumbotron can match the absurdity of this tube array.

[Muth] got his hands on …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 24, 2018
8:30
Making 3D Objects The Scroll Saw Way
» ‎ Hack a Day

These days most have come to think that if you want to make a complex 3D object with all curved surfaces then a 3D printer is the only way to go. Many have even forgotten that once such things could be hand carved. [JEPLANS], on the other hand, is a master at making these objects using only a scroll saw as he’s done with his latest, a miniature camel cut from a single block of maple.

His process has a lot of similarities to 3D printing. He starts with a computer drawn design, in this case for the camel’s front …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 20, 2018
1:00
Tesla Coil Uses Vacuum Tube
» ‎ Hack a Day

What do you do when you find a 5 kW transmitting tube in your local electronics store? If you are [TannerTech], you build a vacuum tube tesla coil. This isn’t the usual little wimpy coil, but a big bad boy that would look at home in an old horror movie.

The first power up was a bit anticlimactic, although it was working, it wasn’t very spectacular other than the tube glowing brightly. A few adjustments and some mineral oil did the trick.

Honestly, the build details are a little sparse, but if you have any business building a coil this …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 18, 2018
22:00
Browsing Modern Day BBS on the Epson PX-8 Laptop
» ‎ Hack a Day

As you read this, there are still people chatting away on Bulletin Board Systems all over the world. Running on newly written software and without the need to actually use a dial-up modem, these (slightly) more modern takes on the BBSs of yore can be compelling diversion for those who might want to decompress a bit from contemporary social networks.

[Blake Patterson] is one of these people, and he writes in to tell us about his recent experiments with using a particularly gorgeous example the Epson PX-8 “Geneva” laptop on modernized BBSs. The form factor of the device makes it …read more

Tags: classic hacks
16:00
Classic American Dial Phone Gets A GSM Makeover
» ‎ Hack a Day

For sturdy utilitarianism, there were few designs better than the Western Electric Model 500 desk phone. The 500 did one thing and did it well, and remained essentially unchanged from the mid-1940s until Touch Tone phones started appearing in the early 70s. That doesn’t mean it can’t have a place in the modern phone system, though, as long as you’re willing to convert it into a cellphone.

Luckily for [bicapitate], the Model 500 has plenty of room inside the case once the network interface is removed, because the new electronics take up a fair bit of space. There’s no build …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 17, 2018
13:00
DIY Drill-Powered Water Pump
» ‎ Hack a Day

Whether you need to pump water out of your basement this spring, or just want to have fun shooting water around in the yard this summer, here’s a way to build a pump instead of buying one. This is a simple but ingenious build, and [NavinK30] did everything shy of machining his own hardware and making his own tools. Well, it looks as if he might have made that drill.

As you’ll see in his how-to after the break, this centrifugal pump is mostly acrylic, PVC, and fasteners. [Navin] cut two sides and a base for the paddles from acrylic, …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 16, 2018
16:00
Polaroid Gets Thermal Printer and Raspberry Pi
» ‎ Hack a Day

Despite what you may have read in the comments, we here at Hackaday are not unaware that there’s something of a “Pi Fatigue” brewing. Similar to how “Arduino” was once a dirty word around these parts, projects that are built around the world’s most popular Linux SBC are occasionally getting dismissed as lazy. Hacker crams Raspberry Pi into an old electronic device, applies hot glue liberally, posts a gallery on Imgur, and boom! Lather, rinse, repeat.

We only mention this because the following project, despite featuring the Raspberry Pi Zero grafted into a vintage Polaroid camera, is anything but lazy. …read more

Tags: classic hacks
$Permalink for 'Delicious Optics, A Chocolate Diffraction Grating'$ 8:31
Delicious Optics, A Chocolate Diffraction Grating
» ‎ Hack a Day

Diffraction gratings are curious things. Score a series of equally spaced tiny lines in a surface, and it will cause reflected or transmitted light to bend and separate into its component wavelengths. This ability gives them all manner of important applications in the field of optics, but they’re also fun to play with. [Tech Ingredients] has done the hard work to find out how to make them out of candy!

The video starts with a basic discussion on the principles of diffraction gratings. The basis of the work is a commonly available diffraction grating, readily available online. It’s a plastic …read more

Tags: classic hacks
1:01
Custom Built Vacuum Tube Cassette Player
» ‎ Hack a Day

As we’ve said many times here on Hackaday, it’s not our place to question why people make the things they make. There’s a legitimate need or utility for many of the projects we cover, no doubt about it. But there’s also a large number of them which are so convoluted that they border on absurd. Not that we love the crazy ones any less, in fact, we usually like those the best.

So when we saw this incredible modification to a Panasonic RN-404 microcassette recorder which replaces the audio hardware with a custom built vacuum tube amplifier, we didn’t bother …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 14, 2018
19:01
Neon Lamps Light Up Dim Ion Motor
» ‎ Hack a Day

Small pinwheel type ion motors fall into the category of a fun science experiment or something neat to do with high voltage, but Hackaday’s own [Manuel Rodriguez-Achach] added a neat twist that incorporates neon lamps.

Normally you’d take a straight wire and make 90 degree bends at either end but pointing in opposite directions, balance it on a pole, and apply a high voltage with a moderate amount of current. The wire starts spinning around at the top of the pole, provided the ends of the wire are sharp enough or the wire has a small enough diameter. If your …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 13, 2018
22:00
Portable DVD Player gets Raspberry Pi Zero Upgrade
» ‎ Hack a Day

You might remember a time when people thought portable DVD players were a pretty neat idea. In the days before netbooks, cheap tablets, and arguably even the widespread adoption of smartphones, it seemed perfectly reasonable to lug around a device that did nothing but play movies. Today we look back at them as we would flip phones: a quaint precursor to the technology overload we find ourselves in currently. But the fact remains that millions of these comical little devices were pumped into the greedy maw of the consumer electronics market. They’re ripe for the hacking, all you need is …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 12, 2018
16:00
Dumping Arcade ROMs the Hard Way
» ‎ Hack a Day

Nostalgia is a funny thing. That desire we all get to relive past memories can make you do things that in any other scenario would be out of the question. The effect seems even stronger when it comes to old video games. How else can you explain buying the same games over and over every time they get “remastered” for the next generation of consoles? But what if those remasters aren’t good enough?

If you have a burning desire to play a 100% accurate version of certain old arcade games, you might have your work cut out for you. Getting …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 10, 2018
22:00
1920’s Claratone Radio Runs Windows 10
» ‎ Hack a Day

In the past we’ve mentioned how there are different schools of thought in terms of how to bring a vintage piece of hardware into the 21st century. You can go down the preservationist’s route, carefully grafting the original components with more modern ones, or you can take the nuclear option and blow all that dusty old gear out of the water. [Derek Traxler] clearly decided to go with the latter option on his recent conversion of 1920’s era Claratone tube radio to an Internet radio and podcast player. Not only is there little left of the original device beyond its …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 08, 2018
19:00
Orbital Mechanics on a Vintage Kaypro
» ‎ Hack a Day

These days, a good proxy for hacking prowess is getting Doom playable on the oldest piece of hardware imaginable. While we respect and applaud these efforts, perhaps the bar should be set a bit higher. Like orbital mechanics on an early 80s Kaypro, perhaps?

At least that’s the hurdle [Chris Fenton] set for himself as a fun project for his spare time with his Kaypro 2/84, a vintage Z80 clocking in at a screaming 4 MHz and 64-kB of RAM. With its built-in 80×25, 9″ green phosphor CRT monitor and flip-top keyboard, the Kaypro fit into that loveable luggable category …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 07, 2018
1:00
Reviving an Electron Microscope with Arduino
» ‎ Hack a Day

We don’t know about you, but when our friends ask us if we want to help them fix something, they’re usually talking about their computer, phone, or car. So far it’s never been about helping them rebuild an old electron microscope. But that’s exactly the request [Benjamin Blundell] got when a friend from a local hackerspace asked if he could take a look at a vintage Cambridge Stereoscan 200 they had found abandoned in a shed. Clearly we’re hanging out with the wrong group of people.

As you might imagine, the microscope was in desperate need of some love after …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 05, 2018
19:00
Magic 8 Ball Business Card Will Answer All Your Questions
» ‎ Hack a Day

The PCB business card has long been a staple amongst the freelance EE set. It’s a way to show potential clients that you can do the job, as well as leave a great first impression. Some are simple blinkenlights devices, others have contact information on USB storage. We reckon that [Seamus] has really hit it out of the park with this one, though.

That’s right- this business card riffs on the classic Magic 8-ball toy. Ask a question, shake the card, and it’ll light an LED with the corresponding answer to your query. Use it as a desk toy, or …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 04, 2018
22:00
3D Print a Thinner Car Key
» ‎ Hack a Day

Almost all modern cars come with keyless entry, some even come with keyless start. Of course, the price you pay for this technology is a bulky plastic keyfob that is an absolute pain to remove from your pockets, and generally spoils the lines of your carefully chosen outfit. [Jeremy] decided enough was enough.

The project begins with a careful disassembly of the original key. This is important to avoid damaging the PCB inside, particularly if there are any delicate wire links between different sections of the keyfob. With the piece disassembled, it was then time to start designing a replacement …read more

Tags: classic hacks
April 02, 2018
1:00
Pepper Mill Locks Your Door
» ‎ Hack a Day

Pepper! If you’ve ever tried to grind it, you’ve probably noticed it takes a bit of elbow grease. It’s actually possible to source electric pepper mills to grind it for you, in fact. It just so happens that [MarioM66] had one to hand, and a door lock that needed automating.

Seeing as grinding pepper requires at least as much torque as turning an average key in an average lock, the electric pepper mill makes perfect sense to use as a lock actuator. This build actually uses the electric pepper mill to directly turn the key in the lock, courtesy of …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 31, 2018
22:00
An 8-Bit ALU, Entirely From NAND Gates
» ‎ Hack a Day

One of the things that every student of digital electronics learns, is that every single logic function can be made from a combination of NAND gates. But nobody is foolhardy enough to give it a try, after all that would require a truly huge number of gates!

Someone evidently forgot to tell [Notbookies], for he has made a complete 8-bit ALU using only 4011B quad NAND gates on a set of breadboards, and in doing so has created a minor masterpiece with his wiring. It’s inspired by a series of videos from [Ben Eater] describing the construction of a computer …read more

Tags: classic hacks
16:00
Build Your Own Antenna for Outdoor Monitoring with LoRa
» ‎ Hack a Day

LoRa and LPWANs (Low Power Wide Area Networks) are all the range (tee-hee!) in wireless these days. LoRa is a sub 1-GHz wireless technology using sophisticated signal processing and modulation techniques to achieve long-range communications.

With that simplified introduction, [Omkar Joglekar] designed his own LoRa node used for outdoor sensor monitoring based on the HopeRF RFM95 LoRa module. It’s housed in an IP68 weatherproof enclosure and features an antenna that was built from scratch using repurposed copper rods. He wrote up the complete build, materials, and description which makes it possible for others to try their hand at putting together …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 30, 2018
1:00
This is How the Fonz Would Play MP3s
» ‎ Hack a Day

Here at Hackaday, we love to see old hardware treated with respect. A lovingly restored radio or TV that’s part of our electronic heritage is a joy to behold, and while we understand the desire to stream media from a funky retro case, it really grates when someone throws away the original guts to make room for new electronics.

Luckily, this Seeburg jukebox wall remote repurposing is not one of those projects. [Scott M. Baker] seems to have an appreciation for the finer things, and when he scored this classic piece of Mid-Century Americana, he knew just what to do. …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 29, 2018
1:00
Eavesdropping on a VGA Monitor’s Conversations
» ‎ Hack a Day

Did you ever wonder what your monitor and your computer are talking about behind your back? As it turns out, there’s quite a conversation going on while the monitor and the computer decide how to get along, and sniffing out VGA communications can reveal some pretty fascinating stuff about the I²C protocol.

To reverse engineer the configuration information exchanged between a VGA monitor and a video card, [Ken Shirriff] began by lopping a VGA cable in two. The inside of such cables is surprisingly complex, with separate shielding wires for each color and sync channel and a host of control …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 28, 2018
22:00
Emulating A Complete Commodore 64
» ‎ Hack a Day

When the Commodore 64 was released in 1982, it was a masterpiece of engineering. It had capabilities far outstripping other home computers, and that was all due to two fancy chips inside the C64. The VIC-II, the video chip for the C64, had sprites and scrolling, all stuffed into a single bit of silicon. The SID chip was a complete synthesizer on a chip. These bits of silicon made the C64 the best selling computer of all time, but have also stymied efforts to emulate a complete C64 system on a microcontroller.

[Frank Bösing] has just managed to emulate an …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 25, 2018
22:00
An Amiga 500 For The 21st Century
» ‎ Hack a Day

There was a period in the late 1980s when the home computer to own did not come with an Apple logo and was not an IBM, Compaq, or any of the other clones, but instead sported a Commodore logo. The Amiga 500 was an all-in-one console-style cased machine that maybe wasn’t quite the computing powerhouse you might have wished it to be, but gave you enough of the capabilities of the more accomplished 16-bit machines of the day to be an object of desire while also having a games catalogue second to none.

A500s have survived in reasonable numbers, but …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 22, 2018
16:00
Converting Power Supplies for Antique Computers
» ‎ Hack a Day

Just because something is “never used” doesn’t mean it’s good. [Inkoo Vintage Computing] learned that lesson while trying to repair an Amiga 500 and finding parts online that were claimed to be “new” in that they were old stock that had never been used. The problem was that in the last 30 years the capacitors had dried out, rendering these parts essentially worthless. The solution, though, was to adapt a modern PSU for use on the old equipment.

The first hurdle to getting this machine running again was finding the connector for the power supply. The parts seemed to have …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 21, 2018
13:00
Neon Lamps Make For The Coolest Of Nixie Clocks
» ‎ Hack a Day

Enclosure: [download]

Revisiting old projects is always fun and this Nixie Clock by [pa3fwm] is just a classic. Instead of using transistors or microcontrollers, it uses neon lamps to clock and drive the Nixie Displays. The neon lamps themselves are the logic elements. Seriously, this masterpiece just oozes geekiness.

Inspired by the book “Electronic Counting Circuits” by J.B. Dance(ZIP), published in 1967, we covered the initial build a few years back. The fundamental concept of operation is similar to that of Neon Ring Counters. [Luc Small] has a write-up explaining the construction of such a device and some math associated with it. …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 19, 2018
13:00
Building a Tricorder Prop Worthy of Mr Spock
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve all been there. You want to assemble a proper Star Trek: The Original Series landing party prop set, but the TOS tricorders you can find on the market are little more than overpriced toys. Imagine the embarrassment of beaming down to Cestus III with a plastic tricorder. The Metrons wouldn’t have even bothered with the trial by combat with such a sorry showing.

Unhappy with the state of Star Trek props, [Dean O] decided to take matters into his own hands. He purchased a TOS tricorder from Diamond Select Toys and set out to modify it into something a …read more

Tags: classic hacks
1:00
Making Fancy Dice PCBs at Home
» ‎ Hack a Day

These days, it’s easy to get high-quality custom PCBs made and shipped to your door for under $50. It’s something that was unfathomable only a decade ago, but now it’s commonplace. However, it doesn’t mean that the techniques of home PCB production are now completely obsolete. Maybe you live somewhere a little off the beaten track (Australia, even!) and need to iterate quickly on a project, or perhaps you’d like to tinker with the chemical processes involved. For your learning pleasure, [Emiliano] decided to share some tips on making SMD-ready PCBs with the TinyDice project.

The actual project is to …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 17, 2018
22:00
RFID Unlock Your PC, Because You’re 1337
» ‎ Hack a Day

Ever wanted to feel like one of those movie hackers from the late 90s? Yes, your basement’s full of overclocked Linux rigs and you’ve made sure all your terminal windows are set to green text on a black background, but that’s not always enough. What you need is an RFID tag that unlocks your PC when you touch the reader with your RFID card. Only then may you resume blasting away at your many keyboards in your valiant attempts to hack the mainframe.

[Luke] brings us this build, having wanted an easier way to log in quickly without foregoing basic …read more

Tags: classic hacks
19:00
From Cop Car Data Terminal, To Retro Computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

It is possible that you will have lived your life without ever coming into contact with a Motorola MDT9100-T. The data terminal of choice for use in police cars across the globe was a computer with a full-sized QWERTY keyboard, a small CRT display, a mainboard sporting an Intel 386SX processor, and a custom version of Windows 3.1. [Trammell Hudson] and some friends from NYC Resistor scored some MDT9100s in an online auction and found them to be just too good an opportunity not to crack them open and see what could be done.

The custom Windows install could be …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 14, 2018
10:00
Teardown: “The Oregon Trail” Handheld
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you were a school-age child in the 1980’s or 1990’s, you almost certainly played The Oregon Trail. Thanks to its vaguely educational nature, it was a staple of school computers until the early 2000’s, creating generations of fans. Now that those fans are old enough to have disposable incomes, we are naturally seeing a resurgence of The Oregon Trail merchandise to capitalize on one of humanity’s greatest weaknesses: nostalgia.

Enter the Target-exclusive The Oregon Trail handheld game. Priced at $24.99 USD and designed to look like the classic beige-box computers that everyone of a certain age remembers from …read more

Tags: classic hacks
March 12, 2018
16:00
Open Source Hardware Video Game Music Player
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Aidan Lawrence] likes classic synthesized video game music in the same way that other people “like” breathing and eating. He spent a good deal of 2017 working on a line of devices based on the Yamaha YM2612 used in the Sega Genesis to get his feet wet in the world of gaming synths, and is now ready to take the wraps off his latest and most refined creation.

The YM2151 Arcade Classic is an open source hardware player for Video Game Music (VGM) files. It uses no emulation, the files are played on the device’s YM2151 chip in the same …read more

Tags: classic hacks
January 02, 2013
6:24
Frankenstein, an all-tube home theater amplifier
» ‎ Hack a Day

Here’s an exercise in excess if we’ve ever seen one. While working on his undergrad at Michigan State, [Gregory] thought it would be a great idea to build an all-tube home theater system. He calls his seven-foot tall rack of amplifiers ‘Frankenstein,’ and we’ve got to agree this build is an impressive monstrosity of engineering prowess. [Gregory]‘s [...]
Tags: theater frankenstein home gregory michigan home-theater-system monstrosity prowess classic hacks
December 22, 2012
10:01
Fabricating hardware from the original arcade Pong schematics
» ‎ Hack a Day

This heavily populated PCB is a recreation of the original arcade version of Pong. That is an important distinction because the home version of Pong used a specialized chip to do much of the work. This is basically all stock logic, which explains the high component count. We wonder how many quarters it took just [...]
Tags: version arcade pong arcade-version component-count classic hacks
December 08, 2012
10:01
[Staci Elaan]‘s awesome portable tesla coils.
» ‎ Hack a Day

We stumbled onto [Staci's] videos a while ago when we posted this big tesla gun. While it wasn’t the first portable coil we had seen, it was certainly an impressive implementation. In the comments we found [Staci] had already been making these for a while. Hers were big and small, had awesome modulation, and looked [...]
Tags: while gun tesla staci staci-elaan tesla-coils elaan classic hacks
December 05, 2012
5:00
An introduction to vector displays
» ‎ Hack a Day

Unlike the CRTs found in big old televisions, vector displays are a bit of a historical oddity. Instead of sweeping an electron beam across the screen from left to right and top to bottom, a vector display draws lines between two points on a screen. Once used in arcade games such as Asteroids, Tempest, and old FAA [...]
Tags: introduction vector screen tempest vector-displays old-televisions electron-beam classic hacks
December 04, 2012
4:00
Cute little amplifier has a tube pre
» ‎ Hack a Day

While you won’t catch us in an argument with an audiophile regarding the sound quality of tube vs. solid state amps, there is a general consensus that tube amplifiers sound much better than their transistorized brethren. Actually building an all-tube amplifier, though, is a bit harder than one built around common ICs – there are transformers to deal [...]
Tags: amplifier cute tube state-amps tube-amplifier tube-amplifiers classic hacks
December 03, 2012
4:00
Teaching the Speak & Spell four (and more) letter words
» ‎ Hack a Day

Before it became the darling of circuit benders the world over, the Speak & Spell was a marvel of modern technology. Complete with a microprocessor and voice synthesizer, the Speak & Spell was able to speak a limited vocabulary that [Furrtek] thought should include words such as, “al qaeda”, “necrosis”, and “butt”. The Speak & [...]
Tags: spell teaching speak voice-synthesizer modern-technology necrosis classic hacks
November 26, 2012
3:00
Tiny MAME cabinet built from Raspberry Pi
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s been a while since we’ve seen [Sprite_tm] pull a project from thin air, and we haven’t seen him do anything with a Raspberry Pi yet. All things must pass, and finally [Sprite] has unleashed his tiny, pocket-sized MAME machine to the world. The build uses a Raspi for all the Linux-ey and MAME goodness, [...]
Tags: sprite raspberry mame mame-machine mame-cabinet tiny-pocket classic hacks

November 15, 2012
16:00
Media Player Classic WebServer Cross Site Scripting and Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
» ‎ SecuriTeam

Media Player Classic WebServer is prone to a cross-site scripting vulnerability and a denial-of-service vulnerability.
Tags: classic player media service-vulnerability cross-site-scripting denial-of-service

November 14, 2012
7:23
Playing Led Zeppelin on a C64
» ‎ Hack a Day

In the C64 demoscene there are a ton of awesome software hacks that push the Commodore 64, the 1MHz 6510-based computer from 1982, to its limits. Most of these C64 demos are very much limited by the hardware inside the C64, but the demoscene is always coming up with new ways of pushing the envelope. [...]
Tags: demoscene zeppelin ton software-hacks commodore-64 classic hacks
November 09, 2012
5:00
Storing 32 bytes of data in a piece of glass
» ‎ Hack a Day

After finding an old piezoelectric delay line in an old TV, [Mike] decided to figure out how it works and in the process stored his name in sound waves reflecting inside a piece of glass [Mike] was intrigued by these old-fashioned delay lines after watching [Dave] from EEVblog’s teardown of an circa 1985 camcorder. [Dave] found [...]
Tags: piece delay glass mike dave sound-waves delay-lines delay-line classic hacks
November 06, 2012
6:00
Reliving 1977′s cutting-edge computer with the Pocket Mini Computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

Classic computers are just up [Jeff]‘s alley, so when he looked for a new project for his Pocket Mini Computer, he looked at one of the earliest microcomputers available: the COSMAC VIP, a 1.76 MHz beast from 1977. The COSMAC VIP was a single-board educational computer released by RCA in 1977. Priced at just a [...]
Tags: mini pocket computer jeff edge-computer educational-computer classic-computers classic hacks
October 30, 2012
4:17
Myst book plays Myst, doesn’t transport you to other ages
» ‎ Hack a Day

We shouldn’t have to remind you, but back in the early 90s one of the most popular computer games was Myst. Despite having the gameplay of a PowerPoint presentation, Myst went on to become one of the best-selling video games of all time and the killer app that made a CD-ROM drive a necessity rather than a luxury. [riumplus] [...]
Tags: myst book doesn cd-rom-drive popular-computer killer-app classic hacks
October 28, 2012
8:15
Hackaday Retro edition: The Macintosh SE/30
» ‎ Hack a Day

In 1988, Apple introduced the Macintosh IIx, an upgrade of the Mac II that included a Motorola 68030 CPU. The IIcx – a compact version of the IIx, also with a 68030 – was introduced in 1989. That same year, product designers at Apple created a more powerful version of the all-in-one Macintosh SE using [...]
Tags: macintosh iix apple macintosh-iix motorola-68030 product-designers classic hacks
October 27, 2012
9:43
Making a phono preamp for a first electronics project
» ‎ Hack a Day

Nearly everyone’s first electronic project is something that blinks a LED. There are a million ways to go about this ‘Hello World’ project of electronic design; 555 timers, microcontrollers, or maybe even discrete components if you’re really cool. When [miceuz] was asked by a friend to help with his first electronic project he eschewed the [...]
Tags: preamp phono project 555-timers phono-preamp electronic-project classic hacks
October 25, 2012
10:01
A beautiful pinhole camera takes wonderful photos
» ‎ Hack a Day

With digital cameras in everything and film slowly disappearing from shelves, everyone loses an awesome way to learn about photography. Pinhole cameras allow anyone to build a camera from scratch and also learn about those crazy f-stops, exposure times, and focal planes that Instagram just won’t teach you. [Matt] put up a great tutorial for building your [...]
Tags: everything camera pinhole matt pinhole-cameras pinhole-camera focal-planes classic hacks
October 19, 2012
6:01
Hackaday retro edition roundup
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s time for another update chronicling the adventures and misadventures of getting really old computers to load our retro edition! First up is [Andrew Hull] and his brilliant use of a Raspberry Pi to get an old Psion 5mx PDA on the Internet. The Raspi served as a wireless bridge, taking in Internet from a WiFi dongle [...]
Tags: internet retro edition andrew-hull psion-5mx wireless-bridge old-computers classic hacks
October 18, 2012
5:00
Creating a MIDI synth from a Commodore SID
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Commodore SID was the audio chip in the venerable Commodore 64 and in the 30 years since release has attained classic status and become one of the best ways to get your chiptune on. Designed by famous synthesizer designer [Bob Yannes], it was only a matter of time before we saw a real, homebrew [...]
Tags: synth creating midi bob-yannes commodore-sid the midi-synth commodore-64 audio-chip classic
October 13, 2012
12:00
Making a Game Boy Color louder
» ‎ Hack a Day

When [Anton] picked up an old translucent purple Game Boy Color, he noticed a nearly complete lack of sound coming from the speaker. This simply would not do, so [Anton] replaced the speaker and soldered in a 2 Watt amp, making his Game Boy very loud indeed. After cracking open his Game Boy, [Anton] noticed [...]
Tags: color boy game anton game-boy-color watt-amp classic hacks
October 07, 2012
14:00
Hackaday retro roundup, this time with a PowerPC and a PET
» ‎ Hack a Day

Thought we forgot about this, didn’t you? Well, the Hackaday Retro Edition is still going strong, and this time we have a few more retro successes that were able to load our retro site with ancient hardware. First up is a submission by [rusbus]. He had a Power Macintosh 6100/60 lying around – the first Macintosh with [...]
Tags: retro hackaday time power-macintosh powerpc roundup classic hacks
October 04, 2012
8:01
Basking in the vintage glory of InfoAge
» ‎ Hack a Day

Last weekend’s Maker Faire wasn’t only about the latest and greatest. Some of the groups there brought up the latest and greatest from earlier eras. InfoAge is a historical science and technology learning center based out of the former Camp Evans in Wall, New Jersey, and they really know how to put on a show [...]
Tags: basking vintage infoage new-jersey camp-evans historical-science technology-learning-center classic hacks
September 29, 2012
13:05
Giving graphing calculators a new life
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Christopher] at Cemetech, ever frequent HaD feature for his hacked up graphing calculators, made it to the NYC Maker Faire. He already posted on his blog he was making the trip up to Maker Faire, but we were lucky enough to catch up with him. Two things: the name of his blog isn’t ‘cement tech’, but ‘chem [...]
Tags: maker blog faire christopher graphing-calculators cement classic hacks

September 26, 2012
14:00
[remote exploits] - Media player Classic .MPEG4 Heap overflow Vulnerability
» ‎ 0day.today (was: 1337day, Inj3ct0r, 1337db)

[remote exploits] - Media player Classic .MPEG4 Heap overflow Vulnerability
Tags: classic player media overflow-vulnerability heap exploits

September 22, 2012
14:00
Mechanical Donkey Kong features laser cut Mario
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Martin] just sent in a project he’s been working on that takes Donkey Kong out of the realm of pixels and sprites and puts our hero Mario into a world made of laser cut plywood. This mechanical version of Donkey Kong uses an Arduino stuffed into an old NES to control Mario jumping over ball bearing ‘barrels.’ [...]
Tags: kong laser donkey mario martin mario-martin donkey-kong mechanical-version classic hacks
September 20, 2012
9:01
VFX1 Virtual Reality Headset LinkBox
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Kevin Mellott's] take on the VFX1 was to update it so it can be used with modern computers requiring just a USB socket and VGA feed. The VFX1 is a Virtual Reality Headset that hit the market in the first half of the 90′s. The headset was the first of its kind to hit the home market and was [...]
Tags: headset virtual vfx kevin-mellott usb-socket mellott modern-computers classic hacks
September 15, 2012
12:01
Ask Hackaday: Who likes retrocomputing?
» ‎ Hack a Day

Last week we posted a link to Project Kiwi, a homebrew Motorola 68008-based microcomputer built by [Simon] that includes Ethernet, a very good display adapter, an interface for IDE hard disks, two Commodore SID chips (for stereo chiptunes), a floppy disk controller, and an already existent software library that will make it very easy to develop your [...]
Tags: week link hackaday simon commodore-sid floppy-disk-controller sid-chips classic hacks
September 11, 2012
7:00
Typewriter is USB keyboard, also awesome
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re a brooding author putting the finishing touches on the next Great American Novel™ while sipping a latte in Starbucks, a MacBook is far too common to impress uncultured proles guzzling caramel macchiatos. No, to impress the next [Joyce] or [T. S. Eliot] sitting at the table next to you, you’ll need something much more [...]
Tags: typewriter usb keyboard joyce t.-s.-eliot great-american-novel macbook finishing-touches classic hacks
September 08, 2012
7:00
Building the best homebrew computer ever
» ‎ Hack a Day

A few days ago when I posted a homebrew Motorola 68000 computer spectacular, I briefly mentioned a truly spectacular homebrew computer built by [Simon Ferber]. When I posted a link to a Youtube demo of his 68k board, he was working on a website to document the architecture design, hardware, and software. That website is now [...]
Tags: homebrew website computer simon-ferber homebrew-computer motorola-68000 architecture-design classic hacks
September 04, 2012
12:01
Homebrew 68k extravaganza
» ‎ Hack a Day

Introduced in 1979, the Motorola 68000 CPU was first used in very expensive and very high-end workstations from the likes of Sun and SGI. As the processor matured it became well-known for its use in the original Macintosh, early Amigas, and even the TI-89 graphing calculator and a few video game consoles such as the [...]
Tags: extravaganza homebrew motorola ti-89 motorola-68000 graphing-calculator classic hacks
September 01, 2012
13:00
Homebrew computer is 16 bits of awesome
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve seen our share of homebrew computers over the years. Usually, these bare-bone systems use a small, early 80s-era microprocessor such as the Z80 or 6502. These little 8-bit machines are awesome, but somewhat limited in their capability. [BigDumbDinosaur] sent in a computer he’s been working on for a few years now featuring the infamous [...]
Tags: homebrew share computer homebrew-computer 16-bits z80 classic hacks
August 24, 2012
10:01
Uncovering easter eggs in old Mac ROMs
» ‎ Hack a Day

The picture you see above is taken from the ROM of a Macintosh SE made in the late 1980s. This black and white image remained buried inside old Macs until [Adam] and [Trammell] at NYC Resistor reverse engineered these old Mac ROMs and found a few really cool Easter eggs. [Adam] and [Trammell] have been dumping ROMs [...]
Tags: easter uncovering trammell mac-roms adam old-macs easter-eggs resistor classic hacks
August 23, 2012
11:01
Hackaday retro edition roundup
» ‎ Hack a Day

In case you’ve forgotten about it, we still have a retro edition of Hackaday. It’s our simple, hand-coded HTML site featuring a few random hacks from Hackaday’s 8-year history. There’s also a retro successes page where our readers can log on with their old boxxen and claim their prize as a master of retrocomputing. Here’s a [...]
Tags: retro hackaday edition hacks roundup classic
August 20, 2012
8:30
Reliving the BBS days with a Propeller
» ‎ Hack a Day

Back before the world wide web, self-proclaimed geeks would get our compute on by dialing in to bulletin board systems. In their heyday, these BBSes were filled with interesting people and warez to fill the most capacious 10 Megabyte hard drive. In an attempt to relive the days of the Internet before the Eternal September, [Jeff [...]
Tags: propeller bbs reliving jeff bbs-days heyday classic hacks
August 07, 2012
14:00
Retrotechtacular: Simulating weather patterns with a logic chip computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

In 1975, [D. L. Slotnick], CS professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faced a problem: meteorologists were collecting a lot more data than current weather simulations could handle. [Slotnick]‘s solution was to build a faster computer to run these atmosphere circulation simulations. The only problem was the computer needed to be built quickly and cheaply, [...]
Tags: problem weather computer d.-l.-slotnick illinois champaign university-of-illinois-at-urbana-champaign weather-simulations atmosphere-circulation classic hacks
August 02, 2012
9:01
Digital zoetrope uses 18 LCD displays
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Jasper] sent in a project he, [Quinten], and [Mr. Stock] have been working on for a while. It’s called the Pristitrope and brings the classic 19th centrury paper-based animation device into the 21st century with 18 LCD displays. The lazy suzan portion of the build was fabricated out of plywood cut on a CNC router and [...]
Tags: lcd digital zoetrope mr.-stock jasper cnc-router lcd-displays classic hacks
9:01
Digital zoetrope uses 18 LCD displays
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Jasper] sent in a project he, [Quinten], and [Mr. Stock] have been working on for a while. It’s called the Pristitrope and brings the classic 19th centrury paper-based animation device into the 21st century with 18 LCD displays. The lazy suzan portion of the build was fabricated out of plywood cut on a CNC router and [...]
Tags: lcd digital zoetrope mr.-stock jasper cnc-router lcd-displays classic hacks
8:01
Giving the TRS-80 CoCo a 44 color display
» ‎ Hack a Day

As a relic of the early 80s, the TRS-80 Color Computer couldn’t display very many colors. By default, the CoCo could only display 8 colors on the screen at a time, but [John] figured out a way to increase the number of colors displayed using a very simple trick that surprisingly isn’t found in original CoCo [...]
Tags: display color coco john color-computer trs relic classic hacks
August 01, 2012
7:02
4004 ROM emulator allows fast development on slow computers
» ‎ Hack a Day

Developing for extremely old computers is a chore; not only are you limited by assembly or pure machine language, there’s also the issue of burning ROMs to actually run your programs. [Frank Buss] came up with a neat solution to developing for the venerable 4004 CPU – build a ROM emulator using a modern microcontroller. [...]
Tags: emulator development rom frank-buss rom-emulator neat-solution slow-computers classic hacks
July 23, 2012
9:00
Blinkenwall controlled by a C64
» ‎ Hack a Day

Looking for a dual monitor setup for your Commodore 64? Look no further than the C64 controlled Blinkenwall put together over at Metalab. The Blinkenwall is 45 glass blocks serving as a partition between the main room and the library over at Metalab in Vienna. Previously, the Blinkenwall was illuminated by 45 ShiftBrite RGB LED boards controlled by an Arduino [...]
Tags: blinkenwall metalab monitor vienna dual-monitor-setup commodore-64 arduino classic hacks
4:00
Retrotechtacular: Recovering lost moon images by dumpster diving
» ‎ Hack a Day

In 1966 and 67, NASA launched five probes to image the surface of the moon from orbit, eventually returning over two thousand high-resolution images of future Apollo landing sites and selenogical features to researchers on Earth. After taking its pictures of the moon, developing the film in orbit, and scanning the print with an electron gun and [...]
Tags: retrotechtacular orbit moon high-resolution-images electron-gun moon-images classic hacks
July 20, 2012
4:01
Using a watch to control Ms. Pacman
» ‎ Hack a Day

Recently, [Alan] broke out the ‘ol Atari 2600 to relive his childhood with a bit of Yar’s Revenge and Adventure, but after looking at his new TI EZ430 Chronos watch, he figured he could add a bit of motion control from this classic game system. He used the accelerometer in this watch to play Ms. Pacman by tilting his wrist, an [...]
Tags: watch atari bit ms.-pacman alan ms-pacman atari-2600 accelerometer classic hacks
July 19, 2012
14:07
Defense Against the Dog Arts
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s possible that it was [Matt Meerian]‘s awesome pun that won us over, not his ultrasonic bicycle dog defense system, but that would be silly. [Matt] wanted an elegant solution to a common problem when riding a bicycle, dogs. While, obscenities, ammonia, water, pepper spray, and others were suggested, they all had cons that just [...]
Tags: bicycle defense dog matt matt-meerian ammonia-water water-pepper pepper-spray classic hacks
4:01
Small RC Car, Full Size Controller
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Noah Farrington] sent in his latest hack over at his intensely interesting blog; converting a racing wheel arcade controller to a remote control for his RC car. He picked up the arcade controller for free, and decided it would be much cooler to control an RC car he had handy with it. He elected not [...]
Tags: arcade controller car noah-farrington arcade-controller farrington noah classic hacks
July 17, 2012
4:01
ATX benchtop conversion retains safety features, delivers plenty of current.
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Bogin] was looking to add a benchtop power supply to his array of tools, but he didn’t really find any of the online tutorials helpful. Most of what he discovered were simple re-wiring jobs utilizing LM317 regulators and shorted PS-ON pins used to keep the PSUs happily chugging along as if nothing had been changed. [...]
Tags: atx benchtop conversion bogin psus safety-features classic hacks
July 16, 2012
5:00
Dealing with the horrors of PDFs by binding your own books
» ‎ Hack a Day

Looking at a few PDFs of data sheets, journal articles, or even complete books can be a pain. Not only do you have to deal with the torment of a PDF reader (we’re looking at you, Adobe), but a purely electronic document misses the beautiful tactile interface available in dead tree format. [samimy] put together an [...]
Tags: tactile-interface complete-books own-books classic hacks
July 12, 2012
8:10
Building a CRT and bathing yourself in x-rays
» ‎ Hack a Day

For the Milan design week held last April, [Patrick Stevenson Keating] made a cathode ray tube and exhibited it in a department store. The glass envelope of [Keating]‘s tube is a very thick hand-blown piece of glass. After coating the inside of the tube with a phosphorescent lining, [Keating] installed an electrode in a rubber plug and [...]
Tags: glass tube keating patrick-stevenson milan cathode-ray-tube milan-design classic hacks
July 09, 2012
12:01
Tearing through floppy drives to build a small-format dot matrix printer
» ‎ Hack a Day

The accuracy which [Mario] achieved in his pen plotter dot matrix printer is very remarkable. He tore through a pile of floppy drives to get the parts he wanted, and chose to go with a fine-point Sharpie marker as a print head. In the video after the break he flatters us with a printout of [...]
Tags: printer matrix tearing mario dot-matrix-printer pen-plotter floppy-drives classic hacks
8:03
Refurbing a C64 with a Raspberry Pi
» ‎ Hack a Day

When [Carl] first heard of the Raspberry Pi, he immeidatly though how freakin tiny this board is compared to a Mini ITX motherboard. After ordering a Raspi, [Carl] decided to put his barely-larger-than-a-credit-card computer inside a Commodore 64. [Carl]‘s updated C64 functions exactly like the original – the 30-year-old keyboard works thanks to the help [...]
Tags: mini-itx-motherboard commodore-64 card-computer classic hacks
July 05, 2012
15:01
Reverse engineering silicon
» ‎ Hack a Day

[John McMaster] is doing some pretty amazing work with figuring out how the circuitry in an integrated circuit works. Right now he’s reverse engineering a serial EEPROM chip one section at a time. This is a 24c02 made by ST, and he chose this particular portion of the die to examine because it looked like [...]
Tags: silicon engineering work john-mcmaster serial-eeprom 24c02 classic hacks
July 03, 2012
16:02
Levitating lightbulb does it all with no wires
» ‎ Hack a Day

It would be really fun to do an entire hallway of these levitating wireless lights. This a project on which [Chris Rieger] has been working for about six months. It uses magnetic levitation and wireless power transfer to create a really neat LED oddity. Levitation is managed by a permanent magnet on the light assembly [...]
Tags: levitating levitation lightbulb chris-rieger magnetic-levitation permanent-magnet light-assembly classic hacks
4:02
Dueling mechanical bulls
» ‎ Hack a Day

Do you have what it takes to stay on the mechanical bull longer than the next guy? Who cares! We want to know if you’ve got what it takes to build your own dueling mechanical bulls. After seeing the development stages in the video after the break we think you’ll agree that the construction part [...]
Tags: bull guy dueling mechanical-bulls mechanical-bull classic hacks
June 29, 2012
9:01
Two retro successes with a Commodore 64
» ‎ Hack a Day

Slowly but surely, Hackaday readers have been logging onto our retro edition with some very old hardware. Of course we’re featuring the coolest as retro successes. [azog] and [logik] entered the pantheon of brave souls who loaded up Hackaday with a Commodore 64 this week, and their builds are pretty impressive to say the least. [logik]‘s [...]
Tags: commodore retro hackaday commodore-64 azog old-hardware classic hacks
June 21, 2012
13:01
Turning the Wii Classic Controller into a gaming rig
» ‎ Hack a Day

A bit of clever design lets you mount a screen and gaming hardware right on this controller. [Valentin Ivanov] had already been using the Wii Classic Controller Pro as an input for his Gadgeteer-based projects. He wanted a way to marry the project board, display, and controller into one single unit. We’re huge fans the [...]
Tags: wii classic gaming controller-pro valentin-ivanov gaming-rig peripherals hacks
June 19, 2012
13:01
Hackaday retro submission: Browsing with an Apple IIc
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve had the retro edition of Hackaday up for about a week now, and already a few people have sent in a few neat builds that use an ancient computer to pull this page up. The latest comes from [RetroAppleFanToday] who used an Apple IIc to browse the Internet. To load our humble retro edition, [...]
Tags: retro hackaday edition apple-iic ancient-computer submission classic hacks
June 15, 2012
4:01
Putting an Atari POKEY in your pocket
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Atari POKEY served as the main I/O chip on the venerable Atari 400/800 and XL/XE 8-bit computers. While a chip designed to get voltages from game paddles and scanning a matrix of keyboard switches wouldn’t normally be remembered 30 years later, the POKEY had another function: generating very, very distinctive music and sound effects for [...]
Tags: pokey atari chip keyboard-switches distinctive-music bit-computers classic hacks
June 13, 2012
8:01
Turning an IBM Selectric into a printer.
» ‎ Hack a Day

In the days when computers took up an entire room, a CRT monitor was a luxury. Most of the time, input and output was handled with a teletype – a typewriter connected directly to the computer. [Josh] wanted his own typewriter terminal, so he took apart an IBM Selectric II and got to work. Instead [...]
Tags: selectric typewriter ibm josh ibm-selectric-ii crt-monitor time-input classic hacks
June 11, 2012
11:01
Calculating with 3D printed gears
» ‎ Hack a Day

Here’s a 3D printed electromechanical computer built by [Chris Fenton] over at NYCResistor. It uses plastic registers printed on a Makerbot, a bunch of pogo pins, and business-card sized punch cards capable of storing 32 bits of instructions and data. In case you’re wondering, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen [Chris]‘ FIBIAC. Since the last [...]
Tags: nycresistor plastic computer chris chris-fenton pogo-pins punch-cards fenton classic hacks
6:01
Adding a backlight to the ‘ol Game Boy brick
» ‎ Hack a Day

For being more than 20 years old, [Max]‘s old brick-sized Game boy still has a lot of life left in it. Even though his Game Boy was still in good condition, there were a few vertical lines in the display, making it a perfect candidate for a restoration. While he had his DMG-01 open on [...]
Tags: boy game backlight max ol-game sized-game perfect-candidate classic hacks
June 08, 2012
14:07
Using old phones as an intercom in your VW bus (or anywhere else)
» ‎ Hack a Day

In case you haven’t noticed from my many comments on the subject, I drive a VW bus. It is a 1976 Westfalia camper with sage green paint and green plaid upholstery. I absolutely love it and so does the rest of my family. We go for drives in the country as well as camping regularly. [...]
Tags: case intercom bus westfalia-camper old-phones vw-bus classic hacks
9:01
Building a 1980s microcomputer with a Parallax Propeller
» ‎ Hack a Day

The folks over at Gadget Gangster put up an Instructable to build a retro 80s 8-bit microcomputer. Even though they’re using modern components, it still hearkens back to a time when 10 year olds learned 6502 assembly, PEEKing and POKEing was the best way to program, and using a mouse was a novelty. The build uses a Parallax [...]
Tags: propeller parallax microcomputer retro-80s instructable 10-year-olds classic hacks
June 07, 2012
7:17
Putting every chiptune ever in an FPGA
» ‎ Hack a Day

Finally one device combines the power of the Commodore 64 SID, Atari ST YM2149, and Amiga MOD audio into one awesome box. It’s called the RetroCade Synth, and there’s a Kickstarter that is perfect for starting your chiptune composing journey. [Jack]‘s RetroCade synth is connects directly to the Papilio One 500k FPGA. All the classic chiptune ICs [...]
Tags: chiptune retrocade synth jack sid commodore-64 atari-st amiga-mod classic hacks
June 05, 2012
15:01
Retrotechtacular: The mother of all tech demos
» ‎ Hack a Day

Most bits of a computer we take for granted today – the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, and word processing – were all invented by one team of researchers at Stanford in the late 60s. When the brains behind the operation, [Douglas Engelbart], showed this to 1000 computer researchers, the demo became known as The Mother [...]
Tags: retrotechtacular mother computer douglas-engelbart computer-researchers video-conferencing classic hacks
June 01, 2012
4:01
The Dronitar; a scrap made motorized sitar
» ‎ Hack a Day

This peculiar instrument, called the Dronitar, is completely made from scrap. Interestingly, it sounds pretty good. You can hear the dronitar in action in the video after the break.The call this a ”2 stringed” instrument,and most who are instrumentally savvy will find a bit of confusion here. They are referring to the string that you [...]
Tags: instrument scrap dronitar confusion classic hacks
May 31, 2012
9:01
Dot matrix printer spits out any tweet mentioning @KWF
» ‎ Hack a Day

Earlier this month, [Kenneth] picked up an old dot matrix printer at the Silicon Valley Flea Market and subsequently found two cases of tractor feed printer paper. It’s a marriage made in heaven for a dot matrix twitter printer. [Kenneth] used a BeagleBone - a tiny single board computer running Linux – to connect to the Internet [...]
Tags: printer matrix dot kenneth silicon-valley dot-matrix-printer single-board-computer marriage-made-in-heaven classic hacks
May 28, 2012
6:01
Fine tune your Morse Code skills with this mint tin practice keyer
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hackaday reader [svofski] wrote in to share a device he built, which would be useful to any ham operators out there trying to hone their CW skills. He calls his practice keyer the Morseshnik, and it is a combination of various items [svofski] found while digging through his parts drawer. He disassembled an old hard drive, [...]
Tags: svofski keyer practice morse-code fine-tune hard-drive classic hacks
May 25, 2012
9:01
Making Instagram with an old CRT
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re not familiar with Instagram, it’s a mobile app that takes pictures, applies low-fi ‘lomographic’ digital filters, and shares them on the Internet. For reasons we can’t comprehend, Instagram has been wildly successful as of late and was recently purchased by Facebook for a Billion dollars. [Martin Ström] figured he could do something much cooler than [...]
Tags: low-fi digital-filters facebook classic hacks
May 24, 2012
9:01
Cemetech’s ultimate calculator V2
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Christopher] piped up in our comments on a recent post about using laptop touch pads in other things, noting that he had done this on his Ultimate Calculator Version 2. What he’s done is upgraded his TI-83+ calculator to house a number of improvements and customizations. It now has a stronger RGB backlight so he [...]
Tags: cemetech calculator post christopher ti-83-calculator ultimate-calculator calculator-version classic hacks
May 20, 2012
9:01
Building a 6502 in Minecraft
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ll admit that we haven’t been following Minecraft like we used to; its been a while since we’ve seen something amazing in Minecraft, but [eloraam]‘s 6502 emulator (part of her RedPower Minecraft mod) takes the cake. The RedPower mod adds a lot of industrial technology to Minecraft. Pumps, solar panels, and pneumatic tubes to move [...]
Tags: redpower mod minecraft pneumatic-tubes industrial-technology solar-panels classic hacks
May 18, 2012
7:01
A color Maximite for glorious 3-bit BASIC
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Kilian] sent in a link to a color version of a tiny educational computer. It’s called the Quantumite and it’s designed to be a throwback to the early 80s microcomputers we all grew up on. The Quantumite is a clone of the Maximite, the tiny single board computer / BASIC interpreter designed by [Geoff Graham]. Both [...]
Tags: single-board-computer basic-interpreter geoff-graham classic hacks
May 17, 2012
14:01
Giving a Powerpoint presentation with an Apple ][
» ‎ Hack a Day

When [Vince] saw a coworker give a presentation with an iPad, he thought to himself what a tremendous waste of computing resources he was witnessing; an iPad is just as powerful as an early Cray supercomputer, and displaying slides isn’t a computationally intensive task. We’re assuming [Vince]‘s train of thought went off the rails at [...]
Tags: powerpoint presentation ipad vince cray-supercomputer intensive-task classic hacks
May 15, 2012
16:01
Constant current dummy load
» ‎ Hack a Day

Inspired by a design he saw on the EEVblog, [George Graves] put together this constant current dummy load. You might need on of these if you’re testing power supplies or batteries. They pull a constant current regardless of the voltage of the supply. [George's] version extends the range of the original a little bit by [...]
Tags: design eevblog load george george-graves dummy-load little-bit classic hacks
14:01
Controlling robots with a TRS-80
» ‎ Hack a Day

[DJ Sures], mastermind behind the EZ-B Bluetooth Robot controller, sent in a really interesting build where he controls a robot with a 1983 TRS-80 computer. The robot in question is [DJ Sures]‘ adorable WALL-E we’ve seen before. WALL-E is controlled through a Bluetooth connection to a desktop PC with the EZ-Builder hardware and software package. To get the [...]
Tags: sures bluetooth robot robot-controller builder-hardware classic hacks
12:01
Building a 4-bit TTL computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

When [GG] was 12 years old, he was introduced to BugBooks, the wonderful ‘introduction to digital design’ books from the early 1970s. It has always been a dream of [GG] to build the TTL computer featured in the BugBooks, and now that he has the necessary time and money available to him, the Apollo181 has [...]
Tags: necessary-time time-and-money 1970s classic hacks
10:01
[Engineerguy] explains how a CCD works
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Bill] is back with another fantastic video explaining a piece of intriguing hardware. This time, he’s explaining how a CCD works. For many of us, these things are part of our daily life, but aside from the fact that they capture an image, we don’t put much thought into them. [Bill] breaks things down in [...]
Tags: video ccd engineerguy bill ccd-works classic hacks
4:01
You’ll throw your back out playing this analog TV synth
» ‎ Hack a Day

While CRT televisions fall to the wayside as more people adopt flat-panel TVs, the abundance of unused sets gives hacker/artist [Kyle Evans] an unlimited number of analog canvases on which to project his vision. He recently wrote in to share his latest creation which he dubs “de/Rastra”. The “CRT Performance Interface” as he calls it, [...]
Tags: analog synth crt performance-interface kyle-evans flat-panel-tvs classic hacks
May 14, 2012
7:01
Mapping the motor cortex
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Bruce] sent us another fantastic final project from the ECE4760 class at Cornell. What you see above is an array of 36 near infra red LEDs shining into this young man’s brain for the purpose of spectroscopy. Light bounces back differently based on brain activity (blood flow). For this project, they are mapping their motor [...]
Tags: brain motor project bruce motor-cortex brain-activity blood-flow classic hacks
May 10, 2012
8:01
Your guide to building a homebrew 6502 computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’ve ever thought about getting down to bare metal and building a homebrew computer from scratch [Garth Wilson] put up a great primer to the 6502, the same CPU found in Apple ][ computers, BBC Micros, Vic-20s, and the venerable Commodore 64 (a 6510 in the C64, but it's close enough). In his guide [...]
Tags: homebrew computer guide vic garth-wilson homebrew-computer commodore-64 great-primer classic hacks
May 09, 2012
5:01
Hackaday Links May 9th 2012
» ‎ Hack a Day

Homecut – CNC Cutting Directory So you have a CNC machine that you use as a hobby, but would like to do some actual work on the side? Or maybe you have an idea you’d like made. Homecut is a map directory where you can maybe hook up with the right person. The Curta Mechanical [...]
Tags: directory cnc homecut cnc-machine map classic hacks
May 08, 2012
15:01
Tilt sensor toy is simple and mesmerizing
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Eiki] found himself in need of a project for his “simple machines” class. Another project had brought him in contact with some relatively cheap MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes. He had the idea to create a simple tilt sensor based circuit that would light whatever LED was at the bottom. He’s using an Analog Devices ADXL202E accelerometer [...]
Tags: tilt-sensor gyroscopes accelerometers classic hacks
14:01
An excellent introduction to transmission lines
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Bertho] sent in a great tutorial on terminating transmission lines. If you’ve ever tried to send a high frequency signal a long way down a wire, you know the problems that can crop up due to electronic strangeness. Luckily [Bertho]‘s tutorial explains just about everything, from where and when to terminate a cable and why [...]
Tags: transmission-lines strangeness high-frequency classic hacks
6:46
Replicating the fancy touch sensor that uses anything
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Sprite_tm], a name many of you will recognize from these pages, has wasted no time in replicating the latest cool thing in a much simpler fashion. En Garde is a touch sensor that can detect up to 32 different points of contact on… whatever you use as the surface. He couldn’t sit idly by and [...]
Tags: fancy-touch touch-sensor cool-thing classic hacks
May 07, 2012
15:35
Pinball Stomp: Part 2
» ‎ Hack a Day

This is the 2nd and final part of this project. If you haven’t seen part 1 yet, jump back and check it out. Now that we have the controller box made and ready to go, we just have to build some simple stomp sensors. As I said before, I doubt this will hold anyones attention [...]
Tags: part stomp pinball sensors classic hacks
5:01
Build an 8-bit TTL computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

Very rarely do we see an Instructable so complete, and so informative, that it’s a paragon of tutorials that all Instructables should aspire to. [8 Bit Spaghetti]‘s How to Build an 8-bit computer is one of those tutorials. [8 Bit Spaghetti]‘s build began on his blog. He originally planned to build a 4-bit computer but decided a [...]
Tags: build bit computer instructable bit-computer instructables classic hacks
May 05, 2012
7:01
Using pinball score reels as wireless displays
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Scott] put together a system where he can use pinball score reels as a wireless display. As you can see in the video below, the result is really neat. The sound alone makes this shoot pretty high on our “things that are cool” radar. The display required 24V AC to operate the solenoids that actually [...]
Tags: display score pinball scott v-ac score-reels solenoids classic hacks
May 02, 2012
8:01
Using incandescent bulbs to compensate for a slow start cfl
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Dick], like most of us, likes some pretty strong light in his workshop. He’s using CFL flood lamps to save a little energy. Unfortunately, he found that they gradually become brighter instead of that instant light he was accustomed to with his previous incandescent bulbs. Not wanting to wait around for the lights to reach [...]
Tags: flood-lamps incandescent-bulbs dick classic hacks
April 27, 2012
15:01
Pinball Stomp: part1
» ‎ Hack a Day

Despite my atrociously short attention span, I’ve always loved pinball. Maybe it is something about all the flashing lights and clunking solenoids. Maybe it is just the simple physics at the center of it all. I’m not really sure. My kids, however, don’t share my enthusiasm. I suspect part of it is that they never [...]
Tags: short-attention-span flashing-lights pinball classic hacks
April 25, 2012
13:01
Controlling the power with bluetooth
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Mike] dropped us a tip to show off a system he has built to control some power sockets based on his proximity. Initially the project started as a parallel port controlled box to switch the mains power. Then he got the idea of turning this into a little more interactive of an automation tool. He [...]
Tags: controlling power bluetooth mike power-sockets mains-power automation-tool classic hacks
April 19, 2012
12:02
Building the mind of a robot overlord
» ‎ Hack a Day

The folks at the Louisville hackerspace LVL1 now have a fabulous piece of wall art that is also a speech synthesizer. The speech synthesizer is over two feet long and is made of nine panels of stripboard connected with right angle headers. An awesome piece of art if there ever was one. This speech synthesizer is actually 30 years [...]
Tags: piece speech synthesizer louisville speech-synthesizer stripboard right-angle classic hacks
11:01
Controlling blinkenlights with modern computers
» ‎ Hack a Day

A few old timers may remember that once, long ago, computers didn’t require keyboards. The earliest personal computers such as the Altair 8800 and the server rack-sized minicomputers like the PDP-11 could be controlled with a panel filled with switches and lights, giving us the term blinkenlights. Today, most of these machines have been thrown away [...]
Tags: didn server controlling altair altair-8800 pdp-11 old-timers classic hacks
April 17, 2012
13:01
Original Prince of Persia game source code released
» ‎ Hack a Day

The game that launched a multi-billion dollar franchise is now laid bare for your hacking pleasure. [Jordan Mechner] just posted the once-lost source code for Prince of Persia. This game was ground-breaking for its use of rotoscoping to mimic the movements of an actor (in this case it was his younger brother). Oh, and it’s [...]
Tags: persia game prince jordan game-source-code prince-of-persia-game prince-of-persia classic hacks
April 04, 2012
11:01
Giving an old Atari computer a much needed upgrade
» ‎ Hack a Day

As a kid, [Boisy] cut his teeth on the TRS-80 Color Computer. It was a wonderful machine for its day, featuring a relatively powerful Motorola 6809 CPU. Although his CoCo was theoretically more powerful than its Commodore and Apple contemporaries, the graphics and sound capabilities of [Boisy]‘s first love paled in comparison to his friends 6502-based [...]
Tags: boisy atari computer motorola-6809 atari-computer sound-capabilities classic hacks
April 03, 2012
14:14
Rabiscoscopio – Oscilloscope drawing made easy
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you own an oscilloscope, sooner or later the urge to see something other than signals on the screen will strike. Some people ignore the urge and go about their normal business while others give in, spending hours carefully crafting images, games, and more. The process is time consuming and tricky as our own [Kevin [...]
Tags: signals urge drawing classic hacks
April 02, 2012
9:01
The trials of digital design class
» ‎ Hack a Day

Late last week, we saw a rather clever combination lock build that used only a single 74xx logic chip. [J. Peterson] read this post, and in a battle royale of geek one upmanship sent us a write up of the logic chip computer he built nearly 30 years ago at the University of Utah. Around 1982 or [...]
Tags: design logic chip j.-peterson logic-chip clever-combination chip-computer classic hacks
March 31, 2012
6:06
Floppy autoloader takes the pain out of archiving 5000 Amiga disks
» ‎ Hack a Day

Archiving data from old floppy disks can be a tedious process at best. Poorly labeled disks combined with slow transfer speeds put it high on the list of things we would rather not do, and it turns out that [Dweller] was of the same opinion. With an estimated 5,000 floppies in his collection, he finally decided [...]
Tags: pain autoloader floppy transfer-speeds floppies classic hacks
March 26, 2012
12:30
Press play on tape for your Fignition
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Julian Skidmore] has been busy improving the Fignition, a tiny AVR-powered educational computer, to support loading programs from a cassette tape. We first saw the Fignition after the BBC decided to cover an old-school hacker dedicated to improving computer education with a simple ‘bare-metal’ computer. [Julian]‘s Fignition harkens back to the days of very simple computers [...]
Tags: tape fignition computer julian julian-skidmore simple-computers loading-programs educational-computer classic hacks
March 25, 2012
6:27
Antique Electromechanical Calculating Machines
» ‎ Hack a Day

The decision to use electronics for our calculating machines has long been decided. However, that doesn’t mean that mechanical engineers didn’t put up a valiant, if ultimately futile, fight. [Dvice.com] has an interesting article comparing the calculating technology of the 1960s, such as the [Haman 505], to today’s iPad. This comparison and pictures were made [...]
Tags: decision antique electromechanical ipad haman mechanical-engineers classic hacks
March 19, 2012
6:01
Getting a home built scanner from ’92 up and running again
» ‎ Hack a Day

In 1992, [Arpi] didn’t have much time for Ninja Turtles, Nintendos, and other wonderful wastes of time his fellow geeks were raised on. He was busy building a scanner for his Commodore 64. Although this very impressive build could have been lost to the sands of time, he pulled his project out of the attic [...]
Tags: fellow-geeks ninja-turtles commodore-64 classic hacks
March 17, 2012
11:57
Twittertape machine keeps track of your social media stock.
» ‎ Hack a Day

During the gilded age, oil magnates, entrepreneurs, and robber barons would have a ticker tape machine in their study. This machine would print stock and commodity prices and chart these men’s assets climbing higher and higher. A lot has changed in 100 years, as now [Adam] can be kept apprised of what @KimKardashian, @BarackObama and @stephenfry ate [...]
Tags: machine stock twittertape adam ticker-tape-machine robber-barons barackobama classic hacks
March 16, 2012
10:01
CRT vector graphics arcade game built from an FPGA board
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Sprite_TM] wanted to challenge his VHDL skills, and there’s no more satisfying way of doing this than making something that will be playable when you’re done. He decided to try his hand at creating a vector-based CRT arcade. The distinction here is that vector-based games take control of the magnetic ring that guides the electron [...]
Tags: arcade vector crt fpga-board vector-graphics magnetic-ring classic hacks
March 15, 2012
6:01
Bringing a 19th century stock ticker into the 21st century
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Ames]‘s father has had an old stock ticker sitting on a shelf for some time. He may have become quite listless over his spring break, because he decided connect a century-old stock ticker to his laptop. When stock tickers were in use, they were all connected to a stock ticker circuit that would broadcast stock prices [...]
Tags: stock-tickers stock-ticker sitting-on-a-shelf classic hacks
March 13, 2012
15:01
Fine-pitch SMD soldering with minimal tools
» ‎ Hack a Day

We try to stick to the 0805 parts because they’re still big enough to solder by hand. But [Scott] shows us that it doesn’t take too many special tools to reflow fine-pitch components at home. In this case he’s using 0402 resistors, a footprint that we consider functionally impossible to solder using an iron. The two parts [...]
Tags: smd fine-pitch solder scott minimal-tools special-tools resistors classic hacks
March 09, 2012
13:01
Tuna can and some other trash turned into a Sterling engine
» ‎ Hack a Day

Next time you’re making yourself a tunafish sandwich, try to figure out how to build a Stirling engine from the leftovers (translated). If you can pull it off as well as [Killerlot] did we’d say you’ve earned your hacker badge. The can used in this project was actually sardines in tomato sauce, but the former contents are moot. [...]
Tags: sardines-in-tomato-sauce sterling-engine tunafish-sandwich classic hacks
7:01
Going old school with an 8051
» ‎ Hack a Day

A while back, [Matt] bought a few 8051 MCUs and tucked them away for a future project. He just found these fabulous little chips in a component drawer and decided it was time to figure these guys out. Eventually, [Matt] stumbled across this awesome resource for 8051 programming. The 8051 featured a still reasonably respectable 4k of [...]
Tags: mcus school project matt future-project old-school classic hacks
March 07, 2012
9:01
Vintage VT100 terminal computing…with a Beaglebone
» ‎ Hack a Day

A cool little project came our way, which we thought might be of interest to some of you vintage computer buffs. [Joerg Hoppe] wrote in to share a DEC VT100 terminal he resurrected in a novel fashion. His “DECBox” system was created with a Beaglebone, which he uses to run a wide array of PDP11/VAX [...]
Tags: beaglebone vintage terminal dec-vt100-terminal novel-fashion computer-buffs classic hacks
March 05, 2012
15:24
Loading programs onto a TRS-80 Model 100
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’d guess that you don’t have a TRS-80 Model 100 computer sitting around. But we’ve heard that the decades-old hardware is built like a tank so if you search around you can probably get your hands on a working unit. The Model 100 boasted some nice features, one of which was a 300 baud modem [...]
Tags: loading model trs baud-modem loading-programs old-hardware classic hacks
March 01, 2012
12:18
Auto power circuit for an arcade machine
» ‎ Hack a Day

Some of the pinball machines which [Jeri Ellsworth] has restored have ended up in the break room at her work. We’re sure her coworkers are thankful for this, but sometimes they forget to turn off the power to the machines, and letting them run constantly means more frequent servicing will be necessary. She set out [...]
Tags: circuit power auto pinball-machines arcade-machine auto-power classic hacks
February 27, 2012
9:01
Visualizing a nanosecond
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’re so glad to have run across this video where [Rear Admiral Grace Hopper] explains how to visualize a nanosecond. Now we had never heard of [Grace Hopper] before, but once you watch the clip (also embedded after the break) you’ll want to know who this person is. We work with divisions of seconds all [...]
Tags: video visualizing nanosecond rear-admiral-grace-hopper grace-hopper admiral-grace-hopper classic hacks
February 25, 2012
12:03
Giving old appliances a second life with simple tweaks
» ‎ Hack a Day

Cruising estate sales can be a total crapshoot – sometimes you find a goldmine, other times nothing but junk. [John Ownby] recently found a sleek-looking old blender at such a sale and decided to take it home. The chrome plated base and fluted glass immediately caught his eye, but he didn’t buy the blender so [...]
Tags: blender life cruising john-ownby crapshoot second-life classic hacks