jetlib.sec » Tags » classic

UltraChess is a vintage chess game for the 8-bit MSX platform, running on the Z80. [flok] wondered just how capable the game really was, and set forth to test it against a variety of other chess engines.

Having been designed in the 1980s, UltraChess is far from up-to-date as far as the chess software world is concerned. By using the OpenMSX emulator to run the game, [flok] was able to implement scripts to read and write the gamestate in UltraChess, and make it compatible with the Universal Chess Interface. This would allow UltraChess to be played off against a variety of other chess engines to determine its approximate ELO rating.

The scripts worked well, and are available on Github for those who wish to tinker further. Unfortunately, [flok] has thus far been unable to determine a rating for UltraChess, as it has lost every single game it has played against other chess engines. This is unsurprising given the limited processing power available, but we’d love to see a tweaked and hotrodded Z80 chess program take on the same challenge. If you’ve done such a thing, let us know, or alternatively  you might like to try playing like Harry Potter.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Frequency counters are useful tools for anyone that finds themselves regularly working with time-variant signals. There are a huge range available, from cheap eBay specials to expensive lab-grade hardware. [itakeyourphoto] had a counter on the lower end of the cost spectrum, and decided to make some improvements with the help of GPS (Youtube link, embedded below).

The fundamental weakness of a cheap frequency counter is usually the internal reference against which all other signals are measured. The more accurate this is, the more accurate the counter will be. [itakeyourphoto] determined that a great way to generate a reasonably good reference frequency was by using a uBlox GPS module. Once locked on to satellites, it can use a numerically controlled oscillator to output any frequency up to 15MHz with good accuracy.

The cheap frequency counter in question used a 13 MHz internal reference, so the uBlox module was programmed to match this. [itakeyourphoto] reports that it compares favorably to his higher-end GPS-disciplined oscillators, displaying very little drift or other aberrations.

We see plenty of clocks using GPS for its accurate time, but we’ve seen projects that attempt to go even further than that, too. Video after the break.

[Thanks to jafinch78 for the tip!]

Tags:  classic hacks  

If you’ve had the need to send secure, private messages in recent times, you might have considered using Telegram. However, using such a service means that, if discovered, it’s well known what manner of encryption you’re using, and there’s a third party involved to boot. [Labunsky] walks a different path, and built a covert channel within Telegram itself.

[Labunsky] likens their process to the process used in the film Seventeen Moments of Spring, in which a flower placed in an apartment windows indicates a spy has failed their mission. In this case, instead of a flower in a window, one user blocks another to signal them. By switching the blocked status on and off, messages can be sent, albeit in a slow and convoluted way.

It’s more of a proof of concept than a practical way to message people over Telegram. With that said, it does work, and it might just keep the security services monitoring your chats confused for a few extra weeks. Or, it would, if we hadn’t written an article about it. Perhaps consider using zero-width characters instead.

Tags:  classic hacks  

The humble serial interface has been around for a very long time, and will stay with us in one form or other for the foreseeable future. It was easy enough to keep track of back in the days when a computer only had one, or perhaps two COM ports. However, in this day and age of USB-programmable microcontrollers, it’s likely you’ve got COMs coming out the wazoo. Thankfully, [Amr Bekhit] has put together a utility to help solve this problem.

[Amr’s] utility is called Serial Port Monitor, and it does what it says on the tin. When new serial ports are enumerated in Device Manager, a system tray notification pops up noting the number of the newly attached COM port. Additionally, it maintains a list of ports sorted in order of the newest first, and also features a right-click menu that allows the launching of various terminal programs.

It’s a useful tool to keep in your back pocket that can prove particularly so when programming many devboards at once, or any other time when you find yourself dealing with a mess of serial devices.

Incidentally, if you find yourself having continual headaches with USB-to-Serial adapters on Windows, this might just be your problem. Happy hacking.

Footnote: In light of this article, the author would like to formally apologise to [Cosmos2000] for permanently disabling COM1 on his main programming rig. Sorry, friend.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Whether it was home-built from scraps or one of the various commercial versions that have popped over up over the years, there’s an excellent chance that the average Hackaday reader spent at least a couple of their more formative summers flying water rockets. You might not have realized it at the time, but with shirt soaked and head craned skywards, you were getting a practical physics lesson that was more relatable than anything out of a textbook. Water rockets are a great STEM tool for young people, but in a post-Fortnite world, the idea could use a little modernization to help keep kids engaged.

With his entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Darian Johnson] hopes to breathe some new life into this classic physics toy. His open source kit would provide a modular water rocket intended for a wide range of ages thanks to various payloads and upgrade options. The younger players would be content to simply see it take off, but high school students could outfit the craft with an electronic payload to capture performance data or an automatic parachute.

[Darian] has been building and flying rockets with his own children and other youth in community for years now, and has found them to be a huge hit. They became so popular that he started thinking of a way to not produce them in larger quantities, but make them stronger so they would survive more flights.

Of course, the fuselages are easy enough; there’s no shortage of one-liter bottles you can recycle. But for the nose cone, fins, and ultimately even the launch pad, [Darian] turned to 3D printing. This allows him to continually optimize the design while delivering repeatable performance. When he had a semi-printable water rocket on his hands, he started to wonder if he could get older kids interested by adding some electronics into the mix.

His current proof of concept is a flight data recorder using a Adafruit nRF52 Bluefruit LE Feather, a BMP280 sensor to determine altitude via barometric pressure, and an SD card breakout for local data storage. Long term, [Darian] wants to be able to stream flight data to student’s phones over Bluetooth, with the SD card providing a local copy which can be analyzed after the flight.

[Darian] has leaned heavily on the open source community for the various components of his water rocket kit, and is dedicated to giving back. He hopes that his final kit will allow communities to create engaging STEM activities at little to no cost. This includes creating a repository of lesson plans and designs contributed from others experimenting with water rockets. It’s a noble goal, and we’re excited to see how the project progresses.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  classic hacks  

Computer games have been around about as long as computers have. And though it may be hard to believe, Zork, a text-based adventure game, was the Fortnite of its time. But Zork is more than that. For portability and size reasons, Zork itself is written in Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), makes heavy use of the brand-new concept of object-oriented programming, and runs on a virtual machine. All this back in 1979. They used every trick in the book to pack as much of the Underground Empire into computers that had only 32 kB of RAM. But more even more than a technological tour de force, Zork is an unmissable milestone in the history of computer gaming. But it didn’t spring up out of nowhere.

DEC PDP-10 Flip Chip module

The computer revolution had just taken a fierce hold during the second World War, and showed no sign of subsiding during the 1950s and 1960s. More affordable computer systems were becoming available for purchase by businesses as well as universities. MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) was fortunate to have ties to ARPA, which gave MIT’s LCS and AI labs (formerly part of Project MAC) access to considerable computing resources, mostly in the form of DEC PDP systems.

The result: students at the MIT Dynamic Modeling Group (part of LCS) having access to a PDP-10 KA10 mainframe — heavy iron at the time. Though this PDP-10 was the original 1968 model with discrete transistor Flip Chip modules and wire-wrapping, it had been heavily modified, adding virtual memory and paging support to expand the original 1,152 kB of core memory. Running the MIT-developed Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) OS, it was a highly capable multi-user system.

Naturally, it got mostly used for playing games.

Are you ready for an adventure?

In the Spring of 1977, a game arrived at MIT called Colossal Cave Adventure (or ‘Adventure’ for short). This game was the first interactive fiction computer game, providing the player with a text adventure involving a big cave system that’s rumored to be filled with treasures. Reminiscent of ‘choose your own adventure’ books, the player would make choices that would lead them through the cave’s rooms, either succeeding at recovering treasure and escaping alive, or meeting an untimely demise.

Inspired by this game, a group of students at LCS figured that they could do better than this Stanford-developed project. The main weakness they spotted was that Adventure was implemented in FORTRAN, a language not exactly know for its strong dynamic text-handling features, let alone the needs of an interactive fiction game. Because of this, Adventure essentially hard-coded the entire game, limiting flexibility and complicating extending and maintaining the game.

In Adventure, each room has a numeric ID, with an associated description in a table. Another table defines its short description. Another table lists which rooms lie relative to other rooms using their numeric IDs. This means that in order to add a room, one has to modify all of these tables, taking care not to cause any issues with those changes.

Hacker rivalry

Using the natural language experience that existed at LCS and the AI departments back then, it was Dave Lebling who first put together a simple parser and beginnings of a game engine akin to that of Adventure, using the LISP-derived MDL programming language. Using the strong natural language processing capability of MDL, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Tim Anderson then built upon Lebling’s efforts to create the first prototype game that would ultimately turn into the game we know as ‘Zork’ today.

The revolution of Zork was that it could grasp entire sentences due to the strong natural language features of MDL, in contrast to the simple commands of Adventure, where ‘LAMP GET’ and ‘GET LAMP’ were equivalent. It could grasp full sentences, and even multiple sentences (commands) strung together into a single sentence. The strong parser, coupled with the ease of modelling new rooms in an object-oriented style using MDL, meant that after the parser and game engine had been written the world could be expanded practically at will.

A room in Zork could be defined using a simple bit of code like this:

<ROOM "WHOUS"
"This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door."
"West of House"
<EXIT "NORTH" "NHOUS" "SOUTH" "SHOUS" "WEST" "FORE1" "EAST" #NEXIT "The door is locked, and there is evidently no key.">
(<GET-OBJ "FDOOR"> <GET-OBJ "MAILB"> <GET-OBJ "MAT">)
<>
<+ ,RLANDBIT ,RLIGHTBIT ,RNWALLBIT ,RSACREDBIT>
(RGLOBAL ,HOUSEBIT)>

This defines the ‘white house’ from the beginning of the game, along with exits from this room, special properties of exits (e.g. a locked door) and the objects in the room. This ensures that all properties of a room, including its description, short description, properties and tags are in one location. The game engine can then toggle individual tags (bits) on rooms, keeping a central database of all rooms and their current status. Managing which rooms are connected during game design is done using proper names, not numeric IDs in a table.

Smash hit

Suffice it to say, Zork was absolutely fantastic on mainframes. It was ported to the far more widespread DEC TOPS-20 OS for the PDP-10 by popular demand from other interested gamers. Though the Zork developers were generous enough to give the game away for free, they did distribute it as a read-only, encrypted version. They even stored the source code for Zork in a secure folder on the ITS mainframe, for which they had to patch the otherwise fully open and unsecured ITS mainframe OS.

At this time in computer history, there were still relatively few computers in the world. The concept of a home computer was only beginning to take hold, with the introduction of computers like TRS-80 and the Apple II in 1977, though even that system was incredibly limited compared to the mainframes that were being used for text adventures at the time by students around the US. The thought of porting a game like Zork, a 1 MB executable, to home computers seemed rather far-fetched.

While home computers were still scarce, the concept of selling software to regular consumers was also new. This was the time when the Atari 2600 had just gone on sale, starting the second generation game consoles that were expandable to play more that one game through the use of plug-in cartridges. It was a new market, with many questions among MIT, Stanford and other students regarding the open hacker culture versus the world of commercial software. Some, like Richard Stallman, not changing their stance on this much since their student days at MIT.

As the Zork developers were graduating, they realized that with the success of Zork on their hands, they had this one chance to commercialize it, taking their lives and careers into an entirely different direction from their original goals. With little standing in their way, Infocom was founded on June 22nd, 1979.

Now we just have to port it

This only left the tiny little detail of getting Zork from the PDP-10 mainframe systems onto those dinky little home computers; at this point Infocom didn’t actually have anything to sell yet. They mulled various game ideas that could be adapted to work on home computers, but porting Zork just made too much sense. They just had to crack the problem of getting 1 MB of MDL-based game code onto microcomputers with 32 kB of RAM (or less) and relatively anemic amounts of storage.

They also didn’t want to have to port the game separately to the TRS-80, Apple II, or any upcoming new systems. What if one could use the existing MDL source code? This was the start of the design of the Z-Machine, as it came to be known.

Of course, the initial approach to making Zork fit on a microcomputer was to make the game smaller by removing content. After lots of cutting they had something close to the size of Adventure. They then did something similar with MDL, removing all features that weren’t needed for Zork. This created the Zork Implementation Language (ZIL) which they could cleanly port Zork to from MDL. The ZIL compiler was then able to produce much smaller binaries than the MDL compiler.

Looking at the description of Zork’s brass lantern in ZIL we can see that it’s easier to read than MDL:

<OBJECT LANTERN
(LOC LIVING-ROOM)
(SYNONYM LAMP LANTERN LIGHT)
(ADJECTIVE BRASS)
(DESC "brass lantern")
(FLAGS TAKEBIT LIGHTBIT)
(ACTION LANTERN-F)
(FDESC "A battery-powered lantern is on the trophy
case.")
(LDESC "There is a brass lantern (battery-powered)
here.")
(SIZE 15)>

This was great, of course, but this still didn’t make Zork run on a TRS-80. They could at this point of course have written a ZIL compiler for each platform, along with a ZIL runtime, to then spend a lot of time tweaking each game on every target platform. Instead they opted to write this virtual machine: the Z-Machine. Essentially an ideal platform for text adventure games, directly supporting ZIL binaries and also implementing a number of optimizations, most important of which was the packing of characters into 5 bits, reminiscent of Baudot code.

With all of those optimizations, a virtual machine, and a custom programming language, they managed to squeeze the trimmed-down world of Zork I into a mere 77 kB ‘story file’, along with the interpreter (the VM). Since this was still too much to fit into the 32 kB of a mainstream microcomputer of the time, the VM implements a virtual memory system, with just the dynamic data (variables) loaded into RAM and any static data (text) only got read from the floppy disk when needed.

Towards the future

The Apple II had floppy disks with 140 kB capacity, and the TRS-80 had 180 kB, which meant that the space problem had been solved. Only the interpreter needed to be optimized for the target platform, which meant that for all future Infocom games the same interpreter could be used for each and every game that got released, without having to port it to individual platforms.They had more content waiting in the wings from the mainframe version of Zork. They were set for a sequel.

After the commercial success of Zork I, they’d continue to release the parts that were cut from the original mainframe version in the form of Zork II, as well as Zork III. Year over year, the sale of Zork I would keep rising, and it became a must-have game often provided with new systems. New Z-Machine versions were developed that added additional features for even more advanced games.Today we can still enjoy Infocom games without having to worry about compatibility issues: the MDL source to Zork as well as the source for other classic Infocom games have been released. If you haven’t played Zork in a while, or ever, give it a spin and then have a look under the hood. It’s not a stretch to say that a group of hackers at US universities during the 1970s have very likely defined the world of video gaming and interactive story telling.

Tags:  classic hacks  

The regular Hackaday reader might remember the iClicker from our previous coverage of the classroom quiz device, or perhaps you even had some first hand experience with it during your university days. A number of hackers have worked to reverse engineer the devices over the years, and on the whole, it’s a fairly well understood system. But there are still a few gaps in the hacker’s map of the iClicker, and for some folks, that just won’t do.

[Ammar Askar] took it upon himself to further the state of the art for iClicker hacking, and has put together a very detailed account on his blog. While most efforts have focused on documenting and eventually recreating how the student remotes send their responses to the teacher’s base station, he was curious about looking at the system from the other side. Specifically, he wanted to know how the base station was able to push teacher-supplied welcome messages to the student units, and how it informed the clients that their answers had been acknowledged.

He started by looking through the base station’s software update tool to find out where it was downloading the firmware files from, a trick we’ve seen used to great effect in the past. With the firmware in hand, [Ammar] disassembled the AVR code in IDA and got to work piecing together how the hardware works. He knew from previous group’s exploration of the hardware that the base station’s Semtech XE1203F radio is connected to the processor via SPI, so he started searching for code which was interacting with the SPI control registers.

This line of logic uncovered how the radio is configured over SPI, and ultimately where the data intended for transmission is stored in memory. He then moved over to running the firmware image in simavr. Just like Firmadyne allows you to run ARM or MIPS firmware with an attached debugger, this tool allowed [Ammar] to poke around in memory and do things such as simulate when student responses were coming in over the radio link.

At that point, all he had to do was capture the bytes being sent out and decode what they actually meant. This process was complicated slightly by the fact the system uses to use its own custom encoding rather than ASCII for the messages, but by that point, [Ammar] was too close to let something like that deter him. Nearly a decade after first hearing that hackers had started poking around inside of them, it looks like we can finally close the case on the iClicker.

Tags:  classic hacks  

For years I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around how silicon chips actually work. How does a purposefully contaminated shard of glass wield control over electrons? Every once in a while, someone comes up with a learning aid that makes these abstract concepts really easy to understand, and this was the case with one of the booths at Maker Faire Bay Area. In addition to the insight it gave me (and hundreds of Faire-goers), here is an example of the best of what Maker Faire stands for. You’ll find a video of their presentation embedded below, along with closeup images of the props used at the booth.

The Uncovering the Silicon booth had a banner and a tablecloth, but was otherwise so unassuming that many people I spoke with missed it. Windell Oskay, Lenore Edman, Eric Schlepfer, John McMaster, and Ken Shirriff took a 50-year-old logic chip and laid it bare for anyone who cared to stop and ask what was on display. The Fairchild μL914 is a dual NOR gate, and it’s age matters because the silicon is not just simple, it’s enormous by today’s standards making it relatively easy to peer inside with tools available to the individual hacker.

ATmega328 decapped by John McMaster was also on display at this booth

The first challenge is just getting to the die itself. This is John McMaster’s specialty, and you’re likely familiar from his Silicon Pr0n website. He decapped the chip (as well as an ATmega328 which was running the Arduino blink sketch with it’s silicon exposed). Visitors to the booth could look through the microscope and see the circuit for themselves. But looking doesn’t mean understanding, and that’s where this exhibit shines.

To walk us through how this chip works, a stack-up of laser-cut acrylic demonstrates the base, emitter, and collector of a single transistor. The color coding and shape of this small model makes it easy to pick out the six transistors of the 941 on a full model of the chip. This lets you begin to trace out the function of the circuit.

For me, a real ah-ha moment was the resistors in the design. A resistive layer is produced by doping the semiconductor with impurities, making it conduct more poorly. But how do you zero-in on the desired resistance for each part? It’s not by changing the doping, that remains the same. The trick is to make the resistor itself take up a larger footprint. More physical space for the electrons to travel means a lower resistance, and in the model you can see a nice fat resistor in the lower right. The proof for these models was the final showpiece of the exhibit as the artwork of the silicon die was laid out as a circuit board with discrete transistors used to recreate the functionality of the original chip.

Windell takes us through the booth presentation in the video below. I think you’ll be impressed by the breakdown of these concepts and how well they aid in understanding. This was a brilliant concept for an exhibit; it brought together interdisciplinary experts whom I respect and whose work I follow, and sought to invite everyone to gain a better understanding of the secrets hiding in the chips that underpin this technological age. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to see at a Maker Faire.

Tags:  classic hacks  

You use things every day that are very different from the same items from even a decade ago. Your car, your cellphone, and your computer all have probably changed a lot in the last ten years. But there’s something you almost certainly use every day that hasn’t changed much in a very long time: your toilet. That is unless you live in Japan where some toilets are a high tech delight. Lifehacker recently did a video about the toilet of the future, which might be coming to the US soon if Toto — one of the Japanese toilet makers — has its way.

It made us think. For as ubiquitous as the porcelain throne is, we don’t see many hacks related to it. There are several really obvious ones. For example, in the Lifehacker video, the seat automatically raises when you approach. We don’t know how it could figure out if you were going to stand or sit, but maybe that’s a good application for machine learning. What we really want is one that can clean itself. That would be worth something. Every time we see a Sanisette washing itself in Paris we want to take it home.

Bidets aren’t a big thing in this country, but we’ve never heard anyone who has used one say they didn’t like it. Turns out, it is very water efficient compared to the production of toilet paper, too. Some other features mentioned were scent, sound, and UV sterilization. We’ll admit it, though. We snickered at the icon on the bidet button.

So why aren’t there more toilet hacks? We don’t know. Maybe it’s taboo. A computer vision system for precise targeting of a bidet is a dirty business, but someone has to do it. Surprisingly, we do see a lot of toilet paper holders with either IoT sensors or some 3D printed features. We’ve only seen one recent project involving something more concrete. That project tried to thwart splashback. Got a toilet project? Hit us on the tip line.

Tags:  classic hacks  

In a lot of fields – motorsport, space exploration, wearables – lighter is better. But it’s not always the case. When you want to damp vibration, stop things moving around, and give things a nice weighty feel, heavier is the way to go. This is the case for things like machine tools, anvils, and yes – speakers. Using this philosophy, [SoundBlab] built a set of concrete speakers. (Youtube link, embedded below)

The concrete speaker enclsosures are sized for 3″ drivers, and were cast using two measuring jugs as the mold. This gave the final product a smooth and glossy surface finish, thanks to the surface of the plastic used. The concrete was also agitated during the casting process to minimise the presence of air bubbles in the mixture.

Once cast, the enclosures are fitted with plywood end caps which mount the Fountek FE85 speaker drivers. These are a full-range driver, meaning no cross-overs or other drivers are required. The speakers are then mounted on stands constructed from wood edging, which are stained in a contrasting colour for a nice aesthetic touch. Felt pads are placed on the base, and polyfill inside the enclosure to further minimise any unwanted vibrations.

The sound test confirms the speakers perform well, and they look great as a part of a lounge audio setup. We think they make an excellent pair of bookshelf speakers, which would be ideal for comfortable listening at moderate volume levels.

We’ve seen many speaker builds at Hackaday, from 3D-printed omnidirectional builds to the more classical designs. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

In the first part of this series, we took a look at a “toy” negative-differential-resistance circuit made from two ordinary transistors. Although this circuit allows experimentation with negative-resistance devices without the need to source rare parts, its performance is severely limited. This is not the case for actual tunnel diodes, which exploit quantum tunneling effects to create a negative differential resistance characteristic. While these two-terminal devices once ruled the fastest electronic designs, their use has fallen off dramatically with the rise of other technologies. As a result, the average electronics hacker probably has never encountered one. That ends today.

Due to the efficiencies of the modern on-line marketplace, these rare beasts of the diode world are not completely unobtainable. Although new-production diodes are difficult for individuals to get their hands on, a wide range of surplus tunnel diodes can still be found on eBay for as little as $1 each in lots of ten. While you’d be better off with any number of modern technologies for new designs, exploring the properties of these odd devices can be an interesting learning experience.

For this installment, I dug deep into my collection of semiconductor exotica for some Russian 3И306M gallium arsenide tunnel diodes that I purchased a few years ago. Let’s have a look at what you can do with just a diode — if it’s the right kind, that is.

[Note: the images are all small in the article; click them to get a full-sized version]

3И306M Tunnel Diodes

I bought a set of ten of these military-grade gallium arsenide diodes in 2016 for some experiments with pulse generators. You may also see this part listed as “3I306M,” since the Cyrillic letter “И” corresponds to the English “I.” The TekWiki on w140.com has a good page on surplus Russian diodes, as well as good general information on tunnel diodes, especially those used in classic Tektronix oscilloscopes. Some diodes are optimized for use in amplifiers, pulse generators, or for switching circuits. From the 3И306M datasheet (PDF, in Russian), we can glean some information about this particular diode — a switching type — but I found it easier just to measure some of the parameters firsthand using a curve tracer, which generates the I/V characteristic curve for the device.

Tunnel diode waveform shows sharp edges

In the last article, I presented my quick-and-dirty curve tracer, which is nothing more than a signal generator, a 10-Ohm resistor, and an oscilloscope. I also mentioned the problem with that method: that the voltage measurement is corrupted by the current measurement on the scope’s screen. The ideal thing to do is capture the trace data and plot the curve in your favorite graphing software, where you can compensate for the error. This time, that’s exactly what I did, exporting the traces as a CSV file, then generating the plot in python using matplotlib.

As you can see in the curve, the current through the device initially ramps up to around 11 mA with increasing voltage until 150 mV, at which point the current drops abruptly to about 500 uA before increasing again. This is the negative differential resistance (NDR) region, where the current drops with increasing voltage. The interesting thing about this curve is that only two points in this region were captured. Looking at the waveform of the voltage measurement shows what’s going on — the diode is switching on and off at very high speed.

Switching Performance Tunnel diode switching time test jig – just a couple of BNC connectors soldered together.

This diode was intended for switching, so it makes sense it should generate sharp edges. To get a better look at this, I built a test jig from two BNC jacks soldered closely together: the tunnel diode is soldered across the BNC terminals. With one end connected to a 50-Ohm signal generator and the other to a 50-Ohm terminated oscilloscope, this allows testing of the very fast switching speed of the diode.

Fall time of tunnel diode is less than 1 ns

The switching time of the diode seems independent of the input waveform — when the voltage hits the threshold, the diode switches — so I drove it with a triangle waveform at around 100 kHz. I measured the fall time of the output transitions at under 900 ps, while the rise time was slightly longer at 1.1 ns. That’s pretty impressive for a circuit with only one part (ignoring the signal generator). This could be just the ticket for sharpening up the lazy 100 ns edges on a classic 555 oscillator, if you were into that kind of thing.

The drawback to this circuit, common to all tunnel diode applications, is the low output level: these diodes work at low voltages and currents, so can’t generate powerful outputs.

300 MHz Oscillator Tunnel diode LC oscillator

While this particular diode may have been intended for switching, it can easily be pressed into oscillator service. Like I did with the transistor circuit in Part I, I built an LC oscillator using this diode as the active element. The negative resistance of the tunnel diode counteracts the positive resistance in the LC tank, causing oscillations to build over time instead of diminishing.

300 MHz oscillator and probe loop

The resonator initially consisted of a single 9 mm loop of copper wire in parallel with a 2 pF capacitor – or so I thought. A 10 nF bypass capacitor handles the return current through the diode, and a 700 mV supply powers the oscillator, although I found that the circuit would continue to oscillate down to 330 mV once started.

This circuit initially oscillated at 295 MHz. When I swapped the 2 pF capacitor for a 1 pF part, and the frequency only went up to 300 MHz, I realized that the capacitance of the diode itself was keeping the frequency low. By calculating the inductance of the wire loop, I was able to estimate the diode capacitance at around 18 pF (the datasheet only says less than 30 pF). This diode capacitance adds to the LC tank capacitance, reducing the resonant frequency.

300 MHz tunnel diode oscillator output

For the same reason, care must be taken when probing a circuit like this. My 10x oscilloscope probe claims to have a 10 pF nominal capacitance, which would have a similar frequency-reducing effect if the circuit were probed directly. Instead, I attached the ground clip to the probe’s tip, forming an inductive pickup loop. Keeping the two loops close together acts like a transformer and gives enough coupling to detect the signal and measure the frequency. Since the coupling is somewhat arbitrary, the amplitude scaling is not calibrated, but changes to the circuit operation — due to changing the power supply for instance — can still be seen.

581 MHz Oscillator 581 MHz tunnel diode oscillator with two components

Not content with 300 MHz, I decided to strip the circuit down to the bare minimum to speed it up. I cut the diode leads short and soldered them directly to those of a 100 pF axial capacitor. In this case, the leads themselves are providing the necessary inductance, resonating with the diode capacitance. Again using a supply voltage of 700 mV, I found the circuit oscillated at 581 MHz. I’m not sure how to make this go any faster using lumped components – maybe someone can suggest a different method in the comments. Cavity resonators?

Output of two-component tunnel diode oscillator at 581 MHz

In any case, I find it amazing that a two-terminal device can form such an oscillator this simply. I also have a much greater appreciation for the designers who worked with these things: preventing unwanted parasitic oscillations in circuits using these diodes must have been a serious consideration. This is also why I haven’t tried to build an amplifier with these diodes (yet). There’s an old adage that the easiest way to build an oscillator is to design an amplifier, and now I’m wondering if this saying really caught on during the tunnel-diode days.

To measure this faster oscillator, I constructed a smaller pickup loop on the end of the oscilloscope probe with a length of bare copper wire. Don’t be fooled by the perfect-looking sine wave shape of the output; it’s a 581 MHz signal measured on a 1 GHz scope, so there’s not enough bandwidth to show many distortions. They may or may not be present, but we can’t tell with this equipment. And, like with the previous oscillator, the random coupling of the probe loop creates an arbitrary amplitude scale, so you can’t compare the outputs of the two circuits.

Hard Lessons Soldering heat sink can prevent thermal damage

These gallium arsenide diodes are as fragile as they are fascinating. Of the four diodes I used in these experiments, I destroyed two. The first one was simply a matter of applying too much voltage during curve tracing. The best approach is probably to start low — the active region is below 1 V with these devices — and advance slowly. The second casualty was a case of overheating. The datasheet cautions to heat the leads no more than 3 seconds to a temperature not exceeding 260 °C, and to use a heat sink between the diode body and the solder point on the leads. I read this after having overcooked one. I didn’t have the recommended 2 mm wide copper tweezers, but finally made do with a clamp-on aluminum sink I originally bought for soldering germanium components.

The diodes are also static sensitive, and the datasheet ominously warns not to test them with a diode tester. I had already tested one with the diode-test function on a DMM when I read this, and although the diode seems to have survived — at least it was not instantly destroyed — the tester didn’t register the diode in either polarity. So, use the diagram in the datasheet to determine which end is which.

The bottom line: if you play with these diodes, be careful and make sure to buy a few spares.

Whats Next?

So, that wraps up this brief hands-on series about negative resistance devices. Be sure to let us know in the comments if you have first-hand experience with these unusual diodes or similar parts, especially if you can get one to go much faster than 581 MHz. I really want to see one of these things scream.

Tags:  classic hacks  

For something basic like a brushed DC motor, speed control can be quite simple, and powering up the motor is a simple matter of just applying voltage. Brushless motors are much more demanding in their requirements however, and won’t spin unless driven just right. [Electronoobs] has been exploring the design of a brushless speed controller, and just released version 1.0 of his open-source ESC design.

The basic design is compact, and very similar to many off-the-shelf brushless ESCs in the low power range. There’s a small PCB packing a bank of MOSFETs to handle switching power to the coils of the motor, and a big capacitor to help deal with current spikes. The hacker staple ATMEGA328 is the microcontroller running the show. It’s a sensorless design, which measures the back EMF of the motor in order to determine when to fire the MOSFETs. This keeps things simple for low-torque, low-power applications.

It’s a tidy build, and the latest revision shows a lot of polish compared to the earlier prototypes. If you’re interested to learn more, try building it yourself, or consider building a thrust testing rig for your bench at home. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Emojis, the graphical descendants of textual emoticons, are everywhere these days. They’re commonly used on social media platforms as a way of indicating a basic emotional response to a post. That wasn’t enough for [Tadas Maksimovas], who built the Emotigun to really get the point across.

Fundamentally, the Emotigun is akin to a Gatling cannon for small foam emojis. Firing over ten rounds per second, it’s built primarily out of wood, using Precise anti-cold rubber bands to fling its ammunition at targets. This was a practical choice, as the original Thera-Band green rubber tubes became inelastic in the cold temperatures of the testing environment. The finer details of the build are laid out in a document for those eager to know more.

The build was a team effort, with many pitching in, and even [Jorg Sprave] lending his expertise to the build. Given [Jorg]’s expertise, we’re not surprised the final result is so impressive. Reports are that filming the machine in action was quite an ordeal, with [Tadas] taking over 200 rounds to the face during the course of the shoot. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Like many other classics it’s easy to come up with ways to ruin Tetris, but hard to think of anything that will make it better. Adding more clickiness is definitely one way to improve the game, and playing Tetris on a flip-dot display certainly manages to achieve that.

The surplus flip-dot display [sinowin] used for this version of Tetris is a bit of an odd bird that needed some reverse engineering to be put to work. The display is a 7 x 30 matrix with small dots, plus a tiny green LED for each dot. Those LEDs turned out to be quite useful for replicating the flashing effect used in the original game when a row of blocks was completed, and the sound of the dots being flipped provides audio feedback. The game runs on a Teensy through a custom driver board and uses a Playstation joystick for control. The video below, in perfectly acceptable vertical format, shows the game in action and really makes us want to build our own, perhaps with a larger and even clickier flip-dot display.

The best thing about Tetris is its simplicity: simple graphics, simple controls, and simple gameplay. It’s so simple it can be played anywhere, from a smartwatch to a business card and even on a transistor tester.

[via Gizmodo]

Tags:  classic hacks  

One of the most popular futurist tropes of the 20th century was the video intercom. Once this technology was ready, it would clearly become a mainstay of modern living overnight. Our lived reality is however somewhat different. For [MisterM], that simply wouldn’t do, so he set about producing a retro-themed video doorbell that is sure to be the envy of the neighbourhood.

Not one to settle for second best, [MisterM] wanted to focus on quality in video and sound. A Microsoft LifeCam 3000HD handles video and audio capture, with a Raspberry Pi 3B+ providing plenty of grunt to run the show. The Pimoroni pHAT BEAT add-on provides audio output. It’s all integrated into a 1980s vintage intercom, which is painted a deep shade of maroon for an extra classy look. Further parts are integrated into a classic Sony tape deck, with LEDs shining out from under the cassette door for added visual appeal.

The doorbell works by making calls to Google Duo, which allows the user to answer the door from anywhere in the house, or indeed – anywhere with an Internet connection! [MisterM] reports this has already proved useful for communicating with couriers delivering packages to the house. There’s also a standard wireless doorbell and chime integrated into the unit which alerts those within the house in the usual way.

It’s a project that is both highly functional and looks particularly swish. Integrating new brains into old-school enclosures is a great way to give your project a cool look. These aircraft surplus clocks are a great example. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Watch any news panel show these days, and you’ll see that things can very quickly become unruly. Guests compete for airtime by shouting over one another and attempting to derail their opponent’s talking points. [cutajar.sacha] had encountered this very problem in the workplace, and set about creating a solution.

The result is the Debatable Deliberator, and it combines the basics of “Talking Stick” practices with behavioural training through humiliation. Two participants each wear a headband, fitted with electronics. The holder of the magic ball may speak for as long as the timer counts down. If their opponent speaks during this time, their headband reprimands them with gentle slapping to the face. If the holder speaks over their assigned time, they are similarly treated to mechanical slapping.

It’s an amusing way to help police a discussion between two parties, and it’s all made possible with a trio of WeMos D1 ESP8266 boards. The headbands act as clients, while the ball acts as a server and keeps track of how many times each speaker has broken the rules.

WiFi projects such as this one have become much easier in the past few years with the wide availability of chips like the ESP8266. Of course, if you need more grunt, you can always upgrade to the ESP32.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Acrylic is a great material. It’s not cheap, but it comes in a wide variety of colours and styles and can be used to make some very attractive projects. [Geek Mom Projects] is a big fan, and whipped up some fun pendants for a high school Maker Faire.

[Geek Mom] has long been a fan of edge-lighting, as it’s a great way to make beautiful glowy projects out of acrylic. In this case a fluorescent acrylic is used with white LEDs to generate an eerie green glow, though it’s also noted that the project can be done with clear acrylic and color-shifting LEDs instead for an equally cool look. If you’re filming a low-budget sci-fi film, this could be just what you need.

The pendants made a great project for young makers to learn about LEDs, electronics, and technologies such as lasercutting that were used to produce the parts. With copper tape used instead of soldering and a CR2032 battery used to eliminate the need for a current limiting resistor, it’s a very accessible project that most teens were able to complete without assistance.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen edge-lit pendants, either. Alternatively, if you need your acrylic bent, there’s a tool for that, too.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Year on year, microcontrollers and development platforms are shipping with ever-increasing feature sets. In the distant past, if you wanted an analog to digital converter or a PWM driver, you had to tack extra ICs on to your design. Nowadays, it’s all baked in at the factory. Of course, you may still find yourself working with a platform that lacks capacitive touch inputs. That’s no problem, though – you can do it all without dedicated hardware anyway!

Capacitive touch sensing works by creating an RC oscillator, and allowing the user to affect the capacitance in the circuit through touch or proximity. By sensing the changes in the frequency of the oscillator, it’s possible to determine whether the object or pad is being touched or not. As the capacitance changes can be small, sometimes it’s desired to use a high frequency oscillator, and then pass the output through a frequency divider, which allows changes to be measured more easily by a slower microcontroller.

[Gabriel] does a great job of both explaining the theory involved, as well as presenting a practical way to achieve this with basic hardware. If you need to add touch sensitivity to an existing or otherwise limited platform, this is an easy way to go about doing it. There are definitely some interesting things you can do with the technology, after all.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Embedded development can be a tough process. Between weird electrical gremlins, obscure bugs and our own mistakes, it can be a real struggle at times. To keep cognitive loads to a minimum, it’s best to make sure your tools are as simple and easy to use as possible. [tech] got tired of having to push a button to prepare the ESP32 for programming, and decided to solve the problem.

The solution comes via another microcontroller, in this case an ATtiny9. The small device listens in on the ESP32’s serial receiving pin. When it detects the Arduino IDE’s boot sequence on the line, it switches the BOOT0 and RESET lines on the ESP32, emulating the button presses to force it into programming mode.

Once you’ve become accustomed to one-click programming your ESP boards, you’re not going to want to go back. We could imagine this hack being replicated in a tidy piggyback format so it could be moved from board to board as workflow dictates.

If you’ve got an ESP32 lying around and don’t know what to do with it, you could always consider getting into game development.

 

Tags:  classic hacks  

[Ivan Miranda] is always experimenting with 3D printing, and recently has been taking his work on the water. His latest creation is a racing paddle boat, but its performance left [Ivan] with a need for speed. Cue the development of the 3D printed water jet engine (YouTube link, embedded below).

The basic principle of operation is simple. Water is sucked through an inlet, where it is accelerated by a turbine driven by a brushless motor. This turbine, in combination with stator fins, forces the water through the outlet, propelling the boat forwards in the process.

The first prototype is printed in PLA. Tolerances are good, thanks largely to [Ivan]’s experience and well-calibrated printers. After assembly, the engine is fired up, to great results. After sourcing a series of larger tubs in which to test the device, the engine is finally run up to full throttle and appears more than capable of shifting a serious amount of water.

We’d love to see a proper instrumented thrust test, particularly one that compares the device to other water jet drives on the market. Brushless motors make a great drive solution for RC boats, so we’re sure [Ivan] will be tearing up the lake real soon. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

eBay is a wondrous land, full of Star Wars memorabilia in poor condition, old game consoles at insane markups, and a surprising amount of DIY electronics. [TheHWCave] found himself tinkering with a common frequency counter kit, and decided to make a few choice improvements along the way (Youtube link, embedded below).

The frequency counter in question is a common clone version of [Wolfgang “Wolf” Büscher]’s minimalist PIC design. Using little more than a PIC16F628 and some seven-segment displays, it’s a competent frequency counter for general use. Clone versions often add a crystal oscillator tester and are available on eBay for a fairly low price.

[TheHWCave] found that the modifications were less than useful, and developed a way to turn the tester components into a more useful signal preamp instead. Not content to stop there, custom firmware was developed to both improve the resolution and also add a tachometer feature. This allows the device to display its output in revolutions per minute as opposed to simply displaying in hertz. By combining this with an optical pickup or other RPM signal, it makes a handy display for rotational speed. If you’re unfamiliar with the theory, read up on our phototachometer primer. If you’re looking to modify your own kit, modified firmware is available on Github.

We’ve seen other eBay kit specials modified before. Being cheap and using commodity microcontrollers makes them a ripe platform for hacking, whether you just want to make a few tweaks or completely repurpose the device.

[Thanks to Acesoft for the tip!]

 

Tags:  classic hacks  

Acquiring a new YouTube subscriber is a blessed event that deserves far more fanfare than a phone notification. But maybe blinkenlights don’t really do it for you anymore, or you simply prefer to be soothed sonically rather than visually. Well, what could be more satisfying than the crisp clack of an electromechanical 7-segment display? Six of them, of course. These things look great, they sound great, and once they’re set, they don’t need power to stay that way.

These displays switch between black and white by reversing current flow through their electromagnets, so [Zack] turned to the H-bridge in order to use them with DC. One H-bridge for each segment of six displays adds up fast, though. To get around this, [Zack] tied one pole of each electromagnet together for a common signal input, and used the other pole to control each segment individually. Then, he was able to tie all the A segments together, all the B segments, and so on, and only needs 13 H-bridges to do it all.

There was just one thing [Zack] didn’t count on. Once he got the board soldered up and running, the displays started acting funny. The low impedance of the coils was causing them to influence each other over the common path, so he added diode arrays to keep them in line.

[Zack]’s using an ESP32 to get the 411 through the Google API, and four octal serial switches to drive the displays. Even more satisfying than all those clacks is the displays’ operational economy baked into [Zack]’s code—as they count up, any segments common to the first digit and the next digit remain on. Increment your way past the break to check out the build video.

Not focused on numbers, but still want to celebrate each new sub? Try a dancing robot or a Tetris twist.

Tags:  classic hacks  

C is the most perfect language and it will run on anything. It will even run on a computer without a CPU.

The computer in question here is the Gigatron, a fully-functional ‘home computer’ the likes of which you would find in the late 70s and early 80s, complete with a VGA output. What makes the Gigatron exceptional is the fact that there is no microprocessor; everything is just a RAM, a ROM, and a bunch of logic chips. There is no ALU chip. Or rather, there is; it’s just that an entire RISC CPU is implemented in basic logic chips and a whole lot of microcode on the ROM. It’s weird, yes, but it is cool. We’ve taken a look at the Gigatron before, and with this computer you get a glimpse of how clever engineers could have been if there were massive memories available in the late 70s.

While the Gigatron can be programmed in BASIC, the limiting factor of this computer is the fact that it remains exceptionally difficult to program. This is what the 8-Bit Guy says, and even though you can write some simple programs, it’s nothing compared to the likes of an Apple II or C64. If only there were a proper IDE, indeed if only there were a C compiler. That’s where [pgavlin] comes in. He has the LCC compiler working on the Gigatron. This is technically a C compiler for a computer without a CPU, or a computer that is entirely CPU. Either way you look at it, this is impressive.

As far as examples and demos go, [pgavlin] has a demo of Conway’s Game of Life working, and a program that will put dots on the screen. It’s not much, and it’s very slow, but check out the video below.

This isn’t a complete implementation of C, as multiplication, division, mod, and arbitrary shifts left or right haven’t been written yet. Floating point support will probably never be completed, and there’s no shame in that. The hardware is limited due to the fact of the fragmented memory map, but this can be improved by upgrading the Gigatron to a 64k memory model.

 

Tags:  classic hacks  

Before Wolfram Alpha, before the Internet, before even PCs, calculations more complex than what could be accomplished with a “four banger” required some kind of programmable calculator. There were many to choose from, if you had the means, and as time passed they became more and more sophisticated. Some even added offline storage so your painstakingly written and tediously entered programs didn’t evaporate when the calculator was turned off.

One such programmable calculator, a Casio PRO fx-1 with magnetic card storage, came across [amen]’s bench recently. Sadly, it didn’t come with any cards, so [amen] reverse engineered the card reader and brought the machine back to its 1970s glory. The oddball mag cards for it are no longer available, so [amen] had to make do with. He found some blank cards of approximately the right size for cheap, but somehow had to replicate the band of vertical stripes adjacent to the magnetic strip on the card. Reasoning that they provide an optical synchronization signal, he decided to use a CNC router to cut a series of fine-pitched slots in the plastic card. It took a little effort to get working, including tapping the optical sensor and reading the signal on an oscilloscope, but as the video below shows, the hacked cards work fine with the vintage calculator.

Kudos to [amen] for reviving this retro-cool calculator. Now that it’s back in action, it might be fun to visualize domains on the magnetic strip. A flatbed scanner can be used for that job.

Tags:  classic hacks  

After spotting some interesting military phones at a museum, [CuriousMarc] wondered what it would take to retrofit these heavy duty pieces of telecom equipment for civilian use. He knew most of the internals would be a lost cause, but reasoned that if he could reverse engineer key elements such as the handset and keypad, he might be able to connect them to the electronics of a standard telephone. Luckily for us, he was kind enough to document the process.

There were a number of interesting problems that needed to be solved, but the first and perhaps largest of them was the unusual wiring of the keypad. It wasn’t connected in the way modern hackers like us might expect, and [CuriousMarc] had to end up doing some pretty significant rewiring. By cutting the existing traces on the PCB with a Dremel and drilling new holes to run his wires around the back, he was able to convert it over to a wiring scheme that contemporary touch tone phones could use.

An adapter needed to be fabricated to mount a basic electret microphone in place of the original dynamic one, but the original speaker was usable. He wanted to adapt the magnetic sensor that detected when the handset was off the hook, but in the end it was much easier to just drill a small hole and use a standard push button.

The main board of the phone is a perfect example of the gorgeous spare-no-expense construction you’d expect from a military communications device, but unfortunately it had to go in the bin. In its place is the guts of a lowly RCA phone that was purchased for the princely sum of $9.99. [CuriousMarc] won’t be able to contact NORAD anymore, but at least he’ll be able to order a pizza. The red buttons on the keypad, originally used to set the priority level of the call on the military’s AUTOVON telephone network, have now been wired to more mundane features of the phone such as redial.

While this is fine for a one-off project, we’d love to see a drop-in POTS or VoIP conversion for these phones that didn’t involve so much modification and rewiring. Now that we have some documentation for things like the keypad and hook sensor, it shouldn’t be hard to take their idiosyncrasies into account with a custom PCB. Dragging vintage gear into the modern era is always a favorite pastime for hackers, so maybe somebody out there will be inspired to take on the challenge.

Tags:  classic hacks  

How do you get the kids interested in old technology? By connecting it to a phone, obviously. Those kids and their phones. When [Marek] got his hands on an old-school teletype, he hooked it up to a GSM network, with all the bells and whistles including a 40mA current loop running at an impressive 50 baud.

The teletype in question here is a vintage T100 teletype manufactured in Czechoslovakia sometime in the ’70s. This was a gift to [Marek]’s workplace, the museum of Urban Engineering in Cracow, and this project is effectively an experiment to investigate the possibility of running this teletype as an interactive exhibit rather than an artefact from the age of current loops and phone systems.

The current loop is, or was, the standard way of connecting a teletype to anything, so all [Marek] had to do was construct a box that translated the signals from a GSM modem to this current loop. For the prototype, the microcontroller in question is an old AT89C2051 (as that’s what was sitting in the parts drawer). This was moved over to a PIC32 microcontroller and a SIM800 GSM module. This is housed in a two-part enclosure, with the GSM interfaced housed in one half, with the current loop generator consisting of a simple DC power supply housed int the other half.

This interface is capable of receiving and sending messages from the keyboard to a GSM network, so it is theoretically possible you could text your friends using an old-school teletype. This functionality hasn’t been implemented yet, but it is just about the coolest thing you could possibly imagine. You can check out a video of the teletype in action below.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Mowing the lawn is a chore that serves as an excellent character building excercise for a growing child. However, children are expensive and the maintenance requirements can be prohibitive. Many instead turn to robots to lend a hand, and [Rue Mohr] is no exception.

[Rue]’s creation goes by the name Mowerbot, and was first built way back in 1998. Steel angle and brushed DC motors are the order of the day, helping the ‘bot get around the garden and chop the grass down to size. Being of such a vintage, there’s no Raspberry Pi or Arduino running the show here. No, this rig runs on the venerable 386, chosen primarily as it can run off just 5 V. The original build ran off a 5 1/4″ floppy, though it was later upgraded to CF card storage instead.

It’s not the first robot mower we’ve seen, but is likely one of the longest serving. It’s still in use today, though [Rue] reports it’s due for some new batteries. Given it’s been chewing up the grass for over two decades now, that’s fairly impressive performance. We hope to see this 386-driven beast still cutting away long into the future.

Tags:  classic hacks  

A truly random number is something that is surprisingly difficult to generate. A typical approach is to generate the required element of chance from a natural and unpredictable source, such as radioactive decay or thermal noise. By contrast it is extremely easy to generate numbers that look random but in fact follow a predictable sequence. A shift register with feedback through an XOR of its output and one of its stages will produce a continuous stream of pseudo-random bits that repeat after a set period.

[KK99] has created the simplest possible pseudo-random binary sequence generator, using a three-bit shift register. It’s realised on a pleasingly retro piece of perfboard, with a CD4047 as clock generator and a 74HC164 shift register doing the work. Unusually the XOR gate is made from discrete transistors, 2N3053s in bulky TO39 packages, and for a particularly old-fashioned look a vintage HP LED display shows the currently generated number. A relatively useless pseudo-random sequence with a period of seven bits is the result, but the point of this circuit is to educate rather than its utility. You can see it in operation in the video below the break.

We had a demonstration of the dangers of using a pseudo-random sequence back in 2016. The German military cipher nicknamed “Tunny” by British codebreakers relied upon a mechanical sequence generator, and the tale of its being cracked led to the development of Colossus, the first stored-program electronic computer.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  classic hacks  

Back in the ’70s and ’80s, before we had computers that could do this sort of thing, there were fully analog video effects. These effects could posterize or invert the colors of a video signal, but for the best example of what these machines could do just go find some old music videos from Top of The Pops or Beat Club. Stuff gets weird, man. Unfortunately, all those analog broadcasting studios ended up in storage a few years ago, so if you want some sweet analog effects, you’re going to have to build your own. That’s exactly what [Julien]’s Video Mangler does. It rips up NTSC and PAL signals, does some weird crazy effects, and spits it right back out.

The inspiration for this build comes from an old ’80s magazine project called the ‘video palette’ that had a few circuits that blurred the image, turned everything negative, and could, if you were clever enough, become the basis for a chroma key. You can have a lot of fun when you split a video signal into its component parts, but for more lo-finess [Julien] is adding a microcontroller and a 12-bit DAC to generate signals that can be mixed in with the video signals. Yes, all of this can still be made now, even though analog TV died a decade ago.

The current status of this project is a big ‘ol board with lots of obscure chips, and as with everything that can be described as circuit bending, there’s going to be a big panel with lots of dials and switches, probably stuffed into a laser-cut enclosure. There’s a mic input for blurring the TV with audio, and enough video effects to make any grizzled broadcast engineer happy.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Freezers are highly useful devices. You can preserve food, stop a dead animal from stinking out your apartment, and keep your vodka at the optimal drinking temperature. Of course, most of us bought ours from the local whitegoods store, but [Tech Ingredients] set out to build his own (YouTube, embedded below).

Unlike your freezer at home, this build doesn’t use the typical heat pump and refrigeration cycle with a compressor and expansion valve and so on. Instead, this freezer uses thermoelectric devices to pump heat, in combination with a glycol cooling circuit and fan-cooled radiators.

It’s not the most efficient or practical way to build a freezer, but it is functional and the device demonstrably works, making ice cubes over the course of a few hours. Performance can be further improved by moving the radiator assembly outdoors to make the most of the low ambient temperatures.

[Tech Ingredients] has further plans to experiment with a dessicant-based refrigeration system, and reports that initial results are promising. We’re eager to see how that goes; we’re fans of any rig that can cool a beer down in no time flat. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

When designing furniture, material choice has a huge effect on the character and style of the finished product. Wood is a classic option, while more modern designs may use metal, plastic or even cardboard. Less popular, but no less worthy, is concrete. It’s heavy, cheap, and you can easily cast it into a wide variety of forms. [KagedCreations] thought this would be ideal, and whipped up this nifty piece of furniture with an integrated USB hub.

A pair of melamine shelves were scrapped to build the form, in which the concrete table is cast. Melamine is a popular choice, as it’s cheap, readily available, and releases easily from the finished concrete. Along with the USB hub, a wooden board is cast into the base of the concrete table top. This serves as an easy attachment point for the pre-made hairpin-style legs, which can be installed with wood screws.

The final result is a tidy side table that has plenty of heft to keep it stable and secure. It’s not the first concrete USB hub we’ve seen, but it’s likely the heaviest thus far. We’d love to see a version with an integrated charging pad, too – if you build one, be sure to let us know. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Some of us are able to get by in life with somewhere between 0 and 1 USB ports. We typically refer to these people as “Mac users”. For the rest of us, too much is never enough, and we find ourselves seeking out expansion cards and hubs and all manner of perverse adapters and dongles. [JackmanWorks] was a man who found himself in need of more connectivity, so he built this beautiful shelf with an integrated 12-port hub.

Material choice is key here, with this build looking resplendent in mahogany and cement. As the core of the build, the USB hub is first disassembled and sealed up to prevent damage from the cement. Hot glue is used to protect the PCB, while electrical tape helps cover the individual ports. The cement is then poured into a form which creates the overarching structure for the shelf, with the USB hub being cast in place. With the cement cured, mahogany boards are then cut and waxed, before installation into the structure. These form the individual shelves which hold phones, hard drives and other USB accessories.

The shelf was designed so that the entire structure is supported through the bottom shelf, which then sits on top of the desktop computer case. It’s an attractive piece, and the weight of the cement construction makes it pleasantly stable in use. It’s rare, but we do occasionally see shelf hacks around these parts. Video after the break.

 

Tags:  classic hacks  

Taking an old piece of gear and cramming it full of modern hardware is a very popular project. In fact, it’s one of the most common things we see here at Hackaday, especially in the Raspberry Pi era. The appeal is obvious: somebody has already done the hard work of designing and building an attractive enclosure, all you need to do is shoehorn your own gear into it. That being said, we know some of our beloved readers get upset when a vintage piece of gear gets sacrificed in the name of progress.

Thankfully, you can put your pitchforks down for this one. The vintage radio [Freshanator] cannibalized to build this Bluetooth speaker is actually a replica made to invoke the classic “cathedral” look. Granted it may still have been older than most of the people reading this right now, but at least it wasn’t actually from the 1930’s.

To start the process, [Freshanator] created a 3D model of the inside of the radio so all the components could be laid out virtually before anything was cut or fabricated. This included the design for the speaker box, which was ultimately 3D printed and then coated with a spray-on “liquid rubber” to seal it up. The upfront effort and time to design like this might be high, but it’s an excellent way to help ensure you don’t run into some roadblock halfway through the build.

Driving the speakers is a TPA3116-based amplifier board with integrated Bluetooth receiver, which has all of its buttons broken out to the front for easy access. [Freshanator] even went the extra mile and designed some labels for the front panel buttons to be made on a vinyl cutter. Unfortunately the cutter lacked the precision to make them small enough to actually go on the buttons, so they ended up getting placed above or next to them as space allowed.

The build was wrapped up with a fan installed at the peak of the front speaker grille to keep things cool. Oh, and there are lights. Because there’s always lights. In this case, some blue LEDs and strategically placed EL wire give the whole build an otherworldly glow.

If you’re interested in a having a frustrating quasi-conversation with your vintage looking audio equipment, you could always cram an Echo Dot in there instead. Though if you go that route, you can just 3D print a classic styled enclosure without incurring the wrath of the purists.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Shaper tools were, at one time, a necessary tool for any machine shop. With a shaper and a lathe, you can rebuild or manufacture almost anything. At the very least, you can make the tool to manufacture anything. For the last few months, [Makercise] has been working on building his own homemade shaper, and now it’s making chips. (YouTube, also embedded below.)

First off, what exactly is a metal shaper? It’s not commonly seen in machine shops these days, but at the turn of the last century, these were popular and practical machines to cut keyways into a piece of stock. Effectively, it’s kind of like a jigsaw, in that it cuts with a reciprocating action and is able to plane the entire surface of a metal plate. Today, if you want to surface a piece of stock, you would just throw it onto the Bridgeport, but there are still some use cases for a metal shaper.

The design of this shaper comes directly from the Gingery series of books, the famous series of books that are step-by-step instructions on how to build a machine shop starting from the technology of rubbing two sticks together. [Makercise] has built one of these machines before, the metal lathe, and the second in the Gingery series of books after a foundry, and the next book is instructions on how to build a mill.

Sure, [Makercise] is using modern tools and modern techniques to build this shaper. There’s a CNC machine involved, and nobody is going to Greenland to make aluminum anymore. Still, this is a flat piece of metal made from scratch, an a great example of how far you can take home machining in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

Tags:  classic hacks  

We are very familiar with retrocomputers, and if you want you too can build a computer that could have been made in the late ’70s on a breadboard. Just grab your CPU of choice, add some RAM, some ROM, a ton of jumper wires, and give it some way to talk to the outside world. The problem with the computers inspired by yesteryear is that they all, inexplicably, use through-hole parts. If only someone used the small QFP parts instead of the big chonkin’ PDIPs, we could have really small retrocomputers. That’s exactly what [NotArtyom] did, and he managed to come up with a wearable 6502 watch.

The system design for this 6502-based watch is fairly standard for what you would find in any other retrocomputer. There’s a PLCC 6502, 32k of SRAM, 16k of ROM, and a PLLC’d 6522 for a bit of IO. There are a few peripherals hanging off the 6522, and since this thing is a watch the most important is a real time clock. There’s also a Nokia LCD and a 20-pin Commodore keyboard connector.

Software-wise, most of the ROM is dedicated to G’Mon, a generic monitor that can view and modify memory. There’s also EhBasic, and a kernel to handle the RTC, keyboard, and display.

Whether or not this is a useful smartwatch isn’t the question; this is one of the first retrocomputer projects we’ve seen that lean into the non-PDIP versions of these classic chips. This is a bit surprising, because you can still buy these parts, PDIP or not, new from the usual vendors. If nothing else, it’s a demonstration of what can be done with modern IC packages.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Amazon’s Dash Buttons are useful little devices, that let you automatically order a wide variety of common household goods at the press of a button. They’re cheap and wireless and readily available, and that makes them ripe for hacking. In just this vein, [Inbar] and [Ezra] found a way to make the Dash buttons update their to-do list.

[Inbar] uses Any.do to manage his to-do list. There’s no public API, but the service can be configured to respond to Alexa commands. Naturally, this meant that if a Dash Button could be configured to trigger a voice command, Alexa would then make the necessary additions to the list.

This was achieved with lashings of Python, a Raspberry Pi, and Apple’s text-to-speech engine. The Raspberry Pi is set up as a wireless hotspot, to which the Dash Buttons are connected. When the button is pressed, a DHCP request goes out as the button tries to phone home. By scraping the MAC address from this request, the Raspberry Pi can identify which button has been pressed, and then plays a recorded voice sample of Apple’s Samantha voice. This voice was specifically chosen to be the one most reliably understood by Alexa, which is responsible for parsing the voice command and updating the list on Any.do.

It’s a cheeky hack that doesn’t bother itself with the nitty-gritty of interfacing with various services and tools. Instead, it laces up a bunch of easy-to-use software and hardware, and gets the job done just as well.

As we’ve seen, Amazon’s Dash Button has been thoroughly pwned. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

A pinhole camera is essentially the combination of the camera obscura with photographic film. The pinhole acts as the lens, focusing the scene onto the film, and after exposure, the film can then be developed and you’ve got your picture. They’re a fun way to learn about photography, and easy to make, too. [Brooklyntonia] decided to undertake just such a build, secreted away inside a pocket watch.

The build starts with with the disassembly of the watch, which acts as the main cavity of the camera. A bellows is then constructed from leather and a toilet paper roll to allow the camera to still fold up inside the original watch case. A pinhole is then installed at the end of the bellows, and a plug is used as a shutter to allow the bellows to be properly unfolded prior to exposure.

It’s a fun build, and one that comes complete with instructions for the proper processing of film in your own darkroom – or bathroom. Pinhole cameras can be useful tools, too – particularly for things such as capturing an eclipse.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Typically, when one considers writing a video game, the platform is among the first decisions to be made. The PC can be an easy one to start with, and mobile development is fairly accessible too. Of course, you could always develop for a microcontroller platform instead. [Fabrizio Di Vittorio] has built the perfect set of tools to do just that with the ESP32, by the name of FabGL.

The library contains a laundry list of features that are perfect for developing games. There’s VGA output with up to 64 colors, PS/2 mouse and keyboard inputs, as well as a capable graphics library and game engine. It can even act as an ANSI/VT terminal if necessary.

[Fabrizio] has put the hardware through its paces, with a variety of benchmarks displaying impressive performance with simple balls, polygons and sprites. You could easily produce a 2D game in an early 90s style without running into any hardware limitations — though given the ESP32 clocks in at up to 240MHz, that’s somewhat to be expected.

It’s an impressive project (video after the break), and we’d love to see more games developed on the platform. Once you have a VGA connector wired in you should try out some ESP32 VGA hacks. And for those ESP8266 die hards there’s a game engine for that chip too!

Tags:  classic hacks  

When starting a new project, the choice of material can have a big effect on the character of the finished product. Wood is stylish and has a certain elegance to it, while polished or brushed aluminium is great for a more futuristic feel. Sometimes though, you just want big, cheap and heavy – in which case, concrete is your friend!

[BALES] was short on USB ports, and needed a hub with plenty of connectivity. Concrete had the benefits of being solid and heavy, and also impervious to beverages. Thus, a melamine form was produced, chosen as its surface doesn’t give the concrete anything to grab on to. A foam skull was cut out and added to create an inlay for decoration, and the 7-port octopus-style hub was placed inside.

With careful attention paid to the mixture consistency, the concrete was poured into the mold and allowed to set. Care was taken to avoid air bubbles and to ensure the mixture flowed completely into the mold, without leaving air pockets behind the inserted components. After allowing it to set for a few days, the part was demolded, with care taken to minimise edge crumbling. The foam skull was removed, and infilled with black epoxy, with a little more used to coat the top and sides of the hub. As a finishing touch, a foam pad was fitted to the base to allow it to sit on a desk without scratching everything up.

In the end, [BALES] has ended up with a hefty hub that won’t skitter around when plugging and unplugging devices. It should also serve admirably as a sturdy drink coaster on those cold winter nights. If you’re trying a similar project yourself, note that sometimes concrete can be surprisingly conductive. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Undertale came out in 2015 and took the world by storm. With a heartwrenching story, compelling characters and a soulful soundtrack, it won legions of fans and became an indie gaming legend. Years later,  [Gornkleschnitzer] decided to begin a pinball machine build, and it became a tribute of epic proportions.

No expense was spared on getting the artwork professionally printed, and the results speak for themselves.

Yes, we’re talking about a living, clacking, and breathing Undertale pinball build. [Gornkleschnitzer] demonstrates not only a deep knowledge of the source content, but also a mastery of pinball construction. The build began with a design in Virtual Pinball, which allowed the basic design to be dialled in. This allows things like trick shots and other features to be tested before cutting real parts. With the design roughed out, the real work starts. Full sets of cabinet and playfield decals were professionally printed, flashers installed, and subway tunnels lasercut in steel. All manner of flippers, slingshots and ball troughs were installed, tested, and tweaked in the pursuit of perfection.

The attention to detail is where this machine really shines. The artwork is stunning, and the game is complete with the original soundtrack, including the death theme. There’s even hidden gems like the Tem Shop and bonuses galore to be had.

It’s a stunning pinball machine, and one we’re dying to play for ourselves. If you’re keen to get your feet wet, why not consider starting with a cardboard build? Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

For one time small window between 1994 and 1998, you could play Game Boy games in color with a Super Game Boy. This was a cartridge that plugged into a Super Nintendo, and using proprietary Lock-On technology, you could play Game Boy games on the big screen. Inside the Super Game Boy was the guts of a real Game Boy. This was, and still is, the best way to experience everything from Kirby’s Dream Land or the Pokemon of Kanto.

Unfortunately, the Super Game Boy doesn’t exactly replicate the Game Boy experience. The crystal in the Super Game Boy means that games and sound run between 2 and 4% faster. The Super Game Boy is out for competitive speed running, and if you’re using Little Sound DJ, you’ll be out of tune with the rest of the band. The Super Game Boy doesn’t have link cable support, either.

Now, [qwertymodo] over on Tindie has the solution to the faster Super Game Boy. It’s a clock mod, but it’s not just swapping a crystal. This is a board that solders to existing pads, and still allows you to access the speed up and slow down functions available from the Commander controller from Hori. It’s a slightly impressive bit of PCB art, and certainly something that deserves notice.

This mod fixes the 2-4% speedup of the Super Game Boy, but then there’s still one feature missing: the link cable. Well, hold on to your butts, because there’s a mod for this one too. The Super Game Boy Link Port is a small little breakout board that requires fly wires to the main chip in the Super Game Boy. The installation isn’t quite as clean as the crystal hack, but if you’re fixing the clock, you might as well add the link cable port while you’re in there.

[qwertymodo] has a comparison test of the Super Game Boy running Pokemon Red, and this thing is dead on. It runs at exactly the same speed as an original Game Boy, only in color, on a TV. You can check that out below.

The Super Game Boy has made surprisingly few appearances here, but we did cover its boot ROM being dumped.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Nintendo made some questionable decisions during the early 2000’s, but developing the WaveBird certainly wasn’t one of them. Years before wireless controllers were the standard on home game consoles, the WaveBird gave GameCube owners a glimpse into the future. It managed to deliver lag-free gaming without resorting to easily-blocked infrared, and had a battery life and range long enough that there was really no downside to cutting the cord aside from the lack of rumble support.

In fact, the WaveBird was such a good controller that some fans just can’t put the thing down even in 2019. [Bill Paxton] loves his so much that he decided to modify it so he could use it on Nintendo’s latest money printing machine, the Switch, without having to fiddle with any adapters. While he was at it, he decided to fix the only serious drawback of the controller and hack in some rumble motors; arguably making his re-imagined WaveBird superior in just about every way to the original.

It might be counter-intuitive, but the trick here is that [Bill] actually took the internals from a standard wired GameCube controller and fitted it all into the case for the WaveBird. That’s how he got the rumble support back, but where does the signature wireless capability come from?

For that, he took apart a “GBros. Wireless Adapter” from 8BitDo. This gadget is intended to let you use your existing GameCube controllers on the Switch wirelessly, so all he had to do was shove its PCB inside the controller and wire it directly to the pads on the controller’s board. Thankfully, the WaveBird was rather husky to begin with, so there’s enough space inside to add all the extra hardware without much fuss.

Between modifications like this and efforts to reverse engineer the controller’s wireless protocol, hackers aren’t about to let this revolutionary accessory go gently into that good night. You might see a GameCube slaughtered for a meme, but WaveBirds never die.

[Thanks to Bill for the tip]

Tags:  classic hacks  

Sometimes the Christmas season can feel like a holiday all about spending money to demonstrate your love for others. Many a maker has attempted to subvert these commercialistic overtones by giving handmade presents to friends and loved ones. [APA] is no exception, and has shared their story of producing a simple Simon game during the holidays.

The circuit is nothing wild – an ATtiny85 microcontroller interfaces a handful of buttons and LEDs to handle the basic Simon gameplay. The real value is in [APA]’s retelling of the development process. It’s an accurate recounting that makes us relive some of our own follies of early projects. There’s the confusion between SMD and through hole versions of the same part, forgotten pull up resistors, as well as hours lost trying to figure out why a chip won’t write, only to learn the bootloader hasn’t been burned yet.

In the end, [APA] was able to push through a rush order and deliver the gifts on time, despite the many pitfalls along the way. The final game provided some laughs around the dinner table at Christmas, so we’d say the mission was definitely accomplished.

We’ve seen similar work before, too – like this tiny Simon game on an ATtiny13.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Toys are great for keeping the kids amused at play time, but oftentimes its difficult to get them to understand the importance of tidying up after themselves. It would naturally be ideal to have some manner of robot to help in this regard, and [Paco Garcia] might just be leading the charge in this area.

[Paco]’s project involves combining a robotic arm with computer vision tools in order to allow it to pick and place small objects – in this example, toys. The robot arm is of a gantry type, built on an aluminium frame with 3D printed components. The computer vision side of things is handled by a Raspberry Pi, fitted with the standard camera and running OpenCV software for object recognition. This then passes commands to an Arduino which runs the stepper motors controlling the arm.

[Paco] notes that the hardest part of the build was learning how to generate real-world coordinates from a single camera feed in OpenCV. With that mastered, the rest of the dominoes began to fall. With trigonometry and kinematics knowledge in hand, the robot has grown capable of reliably picking and placing small objects across its range of motion. Future work aims to improve the robot’s abilities to rotate and otherwise manipulate its end effector for more versatility.

Naturally, we typically see pick and place machines used for PCB production – and this build is no exception. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

The Etch-a-Sketch was a hugely popular toy in the days before video games and the Internet became ubiquitous. These days, they’re a fun amusement, but can still be difficult to master. Rather than learn the necessary skills himself, [Martin Fitzpatrick] decided to build a machine to draw for him. Enter the Etch-a-Snap.

The build starts with a Raspberry Pi Zero, equipped with the requisite camera. Images taken are processed into a 100×60 pixel image with 1-bit color. At this stage, a network graph representation is built of the image and used to generate commands for the plotting mechanism to draw the scene. Plotting is achieved with stepper motors that turn the knobs through 3D-printed gears. Plotting is slow, with images taking 15 minutes to an hour to “develop”. The system can also be used to draw manually processed images, which can improve results when images are chosen carefully.

It’s a project that combines modern hardware with a classic toy for some interactive fun. We could imagine a large-scale version of this being a great installation at a science museum or MakerFaire. We’ve seen others tackle a computer-controlled Etch-A-Sketch, too. Video after the break.

 

Tags:  classic hacks  

The world of radio controlled aircraft used to be an expensive and exclusive hobby, limited to those with the time and money to invest in difficult builds and pricey radio gear. More recently, the hobby has become more accessible, with cheap ready to fly planes available that can be flown in smaller spaces like suburban parks. [Ravi Butani] has built just such a plane, and you can even fly it with your smartphone!

An ESP8266 does double duty here as both the brains and the communication system. A custom smartphone app communicates with the plane over WiFi. Touching the screen increases the throttle, while steering is achieved through tilting the phone. There’s also monitoring of signal strength and battery level, with the phone vibrating if the plane is getting out of range or low on battery.

Flight control is via differential thrust, with power coming courtesy of two small DC motors controlled by tiny SMD MOSFETs. The plane flies remarkably well in still conditions, and the WiFi connection is stable in an open park environment. [Ravi] reports that control is possible at a range of around 70 meters using a Motorola G5S smartphone.

Despite the simplicity of the build and the low cost of the components, the final product performs admirably. It would be a great weekend project, and at the end of it, you get to go and fly your new plane! If you’re worried about keeping your batteries charged, don’t worry – there’s a solution for that. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

Over the past 30 years the price of hardware has slowly but surely come down, and it’s now possible to buy all manner of widgets and gizmos online for less than the price of a fancy Italian dinner. By and large this is a good thing, but it’s not uncommon to find that your new tools are let down by the software side of things. Of course, you can always develop your own solution – and in [ThePhil]’s case, that’s exactly what he did.

The hardware in question was a PCE-174 luxmeter, which came with an uncooperative Windows application as standard. This simply wouldn’t do, so [ThePhil] set about developing a Linux version in Python. This was achieved through the aid of documentation, not of the PCE-174, but its sibling from another corporation – the Extech HD450. The two meters were similar enough that the Extech’s better documentation was able to fill in the gaps of [ThePhil]’s understanding.

[ThePhil] has diligently implemented the full feature set of the PCE-174, and has documented the project well. There are even notes on the version numbers of various dependencies, which will surely be a great help if someone’s trying to run the code five years down the track.

It’s a great lesson that one need not be at the mercy of the software one is given. For a great many cases, it’s possible to roll your own solutions that are robust and get the job done. This approach can be taken to great lengths – you can go so far as replacing an entire camera firmware, if you so wish.

 

Tags:  classic hacks  

Everything can be done with a 555. It’s a universal law, as all readers know. And a flashing light, you might think, will have been done before many times. But nobody has ever created a 555 flashing light as small as thie one created by [TWires], who has taken a TI LMC555 chip-scale packaged 555 and dead-bugged a working flasher on its surface using 01005 discrete components. There is a video showing it in operation that we’ve placed below the break, and it’s tiny. We probably all consider ourselves to be quite good at soldering, but this piece of work is in another class entirely.

The project was inspired by [Mike Harrison]’s previous holder of the smallest blinky prize, which used a PIC mcrocontroller atop a tiny surface mount supercapacitor. It uses the same capacitor for power, but we’d say it’s taken the blinky to new levels of tininess. Does this mean a new arms race is upon us in the world of tiny blinkies? We hope so, and though it’s difficult to imagine they can get much smaller we can’t wait to see what people come up with. If there’s one thing about our community it’s that saying something can’t be done is unwise: one of you will find a way if it is at all possible. Even Microchip’s MIC1555 might be a bit big though, so something inventive is called for.

For a fascinating run-down of the state of the 555 art, read this article from our own [Ted Yapo].

Tags:  classic hacks  

It’s a problem every maker faces at one time or other – how to organise the ever-growing mass of components in the workshop. Some give up and just live with box upon box of disordered parts. That wasn’t good enough for [Inventor22], though – who created FindyBot3000 to tackle the job. 

The first step is to source a set of those tiny component drawers we all know and love. These are then combined with WS2812B LED strips, which act as indicators for each individual drawer. A Particle Photon is used as the brains of the operation, and drives the strips. So far, so good.

Of course, blinking LEDs are great and all, but it’s the voice control where things get really interesting. Through Google Home and IFTTT, it’s possible to give commands to the Particle Photon. This can be used to manage the parts in the drawers, as well as to quickly highlight the location of various components. It’s backed up with an Azure backend, which manages the component database and keeps track of everything.

It’s a tidy build that does away with tiny sticky labels, and is reconfigurable on the fly as parts come and go. Of course, if you’re mostly storing SMD parts, you might prefer a reel based solution. Video after the break.

Tags:  classic hacks  

It might be difficult for modern audiences to believe, but at one point Microsoft Windows fit on floppy disks. This was a simpler time, with smaller hard drives, lower resolution displays, and no hacker blogs for you to leave pessimistic comments on. A nearly unrecognizable era, to be sure. But if you’re one of the people who looks back on these days fondly, you might wonder why we don’t see this tiny graphical operating system smashed into modern hardware. After all, SkiFree sure ain’t gonna play itself.

Well, wonder no more. A hacker by the name of [redsPL] thought that Microsoft’s latest and greatest circa 1992 might do well crammed into the free space remaining on a ThinkPad X200’s firmware EEPROM. It would take a little fiddling, plus the small matter of convincing the BIOS to see the EEPROM as a virtual floppy drive, but clearly those are all minor inconveniences for anyone mad enough to boot their hardware into a nearly 30 year old copy of Visual Basic for a laugh.

The adventure starts when [redsPL] helped a friend install libreboot and coreboot on a stack of old ThinkPads by using the Raspberry Pi as an SPI flasher, a pastime we’re no strangers to ourselves. Once the somewhat finicky software and hardware environment was up and running, it seemed a waste not to utilize it further. Especially given the fact most firmware replacements only fill a fraction of the X200’s 8 MB chip.

Of course, Windows 3.1 was not designed for modern hardware and no proper drivers exist for much of it. Just getting the display resolution up to 1024×768 (and still with only 256 colors) required patching the original video drivers with ones designed for VMWare. [redsPL] wasn’t able to get the sound hardware working, but at least the PC speaker makes the occasional buzz. The last piece of the puzzle was messing around the zip and xz commands until the disk image was small enough to sneak onto the chip.

Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Windows from this era running on a (relatively) modern ThinkPad. For whatever reason, these two legends of the computing world seem destined to keep running into each other.

[Thanks to Renard for the tip.]

Tags:  classic hacks  

Plastic is a highly useful material, but one that can also be a pain as it ages. Owners of vintage equipment the world over are suffering, as knobs break off, bezels get cracked and parts warp, discolor and fail. Oftentimes, the strategy has been to rob good parts from other …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

In the time before smartphones for on-the-go visual entertainment, there were portable TVs. You might think of a portable TV as a luggable device, but the really cool ones were pocket-sized. Perhaps if you are familiar with pocket TVs you’ll be thinking of a Citizen or a Casio with a …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Imagine you’re time-warped back to 1979 and tasked with constructing a personal computer. Could you do it? [RadicalBrad] thinks he can, and his 6502-based “Super VIC” build looks like it’s off to a great retrocomputing start.

Most emulations of old hardware these days go the FPGA route, and while we …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Nixie tubes are adored by hackers across the world for their warm glow that recalls an age of bitter nuclear standoffs and endless proxy wars. However, they’re not the easiest thing to drive, requiring high voltages that can scare microcontrollers senseless. Thankfully, it’s possible to score an Arduino shield that …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Graphing calculators are an interesting niche market these days. They’re relatively underpowered, and usually come with cheap, low resolution screens to boot. They remain viable almost solely due to their use in education and the fact that their limited connectivity makes them suitable for use in exams. The market is …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

We’ve seen a lot of arcade machine builds here on Hackaday. Seriously, a lot. Even more so since the Raspberry Pi took over the world and made it so you didn’t have to cannibalize an old laptop to build one anymore. It’s one of those projects with huge appeal: either …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Ink! No matter the printer you’ve got, whether it be inkjet, laser or otherwise, it’s the consumables that will send you broke. At times, the cost of Hewlett-Packard black ink has exceeded the price per volume of human blood, and shareholders around the world have rejoiced.

As a retrocomputing reprobate, …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

There are a lot of retrocomputers out there sitting in garages and attics, and most of them need work. After thirty or forty years, you’re looking at a lot of corrosion, leaking caps, and general wear and tear. When it comes to extreme refurbishment, we haven’t seen anyone better than …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Vinyl has the audiophiles to keep it relevant, and CDs still have the people who are scared of streaming music, but who mourns for the cassette tape? Yesterday we would have said nobody, but now that [Igor Afanasyev] has unleashed his latest creation onto an unsuspecting world, we aren’t so …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Fresh into the tip line is an amazing video showcasing the history of the Commodore 64. Unlike many historical retellings of the history of the Commodore 64, the history doesn’t start with the VIC-20, but instead the first Commodore machine to feature the VIC-II and SID chip, the Commodore Max. …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Next year we’re arguably coming up on the centennial of electronic music, depending on whether you count the invention or the patent for the theremin its creation. Either way, this observation is early, so start arguing about it now. If you want to celebrate the century of the theremin, how …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-11/70 is a masterpiece of Cold War-era industrial design. This microcomputer was the size of one or two modern server racks depending on configuration, and the front panel, loaded up with blinkenlights, was clad in a beautiful rose and magenta color scheme. The switches — the …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Sensors are critical in robotics. A robot relies on its sensor package to perform its programmed duties. If sensors are damaged or non-functional, the robot can perform unpredictably, or even fail entirely. [Dheera Venkatraman] has been working to make debugging sensor issues easier with the rosshow package for Robot Operating …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

“Never Twice the Same Color” may be an apt pejorative, but supporting analog color TV in the 1950s without abandoning a huge installed base of black-and-white receivers was not an option, and at the end of the day the National Television Standards System Committee did an admirable job working within …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs) are one of those beautiful pieces of bygone technology that you just don’t see much of anymore. At one time they were a mainstay of consumer electronics, but today they’ve largely been replaced with cheaper and more energy efficient displays such as LEDs and LCDs. While …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

When programming for modern platforms, the restraints are different to those of 30 years ago. Back in the dawn of the microcomputer age, storage and RAM were measured in kilobytes. It simply wasn’t possible to store large amounts of graphical data, and even code had to be pared back at …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Security cameras used to be analog devices feeding back into a room full of tiny screens and commercial grade VCRs. As technology moved forward, IP cameras began to proliferate. Early models simply presented a video stream and configuration page to the local network. Modern models aimed at the home market …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Air quality has become an increasing concern in many urban areas, due to congestion and our ever-increasing energy use. While there are many organisations that task themselves with monitoring such data, it’s also something anyone should be able to take on  at home. [Chrisys] is doing just that, with some …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

After a youth spent playing with Amigas and getting into all sorts of trouble on the school computer network, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for hardware from the 80s and 90s. This extends beyond computers themselves, and goes so far as to include modems, photocopiers, and …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The SEGA Genesis (aka Mega Drive) was launched at the tail end of the 1980s, bringing a new level of performance to the console world. At the time, 2D graphics ruled the roost, outside a few niche titles here and there. Decades later however, the demoscene continues to work in …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

There are a few open source autopilots available these days for quadcopters and fixed wing aircraft. Two of the most popular are ArduPilot and PX4, however neither is officially capable of working with unpowered aircraft. Despite this, [rctestflight] decided to run some experiments to see just how PX4 would fare …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

ANT+ is a wireless protocol specifically designed for use with sensors, and has similar functionality in some respects to Bluetooth Low Energy. It’s found a place among various bicycle equipment manufacturers, to connect smartwatches, cycle computers and electronic gear shifters. Of course, as soon as something becomes a defacto standard …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The Commodore 16 was a budget home computer from the mid 1980s, the entry-level model in a wider range of machines. As its name suggests it only has 16k of memory in keeping with its budget status, and while it has the rest of the hardware necessary to run software …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

A feline’s appetite is rarely sated, and cat owners around the world are routinely treated to an early morning wake up call to remind them of this fact. To solve this problem, many turn to automated feeders. However, such devices usually handle only dry foods, with a simple hopper system. …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

When did computers arrive in schools? That should be an easy question to answer, probably in the years around 1980. Maybe your school had the Commodore Pet, the Apple II, or if you are British, the Acorn BBC Micro in that period, all 8-bit microcomputers running a BASIC interpreter. That’s …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Bitcoin’s great, if you sold at the end of 2017. If you’re still holding, your opinion might be a little more sour. The cost to compete in the great hashing race continues to rise while cryptocurrency values remain underwhelming. While getting involved at the top end is prohibitively expensive, you …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The Sega Genesis, or Mega Drive as it was known outside North America, was a popular console for the simple fact that Sega did what Nintendidn’t. Anachronistic marketing jokes aside, it brought fast scrolling 16-bit games to a home console platform and won many fans over the years. You may …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

There are hundreds of modern, retrocomputing projects out there that put ancient CPUs and chips in a modern context. The Neon816 from [Lenore] is perhaps one of the most impressive projects like this we’ve seen. It’s a classic system in a modern form factor, with modern video output, mashed together …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Home brewing is a pastime that can be as much an art or a science as you make it, depending on your predilections. [Brandon Satrom] is one who leans very much towards the science side. There’s plenty that can be done to monitor and control a brew, and [Brandon] is …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The Altair 8800 was, to its creators, a surprise hit. Despite looking nothing like what we would today consider to be a computer, it sold thousands of units almost immediately upon its launch, way back in 1975. A few years later, the Apple II burst onto the scene, and the …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Modern microcontroller platforms spoil us with their performance and expansive spec sheets. These days it’s not uncommon to be developing for a cheap micro that has a clock rate well in excess of 100MHz, with all manner of peripherals baked in. DACs, WiFi, you name it – it’s in there, …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Of all the retro systems, the Commodore 64 had the best video system. The VIC-II chip in the C64 was the best example of why Commodore was the best, but in terms of video output, the C64 was still a consumer device: the only output was S-video, or composite video, …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

It wasn’t that long ago that talking to computers was the preserve of movies and science fiction. Slowly, voice recognition improved, and these days it’s getting to be pretty usable. The technology has moved beyond basic keywords, and can now parse sentences in natural language. [Liz Meyers] has been working …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The hovercraft is an entertaining but much maligned form of transport. While they have military applications and at times have even run as ferries across the English Channel, fundamental issues with steering and braking have prevented us all driving them to work on a regular basis. They do make great …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Debugging tools are critical to quick and effective development. Without being able to peek under the hood at what’s really going on, it can be difficult to understand and solve problems. Those who live on the Arduino platform are probably well acquainted with using the serial port to debug, but …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

It’s possible to find surplus LCDs in all kinds of old hardware. Photocopiers, printers – you name it, there’s old junk out there with displays going to waste. Unfortunately, unlike the displays on sale at your favourite maker website, these often lack a controller and can be quite difficult to …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

There’s something oddly menacing about some vacuum tubes. The glass, the glowing filaments, the strange metal grids and wires suspended within – all those lead to a mysterious sci-fi look and the feeling that strange things are happening in there.

Add in a little high voltage and a tube that …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The 6th Generation iPod Nano was something of a revelation on launch. Packing a color screen, audio hardware, and a rechargable battery into a package no bigger than a large postage stamp remains impressive to this day. They’re now being used in various maker projects for their displays, but if …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

China, we’re told, can make anything. If you need some PCBs in a few weeks, there are a few factories in China that will do it. If you need a nuclear reactor, yep, there’s probably a factory in China that’ll do it because nuclear reactors are listed as one of …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Any studio operator worth their Protools subscription will have a wide array of microphones to cover any conceivable situation. SM57s to cover guitar cabs, fancy gilded ribbon mics for vocal takes, and a variety of condensers to round out the selection. That’s all well and good for high-fidelity recording, but …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

We have covered enough of the work of [Ken Shirriff] on these pages to know that when he publishes something, it will be a fascinating read and work of the highest quality. And so it is with his latest, a very unusual op-amp on which he performs his usual reverse …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

One of the better retro historians out there on YouTube is the 8-Bit Guy, and after years of wanting to do something like this, it’s finally happening. The 8-Bit Guy is building his dream computer, heavily inspired by the Commodore 64.

Before we go into what this computer will do …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Before there was the Internet, there were a lot of would-be Internets. Compuserve comes to mind, as do Prodigy, GEnie, Delphi, and the innumerable BBS systems that were once gateways to worlds beyond our CRT monitors and 300 baud Hayes Supermodems.

Service providers varied by region, of course. The French …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Ubiquitous computing has delivered a world in which there seem to be few devices left that no longer contain a microprocessor of some sort. Thus should a student wish to learn about the inner workings of a computer they can easily do so from a multitude of devices. For an …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

A Lissajous curve is formed when two sine waves plotted on their respective X and Y axes. You can see one using an oscilloscope and a couple of signal generators, if you play with one of those ‘pendulums tracing in the sand’ toys, or if you really need something sciencey …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

When we consume our music online via streaming services it is easy to forget the days of recordings being contained on physical media, and to overlook the plethora of competing formats that vied for space in our hi-fi systems to play them. [Andrew Rossignol] has an eye for dated recording …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

It’s a situation that plays out every day, all over the world – you walk into work, and there’s a full-scale foam toilet sitting on the bench, demanding to be used in a crackpot project. This time, it happened to be at the [FliteTest] workshop, and naturally, they set about …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

DC power bricks were never a particularly nice way to run home electronics. Heavy and unwieldy, they had a tendency to fall out and block adjacent outlets from use. In recent years, more and more gadgets are shipping with USB ports for power input. However, power over USB has always …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The speaker in the original IBM PC is nearly the worst electronic musical instrument ever created. This isn’t because amazing works of art were never created for the PC speaker; no, that’s been done, and it’s amazing. The PC speaker is terrible because of how limited it is. It does …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Bakelite, hammertone gray finish, big chunky toggle switches, jeweled pilot lights – these are a few of [Wesley Treat]’s favorite retro electronics things. And he’ll get no argument from us, as old gear is one of our many weak spots. So when he was tasked by a friend to come …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

It might seem almost comical to our more fresh-faced readers, but there was a time when you could go into a big box retailer and purchase what was known as a “DivX Player”. Though they had the outward appearance of a normal DVD player, these gadgets could read various digital …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

When we are concerned with the accurate reproduction of a signal, distortion and noise are the enemy that engineers spend a great deal of time eliminating wherever possible. However, humans being the imperfect creatures that we are, we sometimes desire a little waviness and grain in our media – typically …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The heart is an impressive piece of hardware. It’s a rare pump that runs continuously for over 80 years in some cases. It’s also, for some reason or other, become a common human symbol of love and affection. In this vein, [Deepak Khatri] has built a beating electronic heart out …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

For one reason or another, we’re going with a retro-futuristic 80s aesthetic in this case, [Mike] decided to turn an Apple IIe into a robot. If you have to ask why, you’ll never know, but this project does have some interesting things going for it. There’s a voice synthesizer, a brand spankin’ new power supply, and it rolls around on the floor thanks to Apple BASIC.

Since this is a mobile robot, there needs to be a power supply in there somewhere. The Apple II had a fantastic switching power supply, but it ran off mains voltage. To make this …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Electron microscopes were once the turf of research laboratories that could foot the hefty bill of procuring and maintaining such equipment. But old models have been finding their way into the hands of eager individuals who are giving us an inside look at the rare equipment. Before you start scouring Craigslist, go on a crash course of what you need to know with Adam McComb’s Hacker’s Guide to Electron Microscopy. He presented the talk at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference and the recording was just published, you’ll find it below.

Two Ways to Make the Really Small, Big

The first thing …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

It’s entirely possible to do your coding in vim or emacs, hammering out hotkeys to drive the interface and bring your code to life. While working in such a way has its charms, it can be confronting to new coders, and that’s before even considering trying to understand command line compiler settings. The greenhorn coder may find themselves more at home in the warm embrace of an IDE, and [morrows_end] has now built one for those working with AVR assembly code.

The IDE goes by the name of Simple AVR IDE, or savr_ide for short. Programmed in C++ with the …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Around these parts, [Peter] is well-known for abusing the TRS-80 to do things it should never do. You can read Wikipedia on the TRS-80, you can look at Google Images, and you can browse the web. As with any retrocomputer, there are limitations for what you can do. To browse Wikipedia, [Peter] had to set up an AWS instance which translated everything and used serial to IP converters. It can be done, but it’s hard.

Now, after seeing a few interesting projects built around the ESP32, [Peter] built a network card for the TRS-80. It’s called the trsnic, and it’s …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Power supply design is a broad field, requiring entirely different tools and techniques depending on what you’re working with. Creating a low-cost and compact mobile phone charger is a completely different ball game to designing the power supply for a medium-sized laser cutter, for example. [Vasily Ivanenko] has been designing a power supply for a clean jazz guitar amplifier, and has helpfully documented the process.

For a guitar amplifier which prides itself on clean tones, it’s highly important to avoid all sources of noise, to let the natural sound of the guitar come through as clearly as possible. [Vasily] notes …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

There’s something enchanting about ancient tools and instruments. The idea that our forebears were able to fashion precision mechanisms with nothing but the simplest hand tools is fascinating. And watching someone recreate the feat, such as by building an astrolabe by hand, can be very appealing too.

The astrolabe is an ancient astronomical tool of incredible versatility, allowing the user to do everything from calculating when the sun will rise to predicting the positions of dozens of stars in the night sky. That it accomplishes all this with only a few moving parts makes it all the more fascinating. [Uri …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Eyes are fragile things. They tend to fail under extreme heat, pressure, and are easily damaged by flying objects. Enterprising humans have developed a wide range of eye protection solutions, but most only work when the user remembers to put them on. [gocivici] had just such a problem, forgetting to put his safety glasses back on when working. Naturally, the solution was found through hacking.

The build starts with a regular baseball cap. [gocivici] fitted an Arduino nano, which is connected to a small microphone. The Arduino uses the microphone to determine the sound level in the room. Above a …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

There’s no doubting the wonders that micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology have brought to the world. With MEMS chips, your phone can detect the slightest movement, turning it into a sensitive sensor platform that can almost anticipate what you’re going to do next. Actually, it’s kind of creepy when you think about it.

But before nano-scale MEMS inertial sensing came along, lots of products needed to know their ups from their downs, and many turned to products such as this vibrating piezoelectric gyroscope that [Kerry Wong] found in an old camcorder. The video below shows a teardown of the sensor, huge …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

If you’re unfamiliar with LIDAR, you might have noticed it sounds a bit like radar. That’s no accident – LIDAR is a backronym standing for “light detection and ranging”, the word having initially been created as a combination of “light” and “radar”. The average person is most likely to have come into contact with LIDAR at the business end of a police speed trap, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Unruly is the open source LIDAR project you’ve been waiting for all along.

Unlike a lot of starter projects, LIDAR isn’t something you get into with a couple …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The Living Computers museum in Seattle has a Xerox Alto, the machine famous for being the first to sport a mouse-based windowing graphical user interface. They received it in working condition and put it in their exhibit, but were dismayed when a year later it ceased to operate. Some detective work revealed that the power supply was failing to reach parts of the machine, and further investigation revealed an unlikely culprit. Electromigration had degraded the contacts between the supply pins and the backplane traces.

If electromigration is new to you, don’t feel ashamed, it was a new one to us …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

For most of human industrial history, the blacksmith was the indispensable artisan. He could fashion almost anything needed, from a simple hand tool to a mechanism as complex as a rifle. Starting with the most basic materials, a hot forge, and a few tools that he invariably made himself, the blacksmith was a marvel of fabrication.

If you have any doubt how refined the blacksmith’s craft can be, feast your eyes on [Seth Gould]’s masterpiece of metalwork. Simply called “Coffer”, [Seth] spent two years crafting the strongbox from iron, steel, and brass. The beautifully filmed video below shows snippets of …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The Jacob’s Ladder is an electrical device named after a biblical “ladder to Heaven”, consisting of a pair of vertically oriented conductors that spread apart vertically. These conductors are charged with high voltage, which creates the repeatedly climbing arc we’ve all come to know and love from science fiction movies of yesteryear.

[LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER] was on a scavenger hunt for electronic junk, and came across a microwave in a skip that was begging to be hacked. After kicking around a few ideas, it was decided that the microwave would donate its high voltage transformer to create a Jacob’s …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

You can define the word crazy in myriad ways. Some would say using SMD resistors and QFN microcontrollers as structural elements is  crazy. Some would say hand soldering QFN is crazy, much less trying to do it on edge rather than in the orientation the footprint is designed for. And of course doing it live on stage in front of people who eat flux for breakfast is just bonkers. But Zach did it anyway and I’m delighted he did.

This is the cyborg ring, and it’s a one-of-a-kind leap in imagination — the kind of leap people have come to …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Chromecast devices have become popular in homes around the world in the last few years. They make it easy to cast audio or video from a smartphone or laptop, to a set of speakers or a display connected to the same network. [Akos] wanted to control the volume on these devices with a single, simple piece of equipment, rather than always reaching for a smartphone. Thus was built the CastVolumeKnob.

The project began by using Wireshark to capture data sent by the pychromecast library. Once [Akos] understood the messaging format, this was implemented in MicroPython on an ESP8266. A rotary …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The Sidewinder line was a series of gaming peripherals produced by Microsoft, starting in the 1990s. After some initial stumbles, several cutting edge joysticks were released, at a time when the home computer market was in a state of flux, transitioning from legacy interfaces like serial and parallel to the more modern USB. In this interim period, Sidewinder joysticks used a special method to communicate digitally over the game port interface, which more typically used a kludge to read joysticks in an analog manner. [MaZderMind] managed to reverse engineer this protocol, and implemented the interface on an AVR microcontroller.

The …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

There’s nothing quite like waiting for something you’ve ordered online to arrive. In [Alex]’s case, he’d ordered a new Leica camera, only to find out there was a six month backlog in shipping. Wanting to whet his thirst regardless, he decided to investigate the Leica website, and reverse engineered a whole heap of camera firmware. As you do.

[Alex] didn’t stop at just one camera, instead spreading his interest across whatever firmware Leica happened to have online at the time. This approach led to improved effectiveness, as there were similarities in the firmware used between different cameras that made it …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

It is an easy trap for us to write only about what we know when covering a topic, thus missing an entire facet of our subject matter. Take retrocomputing for example; we might write about American or Western European machines because we grew up with them, while completely ignoring the hardware being produced on the other side of the Iron Curtain.  Thus it’s fascinating to see [Marek Więcek]’s project, a single board retrocomputer employing a Polish clone of the Intel 8080.

With greater detail on a Polish-language forum (Google Translate), he tells a story of being given an MCY7880 CPU …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The MT3608 is a popular boost converter, able to easily step up DC voltages in useful ranges, at an incredibly low cost. Modules can be sourced from eBay for less than $2, built on a PCB, ready to go. One drawback of these modules, particularly when working with batteries, is the idle current draw, on the order of 1 to 1.5mA. Fear not, however — there is a workaround, courtesy of [Aka Kasyan].

The trick is to modify the behavior of the converter when no load is connected. The enable pin of the boost converter is held low through a …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Back in the early days of radio, it was quickly apparent that the technology would revolutionize warfare, but only if some way could be found to prevent enemies from hearing what was said. During World War II, the Allies put a considerable amount of effort into securing vocal transmissions, resulting in a system called SIGSALY – 50 tons of gear developed by Bell Laboratories with the help of Alan Turing that successfully secured communications between the likes of Churchill and Roosevelt during the war.

Now, a small piece of the SIGSALY system lives again, in the form of a period-faithful …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Unlike DOS, early versions of Windows, and most *nixes, the classic Mac operating system is weird. Contained in the ROM are subroutines to draw windows, pop up dialog boxes, and other various tasks purely related to the UI. On other systems, this would be separate from the BIOS, but in your Mac from the 80s, everything is baked into the ROM and hidden deep in the operating system. This has caused many problems for emulation; you can’t emulate an old Mac without a ROM or without a real installation of the operating system. Where BeOS — a cool but entirely …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Dot matrix printers are the dinosaurs that won’t go extinct. They are not unlike a typewriter with the type bars behind the ink ribbon replaced by a row of metal pins controlled by solenoids, each pin being capable of printing a single pixel. At their best they could deliver a surprising level of quality, but their sound once heard is not forgotten, because it was extremely LOUD.

[Wpqrek] bought an old dot-matrix printer, a Commodore MPS 803. Sadly it didn’t live up to the dot-matrix reputation for reliability in that it didn’t work, some of its pins weren’t moving, so …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Mechanical watches are great in that they never need batteries, but they are simultaneously less than great in that they will lose time if not worn or otherwise regularly agitated. The ridiculous solution to this is the watch winder, which automatically rotates your mechanical watches for you, while you’re not wearing them. This is probably the item you’ll miss the least once the apocalypse hits. [Kristopher] wanted a nice quiet watch winder for his bedside table, but existing solutions were either too loud or too expensive. As is often the case, hacking ensued.

[Kristopher] had decided that starting from scratch …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Modellers and makers who have been around the block for a few decades generally have their preferred materials. Balsa wood, sheet metal, brass tube… these were all staples of the hobbyist workshop. Composites are very much the new kid on the block and are starting to gain more of a foothold in the hobby marketplace. [Anthony] has been experimenting in this area, and has created some useful attachments for carbon fiber tubing.

The fittings are designed to be lasercut from aluminium or 3D printed. The rod ends are a simple two-piece design that slots together, before insertion into the carbon …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

In these turbulent times, journalists fearmonger and honest citizens fear for the safety of their homes and themselves. Adding some security features can allay these fears, and with the advent of cheap technology, front door cameras have become popular. There’s a wide array of options on the market, but short of watching hours of logged video, they’re not always super useful. Adding some smarts can really help – as [Peter Quinn] has done.

For this project, [Peter] decided on a JeVois smart camera. More than just a USB webcam, it also packs a quad-core processor running machine vision algorithms. This …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Monowheels are a singular form of transport. Like electric scooters and the Segway, they are remarkably impractical for getting from point A to point B, are expensive to build or buy, and make you look faintly silly as you ride them down the street. However, we’d be hard pressed to find a member of the Hackaday team that wouldn’t at least want a go on one for half an hour. [MakeItExtreme] felt the same way, and built one of their own.

The build starts with a tube bender, used to form 40mm tubing into a continuous circle to form the …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Remember when a homemade cloud chamber was a science fair staple? We haven’t participated for decades, but it seemed like every year someone would put a hunk of dry ice in a fish tank, add a little alcohol, and with the lighting just right – which it never was in the gymnasium – you might be lucky enough to see a few contrails in the supersaturated vapor as the occasional stray bit of background radiation whizzed through the apparatus.

Done right, the classic cloud chamber is a great demonstration, but stocking enough dry ice to keep the fun going is …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Way back when, before diesel-electric locomotives were a thing, trains weren’t really able to go backwards too well. Also it’s sometimes necessary to turn carriages around in a small space. For that, the railway turntable was invented. If you want to implement one on a model layout, this project from DIY & Digital Railworld is for you.

The project is at an early stage – thus far, laying out how to set up an Arduino Uno using a potentiometer to control the speed of a stepper motor, which rotates the turntable. The turntable itself is a 3D printed part sourced …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Have you ever considered the manufacture of candles? Not necessarily manufacturing them yourself, but how they are manufactured in a small-scale industrial setting? It’s something that has been of great concern to Michael Schuldt as he grappled with the task of automating a simple manual candle production process.

It’s not just an interesting subject, but the topic of manufacturing automation is something we can all learn from. This was the subject of his Adventures in Manufacturing Automation talk at the recent Hackaday Superconference which you’ll find below the break. Let’s dive in and see what this is all about!

How

…read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

If you want to learn Morse code and you don’t have a teacher, you’d probably just head over to a website or download a phone app. Before that, you probably bought a cassette tape or a phonograph record. But how did you learn Morse if you didn’t have any of that and didn’t know anyone who could send you practice? Sure, you could listen to the radio, but in 1939 that might be difficult, especially to find people sending slow enough for you to copy.

Wireless World for August 3rd, 1939, has the answer in an article by [A. R. …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

It’s a common situation faced by every hard-working American – you get home after a long day at the calcium mines, and find yourself stuck with a pile of colored golf balls that simply aren’t going to sort themselves. Finally, you can put away your sorting funnels and ball-handling gloves – [Anthony] has the solution.

That’s right – it’s a delta robot, tasked with the job of sorting golf balls by color. A Pixy2 object tracking camera is used to survey the table, with the delta arms twitching around to allow the camera to get an unobstructed view. Once the …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The floppy disk is a technology that is known only to the youth of today as the inspiration for the Save icon. There’s a lot of retro computing history tied up in these fragile platters, thus preservation is key. But how to go about it? [CHZ-Soft] has found an easy way, using a logic analyzer and a healthy dose of Python.

Floppy drives have particularly low-level interfaces, offering up little more than a few signals to indicate the position of the head on the disk, and pulses to indicate changes in magnetic flux. The data is encoded in the pattern …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

While trying to revive a Donkey Kong Jr arcade board, [Jelmer Bruijn] found himself in the market for an EPROM programmer and became the proud owner of a 1990’s era Dataman S4. Despite its age, it’s a fairly nice tool which allows you to read and write a laundry list of different EPROM types, all without being tied to a computer. The only catch is that a few types of chips need an adapter to work in the Dataman S4, some of which are unsurprisingly no longer available.

After some above and beyond support from the current crew at Dataman …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

If you imagine somebody playing chess against the computer, you’ll likely be visualizing them staring at their monitor in deep thought, mouse in hand, ready to drag their digital pawn into play. That might be accurate for the folks who dabble in the occasional match during their break, but for the real chess aficionados nothing beats playing on a real board with real pieces. Of course, the tricky part is explaining the whole corporeal thing to a piece of software on your computer.

Enter the “Chess Challenger” by [slash/byte]. Modeled after a commercial gadget of the same name from 1978, …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

XInput is an API that is used by applications to interface with the Xbox 360 Controller for Windows. The 360 controller became somewhat of a “standard” PC gamepad, and thus many games and applications support the XInput standard.

[James] is working on an entry for a robotics competition, and wanted a controller to use with their PC that was more suited to their build. They took an RC controller, and converted it to work with XInput instead.

The controller in question is the JJRC Q35-01, a trigger-type RC controller available for under $20. The conversion is executed neatly, with the …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Lightsabers have enchanted audiences since their appearance in the very first Star Wars film in 1977. Unfortunately, George Lucas hasn’t shared the technology in the years since then with the broader public, so we’re left to subsist on pale imitations. This is just such a build.

The closest human analog to Jedi technology is the laser, and this build uses 8 of them in combination with two LEDs. They’re aimed to coincide at a fixed distance above the hilt. A CO2 bicycle inflater is then used to blow through an e-cigarette to create a fog. This makes the red lasers …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Should you ever pick up [Steve Wozniak]’s autobiography, you will learn that in the early 1970s when his friend [Steve Jobs] was working for Atari, [Woz] was designing calculators for Hewlett Packard. It seems scarcely believable today, but he describes his excitement at the prospects for the calculator business, admitting that he almost missed out on the emerging microcomputer scene that would make him famous. Calculators in the very early 1970s were genuinely exciting, and were expensive and desirable consumer items.

[Amen] has a calculator from that period, a Prinztronic Micro, and he’s subjected it to an interesting teardown. Inside …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

It took a long time, but it’s 2019, and we’re starting to get used to the concept of talking to a computer to make it control things around the house. It’s not quite as cool as it seemed when we saw it in films way back when, but that’s just real life. The problem is, there’s a multitude of different systems and standards and they don’t all necessarily work together. In [Blake]’s case, the problem is that Woods brand hardware only works with Amazon Alexa, which simply won’t do.

[Blake] went through the hassle of getting an Amazon Alexa compatible …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The dark, dystopian future is ever-present in the Netflix show Black Mirror, but the latest release in the series, Bandersnatch, presents a decidedly different narrative. Bandersnatch is a branching story that follows the fictional events of a garage-programmer named Stephan who develops the titular game, Bandersnatch, for the Tuckersoft company set in 1980s England. The whole thing plays out as a choose-your-own adventure game fit straight off the Sega CD (albeit with actual full motion video) by allowing watchers to pick what happens next in the story. Not one to miss a cross-promotional opportunity, Netflix also released a playable ZX …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Motors are not overly complex, but this one is downright simple. Carl Bujega has been working on a motor design that heavily relies on the capabilities of the printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication processes. His talk at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference covers how he built a brushless DC motor and speed controller into a PCB. You can watch the newly published video after the break.

There are two main parts of an electric motor; the stator is stationary while the rotor spins on bearings. Electromagnetic forces are used to cause that spinning action. In this case, Carl has built the …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Vacuum tubes fueled a technological revolution. They made the amplification of signals a reality for transatlantic telephone cables (and transcontinental ones too), they performed logic for early computers, and they delivered that warm fuzzy sound for high fidelity audio. But they were labor intensive to produce, and fragile, so semiconductors came along and replaced tubes in almost every application. But of course tubes are still with us and some tube applications are still critical — you’ll find them used in high-power RF and there are even satellites that depend on klystrons. So there are still experts in tube fabrication around, …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

There are a range of integrated circuits that most of us would regard as definitive examples of their type, devices which became the go-to for a particular function and which have entered our collective consciousness as electronics enthusiasts. They have been in production since the early days of consumer integrated circuits, remaining in use because of a comprehensive understanding of their characteristics among engineers, and the job they do well.

You can probably name the ones I’m going to rattle off here, the µA741 op-amp designed by David Fullagar for Fairchild in 1968, the NE555 timer from Hans Camenzind for …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Camera sliders are a fantastic tool for those who wish to shoot beautiful and smooth panning video, or take expressive time-lapse shots. They can also be remarkably expensive, which creates an incentive for the DIYer to innovate at home. [Richard] wanted a motorized slider and didn’t want to break the bank, and thus, a build was born.

Starting with an existing non-motorized camera slider makes things easier, though there’s no reason [Richard]’s techniques couldn’t be applied to a completely DIY build. A NEMA stepper motor is fitted to the frame, and connected to the camera shuttle with a toothed belt. …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Despite being over 25 years old, the original DOOM is still a favorite among gamers and hackers alike. For years now, running the 1993 demonic shooter has been a critical milestone when hacking or reverse engineering a piece of gear, and at this point we’ve seen it run on everything from voting machines to cameras.

But this time around, DOOM isn’t actually running on the device being hacked. Instead, the Roomba 980 that [Rich Whitehouse] has doing his bidding is being used to generate new DOOM levels based on the maps it makes of rooms while going about its business. …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Word clocks use natural language to display the time. They’ve been in vogue in the last 20 years or so, as low-cost digital technology makes them particularly cost effective and easy to build for the average maker. The hardware and software is a solved problem, so presentation is everything. Luckily, [watsaig]’s effort does not disappoint.

The build began with a timeframe of just seven days — a narrow window given [watsaig]’s lack of experience with lasercutting and woodworking. Not content to let that get in the way, it was time to get to work. Wood was sourced from Amazon and …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The only question we have about [mitxela]’s DIY vector graphics game console is: Why did he wait five years to tell the world about it?

Judging by the projects we’ve seen before, from his tiny LED earrings to cramming a MIDI synthesizer into both a DIN plug and later a USB plug, [mitxela] likes a challenge. And while those projects were underway, the game console you’ll see in the video below was sitting on the shelf, hidden away from the world. That’s a shame, because this is quite a build.

Using a CRT oscilloscope in X-Y mode as a vector …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Most people can tell you the various uses of the umbrella — it keeps the rain off, pokes sleeping train passengers awake, and can be used as an improvised defensive weapon when tension in the hot dog line reaches boiling point. A true Englishman would never deign to employ their brolly so imprudently, of course, but they might just give it an upgrade by packing in a full weather station.

The build uses the Particle Photon as the brains of the operation, interfacing it with several sensors. There’s a DHT11 to handle temperature and humidity measurement, an Adafruit barometric pressure …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

We all have fond memories of a toy from our younger days. Most of which are still easy enough to get your hands on thanks to eBay or modern reproductions, but what if your childhood fancies weren’t quite as mainstream? What if some of your fondest memories involved playing with 1960’s educational games which are now so rare that they command hundreds of dollars on the second-hand market?

That’s the situation [Mike Gardi] found himself in recently. Seeing that the educational games which helped put him on a long and rewarding career in software development are now nearly unobtainable, he …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The Macintosh SE/30 is the greatest computer ever made, and I’m not saying that just because I’m sitting on a cache of them, slowly selling them to computer collectors around the world. No, the SE/30 is so great because of how powerful it is, and how much it can be expanded. A case in point: here’s an SE/30 that’s a Spotify player. Oh, it does it over WiFi, too.

You might be asking yourself how a computer from 1989 (it’s late enough in the year that we can safely say this computer is thirty years old) can possibly play music …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

FTDI are a company known for producing chips for USB applications. Most of us have a few USB-to serial adapters kicking about, and the vast majority of them run on FTDI hardware (or, if we’re honest, counterfeit copies). However, FTDI’s hardware has a whole lot more to offer, and [jayben] is here to show us all how to take advantage of it using Python.

FTDI’s chips have varying capabilities, but most can do more than just acting as a USB-connected COM port. It’s possible to use the chips for SPI, I2C, or even bitbanging operation. [jayben] has done the hard …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Measuring power transfer through a circuit seems a simple task. Measure the current and voltage, do a little math courtesy of [Joule] and [Ohm], and you’ve got your answer. But what if you want to design an instrument that does the math automatically? And what if you had to do this strictly electromechanically?

That’s the question [Shahriar] tackles in his teardown of an old lab-grade wattmeter. The video is somewhat of a departure for him, honestly; we’re used to seeing instruments come across his bench that would punch a seven-figure hole in one’s wallet if acquired new. These wattmeters are …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Whether you’re at the hobbyist level or a professional, if you’re working on code for operating systems or file systems, tools can make or break the job. [Ben Lunt] is an enthusiast hacker himself, and found that over time, a series of useful utilities had proliferated beyond reasonable management. It was time to solve the problem – enter ULTIMATE.

ULTIMATE is a combination of a wide swathe of file system hacking tools that [Ben] had developed over the preceding years. Capable of dealing with most FAT variants, Ext4, ISO, [Ben]’s own FYS FS as well as other Linux ephemera, it …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

We’re not allowed to have TV here in the Hackaday Wonder Bunker, but occasionally we’ll pool together the bandwidth credits they pay us in and gather ’round the old 3.5 inch TFT LCD to watch whatever Netflix assures us is 93% to our liking. That’s how we found out they’ve made a show based on, of all things, one of the Castlevania games for the NES. We wanted to play the game to understand the backstory, but since it hails from the era of gaming where primitive graphics had to be supplemented with soul-crushing difficulty, we didn’t get very …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

If you always wished you could get closer to the hardware with the 6502 in your classic microcomputer you’re in luck, because [Drass] has created a beautiful implementation of a 6502 using TTL logic chips. What makes it special is that it sits on a very neat set of PCBs, and due to its use of 74AC series logic it can run at much higher speeds than the original. A 20 MHz 6502 would have been revolutionary in the mid-1970s.

Through a flying ribbon cable, it can plug directly into the 6502 socket on classic microcomputers, and the website shows …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Being a top athlete in this modern age is a full-time job. No longer do athletes simply practice at their nominated sport of choice. They undergo strength training, full nutritional programs, cardio, and even reflex training.

Reflex training involves a series of nodes that an athlete must identify when lit up, and touch them to switch them off. By triggering them in a fast sequence, the athlete must work hard to both identify the lit node and then move to switch it off. TrainerLights is just such a system, built around the NodeMCU platform.

The system consists of a minimum …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

It’s getting ever harder to build a truly unique digital clock. From electronic displays to the flip-dots and flip-cards, everything seems to have been done to death. But this pinball scoring reel clock manages to keep the unique clock ball in play, as it were.

It’s not entirely clear whom to credit with this build, but the article was written by [Lucky]. Nor do they mention which pinball machine gave up its electromechanical scoring display for the build. Our guess would be a machine from the ’60s, before the era of score inflation that required more than the four digits …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The vacuum tube is largely ignored in modern electronic design, save for a few audio applications such as guitar and headphone amps. The transistor is smaller, cheaper, and inordinately easier to manufacture. By comparison, showing us just how much goes into the manufacture of a tube, [glasslinger] decided to make a wire-element pilotron – from scratch!

To say this is an involved build is an understatement. Simply creating the glass tube itself takes significant time and skill. [glasslinger] shows off the skills of a master, however – steadily working through the initial construction, before showing off advanced techniques necessary to …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The Van De Graff generator is a device capable of generating potentially millions of volts of electricity which you can build in an afternoon, probably from parts you’ve got in the junk bin. This is not a fact that’s escaped the notice of hackers for decades, and accordingly we’ve seen several Van De Graaff builds over the years. So has high voltage hacker [Jay Bowles], but he still thought he could bring something new to the table.

The focus of his latest build was to not only produce one of the most polished and professional versions of this venerable piece …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

We’ve featured a great many unique clocks here on Hackaday, which have utilized nearly every imaginable way of conveying the current time. But of all these marvelous timepieces, the Morse code clock has the distinct honor of simultaneously being the easiest to construct and (arguably) the most difficult to read. As such, it’s little surprise we don’t see them very often. Which makes this latest entry into the field all the more interesting.

[WhisleyTangoHotel] has taken the basic concept of the Morse clock, which at its most simplistic could be done with a microcontroller and single LED, and expanded it …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Jennifer Wang likes to dress up for cosplay and she’s a Harry Potter fan. Her wizarding skills are technological rather than magical but to the casual observer she’s managed to blur those lines. Having a lot of experience with different sensors, she decided to fuse all of this together to make a magic wand. The wand contains an inertial measurement unit (IMU) so it can detect gestures. Instead of hardcoding everything [Jennifer] used machine learning and presented her results at the Hackaday Superconference. Didn’t make it to Supercon? No worries, you can watch her talk on building IMU-based gesture recognition …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

When it was released, the Beckman Model 421 CRT controller represented the latest and greatest in liquid chromatography technology. Its 12 inch screen would allow the operator to view critical information such as flow rate and concentration, and its integrated keyboard simplified system control. It made liquid chromatography faster and easier, allowing lab technicians to focus on analysis rather than the complexities of operating the equipment.

But none of that matters right now. What matters is that [Igor Afanasyev] found one of these gloriously vintage devices at a local swap meet and decided it deserved a second chance at life. …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

[James] has been working with GameCubes, emulators, and Animal Crossing for a while now, and while emulators are sufficient, he’d like to play on real hardware. This means he needs to write to a GameCube memory card. While there are a few options to do this, they either require a Wii or hardware that hasn’t been made in a decade. The obvious solution to this problem is to reverse engineer the GameCube memory card to read and write the memory with a Raspberry Pi.

There’s an incredible amount of unofficial documentation for every console, and [James] stumbled upon a GC-Forever …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The best computer ever made is nearly thirty years old. The Macintosh SE/30 was the highest-spec original all-in-one Macs, and it had the power of a workstation. It had expansion slots, and you could hang a color monitor off the back. It ran Unix. As such, it’s become the prize of any vintage computer collector, and [Kris] recently completed a restomod on our beige king. It’s a restored Macintosh SE/30, because yes, we need to see more of these.

The restoration began with the case, which over the last thirty years had turned into an orange bromiated mess. This was …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Many artists are inseparably associated with their medium: Vincent Van Gogh had oil paint, Auguste Rodin had bronze, and Banksy has the spraycan and stencil. You have ICs, passives, wire, and solder. So often electronics are hidden away, but not today! We want to see you build electronic circuits that are beautiful in and of themselves.

This is Hackaday’s Circuit Sculpture Contest and we bet you already have everything you need to enter. Leave behind the drab flatland of 2D PCBs and break out into the third dimension! Or break away from the PCB entirely. Our inspiration comes from a …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

In this day and age of unprecedented military expenditure, we’re used to seeing weapons upgrades across all manner of war fighting hardware – tanks, helicopters, attack aircraft, you name it. We’re somewhat less accustomed to seeing the same on a domestic appliance. Regardless, we now have Henry the Hoover packing some serious heat.

Originally a mere vacuum cleaner, Henry was given movement through two motors and gearboxes sourced from a children’s ride on vehicle. A tank was created out of copper pipe to store the flammable gas (which appears to be butane, as used in cigarette lighters), and discharge is …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Rechargable batteries are great – they save money and hassle when using portable devices. It’s pretty common to want to recharge a battery, but less common to intentionally discharge one. Regardless, [Pawel Spychalski] is working on a device to do just that – in a controlled fashion, of course.

[Pawel] himself notes that the device isn’t something the average person would necessarily need, but it does have its applications. There are times when working with various battery chemistries that it is desired to have them held at a certain state of charge. Also, such devices can be used to measure …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Neural networks are a key technology in the field of machine learning. A common technique is training them with sample data, and then asking them to create something new in the same vein. AI researcher [Janelle Shane] decided to task a neural network with a fun task – inventing new kinds of pie.

Using the char-rnn library, the network was initially trained on a sample of 2237 pie recipe titles, sourced from around the internet. Early iterations struggled to even spell “pie”, but as the network improved, so did the results. Where we can’t imagine how one would even make …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

You’d be forgiven for not realizing there’s still a diehard group of people out there carrying around dedicated MP3 players. While they were all the rage a decade or so back, most consumers have since moved over to using their handy dandy pocket supercomputer for playing their music. Plus controlling every other aspect of their personal life and finances, of course. Though that’s another story entirely.

But as [Conno Brooks] explained to us, there’s a sizable group of open source fanatics who prefer to store their jams on devices running the Rockbox firmware. Only problem is, some of the desirable …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

At this point we’ve seen a good number of desktop-sized arcade cabinets, and while they’ve naturally all been impressive in their own ways, they do tend to follow a pretty familiar formula. Cut the side panels out of MDF (or just buy a frame kit), stick a Raspberry Pi and an old LCD monitor in there, and then figure out how to control the thing. Maybe a couple strategically placed stickers and blinking LEDs to add a few extra horsepower, but nothing too surprising.

[Andy Riley] had seen plenty of builds like that, and he wasn’t having any of it. …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

When referring to classic cars, there’s a good reason that “they don’t make ’em like that anymore.” Old cars represented the limits of what could be done in terms of materials and manufacturing methods coupled with the styles of the time and cheap fuel. The result was big, heavy cars that would cost a fortune in gas to keep on the road today.

Some people just don’t want to let those styles go, however, and send their beast off for some special modifications. This 1949 Mercury coupe with an electric drivetrain conversion is one way of keeping that retro look …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Like many of us, [Zoltan Toth-Czifra] has completely embraced 21st century living. His home is awash in smart gadgets and dodads, from color changing light bulbs to Internet-connected cameras. But he’s also got a soft spot for the look and feel of vintage hardware, like the rotary phone he keeps kicking around to remind him of the old days. He recently decided to bridge these two worlds by turning the rotary phone into a modern voice controlled assistant.

The first piece of the puzzle was getting the old school phone connected to something a bit more modern, namely a Raspberry …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

We’re no stranger to seeing people jam a Raspberry Pi into an old gaming console to turn it into a RetroPie system. Frankly, at this point it seems like we’ve got to be getting close to seeing all possible permutations of the concept. According to the bingo card we keep here at Hackaday HQ we’re just waiting for somebody to put one into an Apple Bandai Pippin, creating the PiPi and achieving singularity. Get it done, people.

That being said, we’re still occasionally surprised by what people come up with. The Super GamePad Zero by [Zach Levine] is a fairly …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

Archer fans and residents of Louisiana will already be familiar with the concept of the airboat. Put a powerful engine running an aircraft prop on a flat-bottomed hull, and you’ve got an excellent way to traverse the marshes of the American South. While a fully-fledged airboat might run you the best part of $100,000, this no-frills radio-controlled version is great fun at a much lower price.

The hull is built on a sheet of foam, which is cheap, readily available, and suitably buoyant for the task. It’s then kitted out with a brushless motor to run the prop and a …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

The UNIBUS architecture for DEC’s PDPs and Vaxxen was a stroke of genius. If you wanted more memory in your minicomputer, just add another card. Need a drive? Plug it into the backplane. Of course, with all those weird cards, these old UNIBUS PDPs are hard to keep running. The UniBone is the solution to this problem. It puts Linux on a UNIBUS bridge, allowing this card to serve as a memory emulator, a test console, a disk emulator, or any other hardware you can think of.

The key to this build is the BeagleBone, everyone’s second-favorite single board computer …read more

Tags:  classic hacks  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

[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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

[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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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  

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