Electro Luminescent Fun With Jeri Ellsworth

June 14, 2010 by 25 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuDZnJX5kqw]

[Jeri] got her hands on some of the DuPont Luxprint EL ink and had some fun conducting experiments. She tried different materials for the base and the display itself.  Not only does she just play with materials, she also tears apart a VFD and an LCD to see if she could use them for parts. The LCD turned out to be the most successful. We saw this stuff show up at the Bay Area Maker Faire and we’re excited to see it become more accessible.

[via Makezine]

Jeri Makes Integrated Circuits

March 10, 2010 by 38 Comments

[Jeri Ellsworth] made this silicon inverter at home, by hand. It took her two years to get the process figured out and achieve something we didn’t think was possible. The complexity of manufacture, and the wide range of tools and materials needed seem insurmountable but she did it anyway. Her home chip fab Flickr set is well commented and details her work area and part of the processing. If you’re hurting for more check out her 40 minute Metalab talk which we’ve embedded after the break.

If her name sounds familiar but you just can’t place it you may know her from The Fatman and Circuit Girl. We’ve also featured some of her hacks, such as her Pinball challenge against [Ben Heckendorn], and her giant Etch-a-Sketch.

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The Taylor and Amy Show

The Avon Computer Goth Challenge

November 2, 2023 by 9 Comments

Hot off the heels of their musical debut 6502 song the good folk at the Taylor and Amy Show are at it again. This time instead of assaulting our auditory senses, they play with our perception of color all while keeping the spirit of retro computing alive.

To back up a bit, I had the pleasure of witnessing the discovery of the Avon Beauty Vision Computer while at the Vintage Computer Festival Mid-West (VCFMW) this past September. We had visited the home of our friend [Jim W] from VCFMW who nonchalantly pulled down from the shelf the reddest computer I have ever seen.

A crowd quickly gathered at this newfound treat, designed and built before the invention of the Blue LED, was fallen upon and the process of prying out its secrets began. I was not privy to the negotiations, but I did notice a brightly colored red suitcase being exfiltrated by highly trained operatives later that night.

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Celebrating The 6502 With Song

September 24, 2023 by 23 Comments

In a wonderful ode to tech nostalgia, The Taylor and Amy Show, comprised of YouTubers [Taylor] and [Amy], have released a new video “THE 6502 SONG”. This song had me singing along in roughly six clock cycles, possibly a little dancing around may have occurred as well. This isn’t just any chip they’re singing about; it’s the venerable 6502 microprocessor, the silicon heart behind iconic machines like the Apple II, Commodore 64/128, and the Atari 2600.

Their lyrics reminds me of when I lived for assembly language mnemonics and counting clock cycles, the “feeling” of a processor coming out of tristate to pronounce what it had learned in the last 500ns, and the undulations of the DRAMs like speed bumps. To top it off, portions of the song were actually recorded live at the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 2023, where fans and computing history aficionados alike were treated to an impressive display of vintage tech.

What sets “THE 6502 SONG” apart isn’t just its catchy, melodic tune; it’s the expert blend of historical detail and genuine enthusiasm that resonates with everyone from grizzled assembly-language programmers to youngsters newly fascinated by the allure of 8-bit computing. With guest appearances from other female tech YouTubers like [Veronica Explains] and [Evie’s Revue], [AJ], [Jeri and Amy- Tilt5] and [FuzzyBad].

I believe [Chuck Peddle] father of the 6502, would be proud to see his creation live on and be appreciated so.

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Vintage Computer Festival Southwest: Bil And Al’s Excellent Adventure

June 30, 2023 by 12 Comments

There was a time when seeing an actual computer was a big deal. They were in air-conditioned rooms with raised floors and locked doors. Even at a university, you were likely only to get access to a keypunch machine or a terminal. Then small computers came out, but computer stores were few and far between. Now you can go to any local store that sells electronics and put your hands on hardware that would have been black magic in those days. But the computers back then were also much easier to understand completely. Look at your main computer today. Do you know all the assembly language instructions for it? Can you access the GPU and the MMU? Could you build your own memory for it? Sure, you don’t have to do those things, but it was fun knowing that you could. That seemed to be the overwhelming sentiment among the attendees we spoke to at the Vintage Computer Festival last weekend: We like computers that we can completely understand and troubleshoot.

If you weren’t one of the 900 or so attendees, we can help. Check out our video summary, dive into even more interviews with Bil Herd and guests on our YouTube channel, or just keep reading. The festival happens at several locations throughout the year, but this was the first time one has been in the Southwest for about ten years!

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Hackaday Podcast 222: VCF East Special Edition

June 9, 2023 by No comments

Editor in Chief Elliot Williams is spending the week communing with nature, which under normal circumstances would mean no podcast — after all, he’s the one who puts each episode together. But since your weekend would obviously be ruined without a dose of lo-fi Hackaday beats to kick things off, Managing Editor Tom Nardi made a valiant attempt to go it alone and produce…something.

This shortened episode will briefly go over the news, including updates about Hackaday’s various ongoing contests and the recent unearthly conditions in the US Northeast due to the Canadian wildfires, before diving into the results of last week’s What’s that Sound challenge. Listeners will then be treated to a special Quick Hacks segment from Jenny List, before settling in for the main event: a pair of fascinating interviews recorded during the 2023 Vintage Computer Festival East in Wall, NJ.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Feel free to download the MP3 directly for safe keeping.

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Hackaday Prize 2023: EyeBREAK Could Be A Breakthrough

May 30, 2023 by 4 Comments

For those with strokes or other debilitating conditions, control over one’s eyelid can be one of the last remaining motor functions. Inspired by [Jeremiah Denton] blinking in Morse code on a televised interview, [MBW] designed an ESP32-based device to decode blinks into words.

While an ESP32 offers Bluetooth for simulating a keyboard and has a relatively low power draw, getting a proper blink detection system to run at 20 frames per second in a constrained environment is challenging. Earlier attempts used facial landmarks to try and determine, based on ratios, whether an eye was open or closed. A cascade detector combined with an XGBoost classifier offered excellent performance but struggled when the eye wasn’t centered. Ultimately a 50×50, 4-layer CNN in TensorFlow Lite processes the camera frames, producing a single output, eye open or closed. For debugging purposes, it streams camera frames over Wi-Fi with annotations via OpenCV, though getting OpenCV to compile for ESP32 was also nontrivial.

[MBW] trained the model using the MRL dataset and then quantized to int8. Getting the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi stacks to run concurrently was a bit of a pain, as was managing RAM. After exhausting SRAM and IRAM, [MBW] had to move to PRAM. The entire system is built into some lightweight goggles and makes for a fairly comfortable experience.

While TensorFlow and microcontrollers might seem like a bit of an odd couple, at the end of the day, the inference engine is just doing some math on an array of inputs with some weights. We’ve even seen TensorFlow Lite on a Commodore 64. If you don’t know about [Admiral Jerimiah Denton] we can shed some light on it for you.

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