We all love the Arduino, but does the Arduino love us back? There used to be a time when the Arduino couldn’t express it’s deepest emotions, but now that [Nick] hooked up a speech synthesis chip from a Speak & Spell, it can finally whisper sweet robotic nothings to us.

The original 1980s Speak & Spell contained a fabulously high-tech speech synthesizer from Texas Instruments. This innovative chip predated [Stephen Hawking]‘s voice and went on to be featured in the numerous speech add-ons for 80s microcomputers like the Apple II, BBC Micro, and a number of Atari arcade games.

[Nick] has been working on his Speak & Spell project for several months now, and he’s getting around to testing the PCBs he made. By his own admission, connecting an Arduino to a Speak & Spell is a little difficult, but he’s got a few tricks up his sleeve to get around the limitations of the hardware. The final goal of [Nick]‘s project is a MIDI-controllable Speak & Sound speech synth for the Arduino. This has been done before, but never from a reverse-engineered Speak & Spell.

You can check out [Nick]‘s progress in interfacing the Speak & Spell speech chip after the break. There’s still work to do, but it’s still very impressive.

Tesla Coils are always a blast to see and are relativity simple to build. While there are plenty of sites on the subject, [Michael's] newest instructable breaks building a solid state Tesla Coil down to 12 easy steps.

Items that should be familiar to anyone who has even looked at a Tesla Coil include PVC pipe, Aluminum ducting, and wire … lots of wire. The PVC pipe is cut to length and a flange is attached to help form a base. From there the pipe is wound with about ¾ of a pound of 30 AWG enameled wire, which takes some time by hand to make sure you don’t overlap or get space between the coils.

Aluminum ducting is then wrapped around the outside of a second flange. Some stovepipe wire is ran though the ducting and twisted to close up the 2 ends, and hot glue is used to attach the two ends together. The assembly is screwed to the top of the pipe now containing the secondary of the massive transformer. All that is left is to attach a primary, which is made out of a few turns of 16 AWG wire, and the control circuitry.

Join us after the break for a shocking video!

If you’ve ever wanted your own self-driving car, this is your chance. [Sebastian Thrun], co-lecturer (along with the great [Peter Norvig]) of the Stanford AI class is opening up a new class that will teach everyone who enrolls how to program a self-driving car in seven weeks.

The robotic car class is being taught alongside a CS 101 “intro to programming” course. If you don’t know the difference between an interpreter and a compiler, this is the class for you. You’ll learn how to make a search engine from scratch in seven weeks. The “Building a Search Engine” class is taught by [Thrun] and [David Evans], a professor from the University of Virginia. The driverless car course is taught solely by [Thrun], who helped win the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge with his robot car.

In case you’re wondering if this is going to be another one-time deal like the online AI class, don’t worry. [Thrun] resigned as a tenured professor at Stanford to concentrate on teaching over the Internet. He’s still staying at Stanford as an associate professor but now he’s spending his time on his online university, Udacity. It looks like he might have his hands full with his new project; so far, classes on the theory of computation, operating systems, distributed systems, and computer security are all planned for 2012.

Retro is in the air today as [John] has tipped us off about a new game he has written for the Tandy Color Computer (CoCo), The game, inspired by the homebrew game DOWNFALL for the Atari Jaguar, features what looks like snappy game play, lots of bright colorful animation and has just entered the Alpha stages. The blog page above sheds some insight on what it takes to make a game for these old 8 bit wonders, cause no matter how easy it sounds, you do have to do some dancing to get even the simplest of things working correctly on such limited resources.

The game was part of this years Retrochallenge which is typically held in January, which we recommend checking out if you want your fill of random projects for old computers. From building an Apple I replica kit, to making a soccer game for a SGI system, getting a 5160 XT online or just noodling with a KIM, there is plenty of interesting projects to keep you occupied during the afternoon.

Join us after the break for a quick video of Fahrfall, the fun looking CoCo Game.

[XVortex] pulled off a pretty incredible firmware hack. He managed to get a firmware upgrade for Synology running on a QNAP machine. These are both Network Attached Storage devices, but apparently the Synology firmware is better than what QNAP supplies with their offerings.

The nice thing is that this is not a one-off hack. You can download the raw image and give it a spin for yourself. A few words of warning though. It will only work on models which use the Atom and ICH9R chipset, you’re out of luck if you have one sporting an ARM processor. You will also need to format the drives once the new firmware is flashed so do this before you fill them up.

This harkens back to the days when DD-WRT was first being run on Linksys routers. We don’t remember if that started with upgrade image hacks like this one uses, or if the source code was available (Linksys was compelled to release it once it was proven they were in violation of the GPL).

See a proof video of this hack after the break.

[Thanks ZeroQI]

[Andrea] built this LED chaser using one logic chip. It illuminates all but one of the six LEDs, with the dim bit moving back and forth along the row in a chase sequence. This is something like an inverse Larson Scanner without the fading tail. But doing it with a logic chip instead of a microcontroller is a fun challenge.

Which brings us to the point of this feature. [Andrea] didn’t really post an explanation of how the circuit works. Usually missing details mean that we archive the tip and move on to the next one, but we think this provides a fun activity. Can you figure out how the circuit works? We already know that it’s using a CD4017 decade counter/divider chip. This gets its clock signal from a 555 timer circuit. [Andrea's] schematic is a bit hard to read, but grab a copy, blow it up a bit (or use your browser zoom) and study the CD4017 datasheet (PDF) if you need to.

Want proof that it does actually work? It’s embedded after the break.

Confronted with the issue of finding a use for his mounting pile of junk electronics, [Rue] set out to build a persistence of vision device using a hardware state machine. We have a suspicion that his original link may go down if there’s too much traffic so here’s a cached link just in case.

Any board that is MSC-51 or MCS-48 based would have worked for his purposes. This is because the addressing scheme of the hardware makes it an easy hack. The image above shows him cutting off the processor from this board. It was chosen because of a 74HC373; it was a mistake at first but since it’s pin compatible with the 74HC374 that he needed a simple swap did the trick. From there a clock source was added, and the address information necessary to display the message was burned into an EEPROM.

Step twelve of his writeup shows a Morse Code message created by attaching the board to a broomstick and twirling it around in an arc. We took  just a minute to decode the message and believe it’s a shout-out to Hackaday. Nice, thanks for reading [Rue]!

You probably know that if you spin a motor (mechanically) it generates electricity on what would normally be the inputs. This can be a problem when you shut off a spinning motor and is the reason that protection diodes are built into motor driver circuits. But [Dino] isn’t interested in driving a motor, he wanted to see what he could do with the electricity generated by spinning a stepper motor.

He built the test rig that you see above for this purpose. In the foreground a 12V DC motor is held in place with an electrical conduit clamp. This connects to the stepper motor being tested using a segment of rubber tube. The DC motor provides a reliable input for his experiments, but could be replaced in the future by a propeller to make it wind powered, or by a water wheel. Check out the video after the break to see what kind of juice [Dino] gets out of it, and how it can be used for powering LEDs, recharging batteries, or driving a motor.

[Tim Hunkin], builder extraordinaire and host of The Secret Life of Machines is a bit frustrated with the current economic climate and decided to take out his frustrations with a game of Whac-A-Banker.

[Tim]‘s version of the classic Whac-A-Mole game uses tiny air cylinders to actuate five banker figurines up and down. The figures were cast with polyurethane and are reportedly holding up well. The cabinet is really interesting. When the game isn’t being played, a really boring front panel is displayed. After inserting a few coins, the panel drops into the machine to show the fun and exciting scoreboard.

If you’re ever around Suffolk, England, you can check out the Whac-A-Banker and a lot of other [Tim Hunkin] creations at the Southwold Pier. Thanks [John] for sending this one in. Yes, we did get The Secret Life of Machines in the states on the Discovery Channel, but it has been replaced with shows about trucking. Here’s an archive of the entire series for your viewing pleasure. Kiss your evening goodbye.

Any self-identified geek that spent some time in the 80s will tell you how they used to type out programs into their ‘microcomputer’ with BASIC. It was a simpler time when a computer’s raison d’etre was simply being a BASIC interpreter. These days are long past us now; you can’t simply turn on a computer and have it load a BASIC prompt anymore. This is where [Geoff]‘s Maximite single board computer comes in. It’s a tiny little box that whose only purpose is to play around with BASIC.

[Geoff]‘s used a PIC32MX microcontroller with 128k of RAM for the CPU of his Maximite. Unlike an Apple ][ or TRS-80, the Maximite version of BASIC can do floating point arithmetic out of the box. To connect to the outside world, the Maximite has VGA or composite out to display the BASIC interepreter. A PS/2 keyboard port provides the input, and a USB port and SD card can be used to load and save programs from a PC.

The Maximite includes a 20-pin breakout for whatever IO you can imagine. This is duplicated on [Geoff]‘s mini Maximite that is designed to be the retro throwback of an Arduino. We though those were called BASIC stamps, but if it gets kids programming, we’ll let it slide.

Here’s something we thought we would never see: computing with just pipes, /dev/zero, and /dev/null.

As a thought experiment, [Linus] imagined a null byte represented an electron. /dev/zero would have an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null would make a wonderful positive power supply. With a very short program (named mosfet.c), [Linus] can use Linux pipes to control the flow of electrons between /zero and /null. [Linus] used mosfet.c with a very short shell script to create a NAND gate. From there all bets were off. He ended up creating a D flip-flop, 4-bit adder and a counter.

From a bit of cursory research, Linux has a maximum pipe capacity of 1,048,576 bytes and the maximum number of PIDs is 4,194,304 (correct us if we’re wrong). [Linus]  can theoretically build some of the classic CPUs of the 70s and 80s with his pipe logic. An Intel 486 is just out of reach, though. If you give someone a NAND or a NOR they’ll eventually build a computer; we thought we’d never see this, though.

[George] is a Neo Geo aficionado, and among his collection of paraphernalia, he has a MVS-Mini game console. His mini “Multi Video System” is a 2-slot model, meaning that it can hold two game cartridges at a time, which are indicated by plastic cards inserted in the cabinet’s face plate. Instead of swapping those cards out each time he changed cartridges, he thought it would be far cooler to install digital displays instead.

He scoured just about every retail store he could before finding a handful of small 5” digital picture frames that looked to fit the bill. After some careful cabinet modifications he had them wired up and ready for display. The frames don’t hold a ton of pictures, but they do support the use of SD cards. [George] says that he’ll likely just buy a ton of small SD cards, swapping them out whenever he changes games, though over time that might become as tedious as swapping out the plastic cards.

We would love to see [George] take his new digital display up a level, so be sure to share your ideas in the comments. Perhaps we can persuade him to automate things a bit.

For a computer that debuted in the early 80s the MSX was a very respectable machine. Of course  these were the days that superimposing graphics over a video was an amazing feat, but  [Danjovic] and [Igor] are still having fun with their boxen. They designed a software interface for the Wii Nunchuck (translation) on their trusty MSX computer.

The plug coming out the back of a standard Wiimote is just a simple I2C bus. Many things can be done with this port from plugging in ancient controllers to controlling robots. [Danjovic] and [Igor] managed to write a routine in Basic that converts the I2C data coming out of the Nunchuck to data the MSX can understand without any modification of the hardware whatsoever.

All the guys needed to plug the Nunchuck into the MSX was a voltage divider and a few pull-up resistors between the computer and controller. They got data from both buttons, the joystick and the accelerometer in the Nunchuck and made a small program to display some sprites on the screen to demonstrate this. Check that out after the break.

Who wouldn’t want to build a computer out of relays? We do, but we’ve got too many projects on our plate already. It looks like [rory] has his priorities in order because his build is one of the most amazing we’ve ever seen.

We’ve seen [Harry Porter]‘s amazing relay computer and we’re familiar with [Konrad Zuse]‘s WWII era endeavours. Relay computers aren’t exactly uncommon, but [rory] built the TIM-8, that may be the smallest 8-bit relay computer ever. The total relay count in the TIM-8 is 152 compared to [Harry Porter]‘s 415 relays. This isn’t a fair comparison because [Harry]‘s uses 4-pole relays, while the TIM-8 uses 1-pole relays, making the [rory]‘s project 8 times smaller than [Harry]‘s.

There are a couple of neat features that makes the TIM-8 really exceptional. Programs for the TIM-8 are written in a text editor on [rory]‘s desktop,  then compiled and printed onto receipt paper. The TIM-8 has a few phototransistors to read the bands of white and black printed on the paper. [rory] has come a long way from a three bit adder made with relays and light bulbs.

Check out a ton of videos after the break. There’s a few demos of programs running off of receipt tape, calculating the Fibonacci sequence, and playing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ on the relay sound card. Thanks to [J. Peterson] for sending this one in.

As a life long lover of his venerable Commodore 64, [Frank] was looking for a way to speed up the development time when writing C64 demos. His solution is a universal C64 cartridge that will connect to a PC over a USB port.

The board is powered by a CLPD and a microcontroller loaded with code from [Frank]‘s previous C64 USB controller adapter. A 16 Mbit flash chip is able to store 31 classic games like Pitfall, Dig Dug, and Lode Runner.

On his Google+ announcement, [Frank] says this is a very early prototype. He plans on reducing the board size to fit inside a standard C64 cartridge, and the firmware for the micro and CLPD aren’t finished yet. That being said, [Frank] does have a board that does what he wants it to do: extremely rapid C64 development.

Check out [Frank]‘s demo after the break of him compiling and re-uploading a simple demo to his cherished computer in just a few seconds. That’s a lot faster than it would take with a 1541 Ultimate or other SD card reader.

All for the want of a 6551