All good things, and apparently our coverage of Maker Faire, must come to an end. Here’s a few more things we saw in New York this last weekend that piqued our interest:
A 10x scale Arduino
[Robert Fitzsimons] of Part Fusion Electronics made a gigantic Arduino. It wasn’t quite functional, but [Robert] did manage to make a few 10:1 scale LEDs (with built-in circuit protection), 1 inch pitch headers, and a few other miscellaneous components out of foam and paint.
Since he’s from Dublin, Ireland, [Robert] didn’t want to take this giant board home with him. He graciously gave it to me in the hopes of turning it in to a proper working Arduino. I’ll do my best, [Robert].
There are hundreds of Lisas buried in a landfill in Utah.
Tekserve, an indie Apple store located in the heart of Manhattan, really knows how to put on a good show. For the entirety of their stay at Maker Faire, they had people showing off one of the first digital cameras, Apple Newtons, and an awesome collection of vintage Macs. No, your eyes do not deceive you; that’s a real Lisa there in the bunch.
Sadly, they didn’t have the boot disk to turn any of these on. Pity.
Yes, there were celebrities at Maker Faire
Well, celebrities to the Hackaday crowd, at least. [Ben Heck] showed off the electronic automatic sunglasses he built. It’s a pair of lensless glasses, a servo, light detector, and a pair of clip-on sunglasses. When [Ben] is out in daylight, the sunglasses swivel down. Inside, the amount of light received by the detector decreases and the shades rotate up.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYpayRVB8YM&w=470]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clvt0_q-4fs&w=470]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jqufTisMVM&w=470]
What, the mac store couldn’t get boot disks for old macs? Hell, when I was helping the Hackery to show off some old machines at Vancouver’s Mini Maker Faire I made sure to get the NeXT cube booting Nextstep.
the older ones – the Lisa and the 128, specifically – are a little harder to get disks for. It’s a piece of cake to use a regular PC floppy drive with the Color Classic or the Q700, especially if you have that PC disk thing in your extentions folder.
Hell, the Quadra and TAM already have Ethernet. If there’s even a bare-bones OS on those drives, I can get it working.
The 400kb drives? well, that’s a whole ‘nother game entirely.
I agree. They should have had an external SCSI disk with a universal installation of System 7.5.5, a 400k System 3 floppy, and an 800k System 6 floppy. Throw in an OS 9 boot CD for the iMac and G4, and a copy of MacWorks so the Lisa can boot the System 3 disk, and you’ve got everything you need to boot any of those. (Better yet install OS X Server on the G4 and netboot the iMac, just because you can.)
I think they just didn’t want people playing with their machines!
The idea is you’d go down the line. Get the Quadra running, use it to make discs for the 128k, etc. I repair vintage machines so I’ve gone down this path before. Perhaps they didn’t have the time before the maker faire?
On another note, things like their Mac Portable, etc, probably wouldn’t work any more even if they did have the boot media, as the surface mount caps on the motherboard will have leaked and rendered it inoperable. It’s a problem I’ve been repairing quite a lot lately on machines from the end of the ’80s.
I have all the disks for my Apple Lisa, its great to play on!
Assuming it still works (not tried it for years). Turns out there are batteries on the pcb inside and they corroded a long time ago. If you have a Lisa, TAKE THEM OUT! Replace them.
Is the Arduino on top of the 10x model just for comparison, or was it attached to run the big LED’s or something…
It’s just there for comparison. The plan for the working version is to have a sheild arrangement, hidden under the DIP socket.
The shield will have extra circuitry on each pin to protect against ESD, shorts and reverses connections.
The large LED has a extra diode and constant current chip added to protect it.
Connecting anything to the 10x sized ports may be a bit of a problem. ;)