Hackaday Links: September 1, 2013

hackaday-links-chain

[Anton] has been doing some Commodore 64 Datasette experiments. He managed to connect the C64 audio traces to his smartphone and use it for tape playback.

Not wanting to actually disassemble his Mendel 3D printer, [SteveDC] figured out how to make extenders that increase his build height by about 40%.

We have fond memories of owning an 8088 PC. We did a lot of experimental programming on it but never anything as impressive as getting the TCP/IP stack to run on it. Then again, we’re not sure there was such a thing back when we owned the 10 MHz hardware. That’s right, the microcontrollers we mess around with now days are much faster than that old beast was.

When he goes running at night [Tall-drinks] straps a pico projector to his chest. We guess you’d call the readout a heads-up display… but it’s really more heads-down since it’s projecting on the pavement.

See how things heat up as a Raspberry Pi boots. This video was made using a thermal imaging camera to help diagnose a misbehaving board.

We don’t have very many trinkets on our desk (that would steal space normally reserved for clutter). But be would happily make room for this motorcycle model made from VCR parts (translated).

21 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: September 1, 2013

    1. the 8088 is up, but I think it froze– he might be running it off a 360k floppy or something. I don’t think he expected for it to get this popular. he has an IRC running @ irc.rubbermallet.org, channel is #wtfpwnt.

      1. No, it’s running off a 40 MB IDE hard drive. :)

        The server was just turned off… apparently right as it was linked on hackaday, and I didn’t realize it was posted! I don’t think think most people would enjoy our IRC chatroom either Sudos.

        1. yeah, well this was BEFORE you came back from whatever it was you were doing nonsensically away from your desk. I actually thought it was netbooted or something, please don’t tell me this is the ST351A/X drive I gave you in ’09. your 1000TX is never going to forgive you for it. D:<

    2. Somebody told me my site just made it on hackaday. I turned the server off some hours ago because it never got any connections. I picked a bad time to do that I guess. The 8088 is back online.

      vonskippy: I can’t imagine a data center will let me ship them my 8088 and then use it to host something. My main web server for my other sites is a modern system, and it’s got a very good uptime.

      1. I have a friends that run a local data center/high tier ISP, and they had my IBM PS/2 Model 80 running a website in their server room for a while. Got some laughs during the occasional tour they did.

    1. The datasette in the article did continue to work as standard but had the added ability for line in. I have stripped a dead unit and harvested the board to make a dedicated device. It’s almost finished so expect an update soon!

    2. They’re common as hen’s eggs in the UK and much of Europe. Back in the day the UK pound was worth about $2 US. Computer pricing policy, for every company up until quite recently, was to change the $ to a £. So very few UK users of 8-bit computers could afford disk drives. They all came with cassette players in the box. So that’s approximately 1 for each machine, in Europe.

  1. Several years ago I built a webserver on a original IBM 5150. 8088 @ 4.77Mhz! I still have the 2 floppies someplace. One had the code, the other had the webpage and a single jpeg. It actually was pretty straight forward and only took a couple of hours of fiddling to get it up and running.
    Protip: Certain realtek based 16 bit ISA NIC’s have an 8bit fallback when plopped in an 8 bit slot with the rest of the edge connector sticking out. They still work fine!

    1. most 16-bit chipsets have 8-bit fallback on ISA cards, there’s a write-up that has a list of all of the popular and common ones somewhere but I seem to have forgotten the link.
      IIRC any NE2000/clone/compatible is subject to this to a point– some aren’t made for 8-bit functioning at all, but there are the lucky ones. Realek is an example, yes, as is most of Intel’s cards (although not NE2000-compatible). the EtherExpress 8/16 is the best, and why it was named the 8/16– it could run in an 8-bit ISA slot.

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