Refurbishing Six Commodore 64s In Parallel

[Drygol] found himself with six Commodore 64’s in various states of disrepair. Because batch work is often more efficient, he detailed the process of restoring all of them in parallel in this one-, two-, three-part series.

The first step was to whiten the cases. Old cases turn yellow from the degradation of the fire retardant additives in the plastic. The proven method to fix this is with a paste called Retr0bright. [Drygol] used hair bleaching paste which is very similar. The cases came out nicely whitened from their treatment.

Next he repaired the keyboard PCB and whitened the keys as well. Drinking was involved, but it all came out okay. The circuit boards were cleaned and inspected. There were a few corroded spots, broken chips, and bad solder joints to be repaired. A few common mods were also installed.

In the final part of the series two of the C64s have SD cards installed into them. A few interesting fixes were done to repair broken plastics. Lastly the two worst cases were painted. In the end [Drygol] found himself with six perfectly working and attractive C64s. Who know’s what he’ll do with them, but we all know that was not the point.

Single Motor Lets This Robot Do The Worm

With more and more research in the field of autonomous robotics, new methods of locomotion are coming on the scene at a rapid pace. Forget wheels and tracks, forget bi-, quad-, hexa- and octopods, and forget fancy rolling BB-8 clones. If you want to get a mini robot moving, maybe you should teach it to do the worm.

Neither the Gizmodo article nor the abstract of [David Zarrouk]’s paper gives too many details on the construction of this vermiform robot, but there are some clues to be gleaned from the video below. At the 1:41 mark we see the secret of the design – a long corkscrew in the center of the 3D-printed linkages.
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