Ancient Teletype Revived In Labor Of Retrocomputing Love

Readers with not too many years under their belts may recall a time when the classic background sound effect for radio and television news programs included a staccato mechanical beat, presumably made by the bank of teletype machines somewhere in the studio, clattering out breaking stories onto rolls of yellow paper. It was certainly true that teletypes were an important part of the many communications networks that were strung together over the 20th century, but these noisy, greasy beasts had their day and are now largely museum pieces.

Which is exactly where the ancient Model 19 Teletype machine that [CuriousMarc] and company are restoring is destined. Their ongoing video series, six parts long as of this writing, documents in painstaking detail how this unit worked and how they are bringing it back to its 1930s glory. Teletypes were made to work over telephone lines with very limited bandwidth, and the hacks that went into transmitting text messages with a simple 5-bit encoding scheme are fascinating. The series covers the physical restoration of the machine, obviously well-loved during its long service with the US Navy. Of particular interest is the massive power supply with its Thyratron tubes and their mysterious blue glow.

The whole series is worth a watch if you’re even slightly interested in retrocomputing. We’re particularly taken with the mechanical aspects of these machines, though, which have a lot in common with mechanical calculators. [Al Williams] recently covered the non-replacement of the power supply caps for this unit, which is an interesting detour to this restoration.

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Web Pages Via Forth

Forth. You either love it or you hate it. If you have struggled to work on tiny microcontrollers, you probably are in the first camp. After all, bringing up a minimal Forth system is pretty simple and requires very little resources on the CPU. Once you have such an environment it is then easy to extend Forth in Forth. [Remko] decided he wanted to build a Forth compiler that uses WebAssembly and runs in your browser. Why? We’ve learned not to think about that question too much.

The world has changed a lot since the first introduction of the WorldWideWeb browser in 1990. What started out as a way to show text documents over the network has become — for better or worse — an application platform. JavaScript won the browser scripting language wars and security concerns pretty much killed Java applets and Flash. But JavaScript isn’t always fast. Sure, there are ways to do just in time compiling, such as Google’s V8 engine. But that compile step takes time, too. Enter WebAssembly (or Wasm).

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Engineering The Perfect Throw For Rock Skipping

Summer is here (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) and World’s Greatest Uncle [Mark Rober] is at it again with his nieces and nephews. This time he’s all about skipping stones, that shoreline pastime that kids sometimes find frustrating and adults find humiliating when trying to demonstrate the technique.

But what exactly is the proper technique? [Mark] didn’t know, so he built a robot to find out. Yes, we know it’s not a robot – it’s just a commercial clay pigeon launcher with a few modifications — but work with us here. His idea is to build a rig that can eliminate as many variables as possible when a human tries to skip a stone, and work back one variable at a time to find the perfect set of factors. The prototype in the video below did a respectable job skipping stones, but it was nowhere near optimal. [Mark] then engaged the kids on a careful exploration of the mechanics of rock skipping using the rig, eventually going so far as to eliminate variability in the rocks by making clay pigeons of his own. The results are fantastic; at a 20° approach angle and a 20° tilt of the rock relative to the water, those artificial stones just seem to go on forever. Even skipping natural stones was much improved by what they learned, which is completely counter to the age-old advice to release as low and as parallel to the water as possible.

The real gem in this video, though, is [Mark] describing his engineering design process. Watch and learn, because he clearly knows a thing or two about turning ideas into fun stuff, such as enormous Super Soakers, fully automatic snowball guns, and dart-catching dartboards.

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CD Image Via Twitter: A Handcrafted Game Disc

Humans can turn anything into a competition. Someone always wants to be faster or drive a ball farther. Technical pursuits are no different, which is why a lot of people overclock or play regular expression golf. [Alok Menghrajani] sets himself some odd challenges. A few years ago, he hand-built a bootable floppy image that had a simple game onboard and managed to fit it in a Twitter message. Twitter has increased their number of characters, so — you guessed it — this time he’s back with a CDROM image.

His tweet is a command line that starts with perl. The text is base64-encoded binary and if you run the Tweet from a shell — which is an odd thing to do with a Tweet, we grant you, you’ll be rewarded with a file called cd.iso. You could burn that to a CDROM, but it is more likely you’ll just mount in a virtual machine and boot that. [Alok] says it does work in QEMU, VirtualBox, and — yes — even a real CD.

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Thermal Actuators: Hydraulic Motors That Feed On Temperature Changes

These Fluid Displacement Thermal Actuators designed by [Andrew Benson] are a delightful and profoundly different approach to the Power Harvesting Challenge portion of The Hackaday Prize. While most projects were focused on electrical power, [Andrew]’s design is essentially a mechanical motor that harnesses the fact that Phase Change Materials (PCMs) change volume when they go from liquid to solid or vice-versa; that property is used to provide a useful hydraulic force. In short, it’s a linear actuator that retracts and expands as the PCM freezes or melts. By choosing a material with melting and freezing temperatures that are convenient for the operating environment, an actuator can be reliably operated virtually for free. A proof of concept is the device shown here; a model of a sun-shade that deploys when a certain temperature is reached and retracts when it has cooled.

Sunshade concept, from deployed (top) to retracted (bottom).

Turning temperature changes into useful physical work is the principle behind things like wax motors and even some self-winding clocks, but what [Andrew] has done is devise a useful method of interfacing directly to the fluids; abstracting away the materials themselves in order to provide mechanical power on the other end. These devices, in general, may not be particularly efficient but they have very few moving parts, are astonishingly reliable, and can operate at virtually any scale. [Andrew] has been thinking big, many of his application ideas are architectural in nature.

[Andrew] was inspired to enter his design for The Hackaday Prize, and we’re glad he did because it was selected as one of the finalists in the Power Harvesting Challenge, and will be in the running for the $50,000 Grand Prize. If you also have an idea waiting for an opportunity to shine, now is the time. The Human-Computer Interface Challenge is up next, followed by the Musical Instrument Challenge. All you really need to enter is a documented concept, so sharpen your pencils and give your idea a shot at reaching the next level.

Hackaday Belgrade: Sophi Kravitz’s Blimp Army

Building things that fly is hard. The constraints on small, battery powered, radio-operated gear already presents a challenge, but adding weight, balance, and aerodynamic constraints takes it to a whole new level. Sophi Kravitz rises to the occasion and discusses each challenge of building a blimp from start to finish in her presentation at the 2018 Hackaday Belgrade conference.

One of the pleasures of writing for Hackaday comes through the incredible array of talent and experience to be found among our colleagues. We all do our own work, but one is humbled by that which flows from the benches of those one works alongside. Just such a project is the Remote Control Mini Blimp from our colleague Sophi Kravitz. It’s a game involving an obstacle course and a set of remote-controlled blimps. The challenges in such an endeavour have been pushing the limits of what is possible with off-the-shelf components. Continue reading “Hackaday Belgrade: Sophi Kravitz’s Blimp Army”

SMD Soldering Challenge Lands At DEF CON

Strap on the jeweler’s loupe and lay off the caffeine for a few days. You’ll need to be at your peak for the SMD Soldering Challenge at this year’s DEF CON (number 26 for those counting).

It’s exciting to see that a Soldering Skills Village has been added to the conference this year. It will be in the same room as the Hardware Hacking Village. After all, who doesn’t want to solder at a conference? This soldering challenge is a great way to ring in the new village, and will take place in eight heats of six people for a total of 48 contestants. If you want to compete, make sure you get to the village right away and sign up for a slot!

A familiar board is being used for the contest. It’s the SMD Challenge board which MakersBox developed. You can check out the Hackaday.io project page and even order one from their Tindie store if you like. The contest will be scored based on time, completion, functionality, precise orientation, and quality of the joints.

The SOIC ATtiny85 is a snap to place on the board, but things get harder with each step. To successfully complete it you need to solder both a resistor and an LED in 1206, 0805, 0603, 0402, and 0201 packages. Those oh-two-oh-ones are basically grains of sand… good luck with that! We’re really excited that MakersBox rolled some custom Hackaday and Tindie boards (pictured above) for this contest which we’re honored to sponsor. It sounds as if the winners will be announced during Hackaday and Tindie’s traditional Breakfast at DEF CON which is happening at 10:30am on Sunday in the HHV.

We plan to spectate during some of the heats and if you’re at the con you should too! For those participating, here’s our advice. Practice soldering the smallest of parts ahead of time (watch some videos on it at the very least). Bring a multimeter to test the diode polarity because you won’t be able to see the symbols on the smallest parts. You may even consider bringing some custom tools; this surface mount “clamp” comes to mind, you’ll just need a much smaller version.

If you have advice of your own, we’d love to hear it in the comments below!