VCF West: Homebrew Lisp Machines And Injection Molded PDPs

August 7, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

Someone walks into the Vintage Computer Festival and asks, ‘what’s new?’. It’s a hilarious joke, but there is some truth to it. At this year’s Vintage Computer Festival West, the exhibit hall wasn’t just filled to the brim with ancient computers from the Before Time. There was new hardware. There was hardware that would give your Apple IIgs even more memory. There was new hardware that perfectly emulated 40-year-old functionality. There’s always something new at the Vintage Computer Festival.

Some of the more interesting projects are just coming off the assembly line. If you want a modern-day Lisp machine, that one won’t be assembled until next week, although there was a working prototype at VCF. If you want the greatest recreation of the most beautiful hardware, VCF has your back. Check out these amazing builds below.

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Remote Controlled Electric Snowblower Sports FPV For Safety

August 7, 2018 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

As summer scorches the northern hemisphere, here’s something to cool your thoughts: winter is only four months away. And with it will come the general misery and the proclamations that “It’ll never be warm again,” not to mention the white stuff and the shoveling. Or perhaps not, if you’re lucky enough to have a semi-autonomous electric snowblower in the garage.

The device [Dane Kouttron] describes is a strange beast indeed, and one that came to him under somewhat mysterious circumstances. It appears to be a standard Ariens two-stage blower, the kind normally driven by a fairly beefy internal combustion engine so as to have enough power to run the auger, the impeller, and the drive wheels. But a previous owner had removed the gas engine and attached a 4-kW brushless motor to run the auger and impeller. Realizing the potential of this machine and with a winter storm heading his way, [Dane] used the old engine mount to hold giant LiFePO₄ batteries from a cell tower backup battery, slapped a couple of electric wheelchair motors onto the drive wheels, mounted a motor to swivel the exhaust chute, and added control electronics from a retired battlebot. Setting such a machine loose in the wild would be bad, so an FPV system was added just in time for storm cleanup. Upgrades for version 2 include better weight distribution for improved stability and traction, and of course googly eyes. Check out the video below to see it flinging snow and moving around faster than any snowblower we’ve ever seen.

We’ll never get lucky enough to have such wonders gifted on us as [Dane] did, but we applaud him for picking up the torch where someone else obviously left off. And who knows; perhaps the previous maker took inspiration from this remote-controlled snowblower build?

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Video Quick Bit: Power Harvesting Hacks

August 7, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

Majenta Strongheart is back again, this time taking a look at some of the coolest power harvesting projects in this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The entire idea of the Power Harvesting Challenge is to get usable power from something, be it solar energy, a rushing waterfall, or fueling steam turbines with hamsters. [Cole B] decided that instead of capturing energy from one of these power sources, he’d do it all. He created Power Generation Modules, or Lego bricks for harvesting power. There’s a hand crank module, a water turbine module, and enough modules to do something with all that captured power like a light module and a USB charger module.

But maybe you don’t want to generate power the normal way. Maybe you think spinning magnets is too mainstream, or something. If that’s the case, then [Josh] has the project for you. It’s the P Cell, a battery fueled by urine. Yes, it’s just a simple copper zinc wet cell using urea as an electrolyte, but remember: in the early 1800s, human urine was a major source of nitrates used in the manufacture of gunpowder. Why not get some electricity from something that is just sent down the tubes?

Right now we’re in the middle of the Human Computer Interface Challenge. Show us that you have what it takes to get a computer to talk to a human, get a human to talk to a computer, or even recreate one of those weird 3D CAD mice from the early 90s. We’re looking for any interesting ways to bridge that valley between people and their devices. Twenty Human Computer Interface Challenge submissions will be selected to move onto the finals and win $1000 in the process! The five top entries of the 2018 Hackaday Prize will split $100,000!

Recorded Programming — Thanks To Bing Crosby

August 7, 2018 by Al Williams 17 Comments

If you look up Bing Crosby in Wikipedia, the first thing you’ll notice is his real name was Harry. The second thing you’ll read, though, is that he is considered the first “multimedia star.” In 1948, half of the recorded music played on the air was by Bing Crosby. He also was a major motion picture star and a top-selling recording artist. However, while you might remember Bing for his songs like White Christmas, or for his orange juice commercials, or for accusations of poor treatment from his children, you probably don’t associate him with the use of magnetic tape.

In a way, Bing might have been akin to the Steve Jobs of the day. He didn’t power the technology for tape recording. But he did see the value of it, invested in it, and brought it to the market. Turns out Bing was quite the businessman. Want to know why he did all those Minute Maid commercials? He was a large shareholder in the company and was the west coast distributor for their products. He also owned part of the Pittsburgh Pirate baseball team and other businesses.

So how did Bing become instrumental in introducing magnetic tape recording? Because he was tired of doing live shows. You see, in 1936, Crosby became the host of a radio variety show, The Kraft Music Hall. This very popular program was live. That means you have to show up on time. If you go off on a tangent, you’ll run out of time. And if you make a mistake, there is no editing. Oh and one other thing. You have to do a nationwide live show twice: once for the east coast and another for the west. This was cutting into Bing’s “family time” which, as far as we can ascertain was a code phrase for golf.

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The Square-Inch Project Rides Again!

August 7, 2018 by Elliot Williams 37 Comments

Want to play a game? Your challenge is to do something incredible with a printed circuit board that measures no more than one inch by one inch. It’s The Return of the One Square Inch Project and it’s going to be amazing!

We can’t believe that it’s been three years! The original One Square Inch Project was a contest dreamt up by Hackaday.io user [alpha_ninja] back in 2015, and we thought it was such a great idea that we ponied up some prizes. The entries were, frankly, the best we’ve ever seen. So we’re doing it again!

Last time around, the size constraint focused the minds and brought out the creativity in some of the best and brightest of Hackaday.io. What functionality or simply amusement can you pack into a square PCB that’s just a tad over 25 mm on a side? We’d like to see.

We’ll be featuring entries throughout the contest. We think geek ‘cred is the best reward but if you want something more to sweeten the pot here you go:

Grand Prize:
- $500 Cash!
Four Top Entries Win Tindie Gift Certificates:
- Best Project – $100
- Best Artistic PCB Design – $100
- Best Project Documentation – $100
- Best Social Media Picture or Video – $100
Five Runner-Up Entries:
- $100 OSH Park gift cards

Want some inspiration? Last time the winner was a quadcopter in one square inch, but there were tons of useful and amusing projects crammed into tight quarters, and many of them transcend their constraints. There were not one but two hi-fi sound cards: one for your laptop’s USB port and one for your microcontroller projects that is now officially supported by the Teensy Audio Library. Need a MPPT power converter for a small solar project? How about a plug-load meter that fits on a US mains plug or an I2C to WS2818 converter to make blinking easier?

There were breakout boards for nearly every imaginable chip, a radio downconverter from our own [Jenny List], and a great magnetic rotary encoder design. Key Pass, an Arduino in the size of a DIP-8, and of course a bat detector, a bubble display volt meter, a smart watch, and a capacitive touch wheel.

It’s been three years, and parts have gotten cheaper, smaller, and more capable. What’s newly feasible in a square inch that wasn’t way back in 2015? Show us what you got.

Even The PlayStation 2 Can’t Escape Java

August 7, 2018 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that Java has a pretty impressive track record in terms of supported platforms. Available on everything from flip phones to DVD players, not to mention computers, Oracle once famously claimed that Java runs on three billion devices. An estimate that, in truth, is probably on the low side at this point. Especially when [Michael Kohn] keeps figuring out how to run it on increasingly esoteric devices.

[Michael] writes in to tell us that he’s added support for the PlayStation 2 console to Java Grinder, his software for taking Java code and turning it into a native binary for a variety of unexpected platforms. His previous conquests have included the TRS-80 and Atari 2600, so by comparison the PS2 is an almost tame addition to the list.

Let’s be honest, you probably don’t have any desire to run a Java program on Sony’s nearly two decade old game system. But that’s OK. The documentation [Michael] has written up is fascinating anyway, covering specifics of the PS2’s rather unique hardware and quirks he ran into when developing on an emulator and deploying on real hardware. Even if you’ll never put the findings to practical use, it’s absolutely worth a read.

In the video after the break you can see the demo [Michael] came up with booting on a real PS2 to prove the software works. To really put his mark on it, he mentions he wrote and performed the demo’s songs and even drew some of the artwork on paper and scanned it into his computer.

We’ve previously covered his work getting Java running on the Sega Genesis, as well as the venerable 6502 CPU. Oh, and one time he encoded data onto a pancake. We like this guy’s style.

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Lathe Headstock Alignment: Cutting A Test Bar

August 7, 2018 by Quinn Dunki 39 Comments

Let’s say you’ve recently bought a lathe and set it up in your shop. Maybe you’ve even gone and leveled it like a boss. You’re ready to make chips, right? Well, not so fast. As real machinists will tell you, you can use all the levels and lasers and whatever that you want, but the proof is in the cut. Precision leveling gets your machine in the ballpark (machinists have very small ballparks) but the final step to getting a machine to truly perform well is to cut a test bar. This is a surefire way to eliminate any last traces of twist in the bed.

There are two types of test bars. One is for checking headstock-to-ways alignment, which is what we’re doing here. There’s another type used for checking tailstock alignment, but that’s a subject for another day.

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