What happens to old, neglected 1980s toy robots? According to the [Randi Rain], they turn to the dark side! Way back in the ’80s, Tomy had an entire line of robots — from keychain wind-up toys to rolling, talking machines almost 2 feet tall. Tucked into the middle of this line was Verbot. Verbot’s claim to fame is that it is a voice-controlled robot. More than that, it was speaker-dependent. Train the robot with commands like “go forward” and then watch as it responds to your every command.
As you might guess, the speech recognition wasn’t great by today’s standards. Recognition was handled by a Microcontroller — a Mitsubishi product that was possibly a mask programmed 8051 variant. Pretty novel for an 80s toy — in fact, there’s a patent for it.
Today, most of us carry supercomputers in our pockets that happen to also take instantly-viewable pictures.This is something that even the dumbest phones do, meaning that we can reasonably draw the conclusion that photographic capability has become a basic feature of everyday carry, a necessity of 21st century life.
Despite the unwashed masses of just-plain-bad photographs clouding the digital landscape, photography itself remains as important as ever so we can retain and disseminate information as history unfolds. In a sense, the more instant, the better — unless it comes at the cost of image quality. The invention of photography is on par with the printing press or with language itself in that all three allow us to communicate within our own time as well as preserve The Way Things Were in frozen silence. And no invention made vivid preservation more convenient than the instant camera.
As we gear up for a summer in the field, or more accurately in a series of fields, it’s time to turn our attention towards Eastnor Castle in the Western English county of Herefordshire, venue for the upcoming Electromagnetic Field hacker camp. Sadly we’ve got no badge to tease you with, but they’ve released a list of the talks that will fill their schedule. There are so many to choose from, we can only mention a few in this article.
One feature of this camp we’re very interested in will be CuTEL, a wired copper telephone network on the field. We’ll be taking along our trusty GPO 746 to be part of it of course, but for those without one, there’s [Matthew Harrold]’s talk on building a copper telephone network in a field.
Our cursory scan of the list finishes up with [Alistair MacDonald] on how not to start a hackerspace. We’ve seen our fair share of hackerspace drama over the years, so whether this one causes pain for ex-hackerspace-directors or not, it promises to be informative for anyone in the hackerspace world.
Nanoparticles sound a bit like science fiction to minds of your average hacker — too esoteric and out of reach to be something we might get to work with in our own lairs — but [Ben Krasnow] of [Applied Science] over on YouTube has proven that they most definitely can be made by mere mortals, and importantly they can be tuned. With light. That’s right, nano particle growth appears to be affected very strongly by being illuminated with specific wavelengths, which locks-in their size, and thus defines their light-bending properties. This is the concept of photo mediated synthesis, which causes nanoparticles to clump together into different configurations depending on the wavelength. The idea is to start with a stock solution of Silver Nitrate, which is then reduced to form silver nanospheres which are then converted to larger silver nanoprisms, sized according to the wavelength of the illuminating source.
The process seems simple enough, with a solution of Silver Nitrate and Sodium Citrate being vacuum degassed to remove oxygen, and then purged by bubbling argon or nitrogen. Sodium Borohydride acts as a reducing agent, producing silver metal nanoparticles from the Silver Nitrate solution. The Sodium Citrate coats the silver nanoparticles, as they are produced, preventing them clumping together into a mushy precipitate. PVP (Polyvinylpyrrolidone) is added, acting as a colloiding agent preventing the coated nanoparticles from clumping together, and helping keep the solution stable long enough for the photo mediated synthesis process to complete. Finally, the pH is adjusted up to 11 using sodium hydroxide. The resulting silver nanoparticle stock solution has a pale yellow colour, and is ready for the final particle size selection using the light source.
The light source was custom made because [Ben] says he couldn’t find something suitable off the shelf. This is a simple design using a Teensy to drive an array of PAM2804 LED drivers, with each one of those driving its own medium power LED, one for each of the different wavelengths of interest. As [Ben] stresses, the naïve approach of trying to approximate a specific colour with an RGB LED setup would not work, as although the human eye perceives the colour, the actual wavelength peak will be totally wrong, and the reaction will not proceed as intended. The hardware design is available on MultiSpectLED GitHub for your viewing pleasure.
If you thought that Tamagotchis were a late ’90s fad that has faded from most people’s memory by now, you’d be wrong: the franchise is still alive and well today, with new models being released regularly. But even the original model from 1996, known as Tamagotchi P1, is being kept alive by a small group of enthusiasts. When ROM dumps of the original hardware began floating around the internet a couple of years ago, even those without the real thing could run these virtual pets in an emulator.
But the whole idea of the Tamagotchi hardware was that it was portable enough to carry around anywhere. If you’re among those who missed that part of the Tamagotchi experience, you’ll be pleased to know that [JC] designed OpenTama: a portable hardware platform that runs an emulated version of the original Tamagotchi P1 software. It’s about as close as it gets to those first-generation virtual pets, but with several additions that make your life easier.
The software platform is [JC]’s TamaLib which we featured last year; in effect it’s an open-source emulator that allows the Tamagotchi ROM to run on a variety of modern hardware platforms. It also contains several additional options like the ability to save and restore your progress or to select customized ROMs. The OpenTama hardware, meanwhile, is a proper 21st-century reimplementation of the original: a small, egg-sized PCB sporting an STM32 microcontroller driving an LCD or OLED display, powered by a 100 mAh battery that can be recharged through a USB-C port.
It’s safe to say that the Altair 8800 is one of the most iconic, and important, computers ever created. The kit-built machine is widely regarded as the first commercially successful personal computer, and as such, intact specimens are bona fide historical artifacts when and if they ever come up on the second-hand market. Accordingly there’s a cottage industry out there dedicated to making affordable replicas, which more often than not, leverage modern hardware to emulate the original hardware.
But that’s not what the Altaid 8800 is. For one thing, it looks nothing like the original Altair. More to the point however, it’s not using modern components to emulate an Intel 8080 computer…it actually is an Intel 8080 computer — complete with fully functional front panel for manually entering in programs. It just happens to be small enough to fit into an Altoids tin, hence the name.
Creator [Lee Hart] didn’t just stop at building a miniature 8080 machine, either. He’s also gone through the trouble of producing a sixteen page faux-vintage magazine to describe the project and its operation. Normally we’d call such a document a “manual”, but somehow in this case that seems to downplay the incredible effort and attention to detail that went into it.
Schematics and firmware are available should you wish to build your own version of the Altaid 8800, but we think the prices for the bare PCBs and complete kits that [Lee] is offering are more than fair for what you get. In fact, if you’ve always wanted to play around with front panel programming and the associated blinkenlights, this might be one of the most affordable options available. Though to be clear, you can also hook the Altaid up to your computer with a USB-to-serial cable if you’re not up to punching in programs on those tiny buttons.
You might think this is one of the most creative and unique retrocomputing projects we’ve ever seen, and you’d be right…if it wasn’t for [Lee]’s own Z80 Membership Card. In some ways the precursor to the Altaid 8800, this diminutive triumph also fits in an Altoids tin and features its own era appropriate magazine-style documentation. We’re detecting something of a theme with these projects…but we certainly aren’t complaining.
Russia’s loose cannon of a space boss is sending mixed messages about the future of the International Space Station. Among the conflicting statements from Director-General Dmitry Rogozin, the Roscosmos version of Eric Cartman, is that “the decision has been made” to pull out of the ISS over international sanctions on Russia thanks to its war on Ukraine. But exactly when would this happen? Good question. Rogozin said the agency would honor its commitment to give a year’s notice before pulling out, which based on the current 2024 end-of-mission projections, means we might hear something definitive sometime next year. Then again, Rogozin also said last week that Roscosmos would be testing a one-orbit rendezvous technique with the ISS in 2023 or 2024; it currently takes a Soyuz about four orbits to catch up to the ISS. So which is it? Your guess is as good as anyones at this point.
At what point does falsifying test data on your products stop being a “pattern of malfeasance” and become just the company culture? Apparently, something other than the 40 years that Mitsubishi Electric has allegedly been doctoring test results on some of their transformers. The company has confessed to the testing issue, and also to “improper design” of the transformers, going back to the 1980s and covering about 40% of the roughly 8,400 transformers it made and shipped worldwide. The tests that were falsified were to see if the transformers could hold up thermally and withstand overvoltage conditions. The good news is, unless you’re a power systems engineer, these aren’t transformers you’d use in any of your designs — they’re multi-ton, multi-story beasts that run the grid. The bad news is, they’re the kind of transformers used to run the grid, so nobody’s stuff will work if one of these fails. There’s no indication whether any of the sketchy units have failed, but the company is “considering” contacting owners and making any repairs that are necessary.
For your viewing pleasure, you might want to catch the upcoming documentary series called “A League of Extraordinary Makers.” The five-part series seeks to explain the maker movement to the world, and features quite a few of the luminaries of our culture, including Anouk Wipprecht, Bunnie Huang, Jimmy DiResta, and the gang at Makers Asylum in Mumbai, which we assume would include Anool Mahidharia. It looks like the series will focus on the real-world impact of hacking, like the oxygen concentrators hacked up by Makers Asylum for COVID-19 response, and the influence the movement has had on the wider culture. Judging by the trailer below, it looks pretty interesting. Seems like it’ll be released on YouTube as well as other channels this weekend, so check it out.
But, if you’re looking for something to watch that doesn’t require as much commitment, you might want to check out this look at the crawler-transporter that NASA uses to move rockets to the launch pad. We’ve all probably seen these massive beasts before, moving at a snail’s pace along a gravel path with a couple of billion dollars worth of rocket stacked up and teetering precariously on top. What’s really cool is that these things are about as old as the Space Race itself, and still going strong. We suppose it’s easier to make a vehicle last almost 60 years when you only ever drive it at half a normal walking speed.
And finally, if you’re wondering what your outdoor cat gets up to when you’re not around — actually, strike that; it’s usually pretty obvious what they’ve been up to by the “presents” they bring home to you. But if you’re curious about the impact your murder floof is having on the local ecosystem, this Norwegian study of the “catscape” should be right up your alley. They GPS-tagged 92 outdoor cats — which they dryly but hilariously describe as “non-feral and food-subsidized” — and created maps of both the ranges of individual animals, plus a “population-level utilization distribution,” which we think is a euphemism for “kill zone.” Surprisingly, the population studied spent almost 80% of their time within 50 meters of home, which makes sense — after all, they know where those food subsidies are coming from.
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