Upgrade Your Computer The 1985 Way

October 22, 2015 by Kevin Dady 39 Comments

Today when you want to upgrade your computer you slap in a card, back in the early 80’s things were not always as simple. When [Carsten] was digging around the house he found his old, and heavily modified Rockwell AIM 65 single board computer, flipped the switch and the primitive 6502 machine popped to life.

Added to the computer was a pile of wires and PCB’s in order to expand the RAM, the I/O to form a “crate bus” and of course tons of LED blinkenlights! On that bus a few cards were installed, including a decoder board to handle all the slots, a monitor controller, a massive GPIO card, and even a universal EEPROM programmer.

If that was not enough there was even a OS upgrade from the standard issue BASIC, to a dual-boot BASIC and FORTH. Though again unlike today where upgrading your OS requires a button click and a reboot, making all these upgrades are planned out on paper, which were scanned for any retro computer buff to pour through.

[Carsten] posted a video of this computer loading the CRT initilization program from a cassette. You can watch, but shouldn’t listen to that video here.

Hipster Linux Box Is An 8mm Film Editor

October 13, 2015 by Kevin Dady 15 Comments

Browsing though the junk store one day [Alec] spotted an old school 8mm film editor. For those who weren’t around, video used to be shot on film and editing it was a mechanical task of cutting (with a sharp implement) and pasting (with special tape) back together. It’s sad to see these in junk stores, but great for [Alec] who thought it begged to have an LCD and a single board computer implanted in it. Once the editor was in hand, the machine was gutted of its very simple parts: a lamp, some mirrors and a couple of lenses. He took measurements of the hollowed out enclosure and got down to business.

The hunt for a 4:3 aspect ratio LCD was on. Through a little bit of research, an LCD security screen was ordered from Alibaba. For the brains of the build an OLinuXino A13 board was chosen due to its native VGA output perfect for the LCD screen, a decent 1GHz Allwinner CPU, and the physical size which would fit in the editor housing.

With some haggling, Linux was installed on the SBC along with some games and the system was buttoned back up. A neat touch was added to the arms where you would originally place your film reals in the form of some fold out speakers, making the whole thing look like something direct out of a classic Sci-fi film. Check out the name of the project: PCsr, pronounced PC Senior… nice!

We’d love to see some film reels added as speaker grills. Maybe there will be some leftover reels to use after converting all your old film to digital.

Join us after the break for a quick video

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Quick Keyboard Hack To Control Heavy Loads

September 18, 2015 by Kevin Dady 21 Comments

When you want to control an external device (like a lamp) from your computer, you might reach for a USB enabled micro. Looking for an inexpensive and quick option to control two lamps [Pete] wanted to control a couple 12 volt halogen lamps, he reached for his keyboard and used a little bit of python.

Desktop PC keyboards have 3 LED’s indicating lock functions, hardly anyone uses the scroll lock, and on a laptop with no keypad, numlock is no big loss as well. Adding wires to the little PCB out of a USB keyboard the numlock and scroll lock LED’s 5 volt output was redirected to a switching circuit.

That switching circuit takes the output of either LED, inverts it with a PNP transistor, then connects to the gate of a FQP30N06L, “logic level” mosfet transistor to handle the heavy lifting. Once the wiring is in place a fairly simple Python script can take over turning on and off the two chosen lock keys, giving control of up to 32 amps with the touch of a button.

Retro Games On ArduinoCade Just Shouldn’t Be Possible

September 17, 2015 by Kevin Dady 26 Comments

Making retro video games on today’s micro controllers brings many challenges, especially when using only the micro controller itself to handle the entire experience. Complex graphics, sound, game logic and input is taxing enough on the small chips, toss in NTSC color graphics and you have a whole different bear on your hands.

[rossum] set out making the Arduinocade retro game system using an overclocked Arduino Uno, and not much more. Supporting 4 voice sound and IR game controllers, the system also boasts 27 simultaneous colors all in software. These colors and the resolution feel like they’re impossible without a graphics chip to offload some of the work. While doing all of this the ATmega328p is also playing some faithful reproductions of classic arcade games.

The uses a couple of interesting tricks. Color is generated with NTSC color artifacts, where the screen is really black and white, but thanks to a delay or two in the signal generation the bits are out of phase from the reference “color burst” signal and appear on-screen as unique colors. This approach was used in the 8 bit Apple II personal computers to generate its colors, and also on the early IBM PC’s with CGA cards to drastically increase color depth. In this case, the chip is overclocked with a 28.6363 MHz crystal (a multiple of NTSC timing) and the SPI hardware leveraged to shift out all the necessary pixels. Check out how great it looks and sounds after the break.

It’s good to see an old trick on a new project and we are off to play some games!

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Laptop Broken? Get A Bigger Hammer

September 11, 2015 by Kevin Dady 22 Comments

The weakest point in a laptop case may be the screen hinges, especially in heavily used machines. The mechanical stresses involved with opening a laptop can often break the thin plastic screw bosses and cause the threaded insert to pop out. What do you do? Get a hammer and some tacks of course!

[mightysinetheta]’s solution involves popping the bezel off the offending screen, then aligning the hinges in preparation for drilling holes though the computer’s plastic lid. Then he placed some short tacks though the holes and the hinges. Pressing the hinge down into the lid to ensure a tight fit, the hammer comes out to peen over the tip of the nail. Course that can be time consuming so just bending the tack over and flattening it down with the hammer works just as well.

With the hinge secured back into place his trusty laptop is back in service. The new additions on the back of the lid add a bit of a custom look that is purely functional.

While you’re in there… might want to replace that charging port that’s been wiggling mysteriously.

Hack Puts Aging Sprinkler System Online

September 9, 2015 by Kevin Dady 17 Comments

Water conservation is on a lot of people’s mind, and with an older sprinkler system one may not have the finest control of when and where the lawn is getting its water. Faced with such a system [Felix] decided to hack into his, adding better computerized scheduling, and internet remote control.

The brains of the operation is handled by a Moteino, which is a Arduino compatible micro controller board with WiFi on board. In order to interface with the sprinkler system, an interface PCB is made. The interface has an on board buck power supply to regulate the 24 volt AC power of the sprinkler down to 5 volt DC for the micro and the 74HC595 shift registers.

The output from the shift registers connects to a pin header where the stock computer normally would have plugged in. With a little software and a phone app, the new micro-controller takes over the sprinkler’s TRIAC’s turning on and off zones with a push of the thumb.

Join us after the break for a quick demonstration video.

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Mini Fridge Turned Gameboy Puts Hot Games On Ice

September 3, 2015 by Kevin Dady 12 Comments

The plain old white mini fridge, a staple of many dorm rooms could use a little decoration. The resemblance to a classic gameboy is not that hard to imagine with some novelty stickers, but [ModPurist] went the extra mile with his Cold Boy.

Making a mini fridge into a playable gameboy involves taking apart the door, once in a Raspberry Pi 2 is fitted in along with a second hand “square screen” LCD. The front of the door is cut for some custom wooden buttons, which are connected to tactile switches. Once everything is fit and finished the door is reassembled, so the fridge can resume its normal life keeping soda and hot dogs good and cold. [ModPurist] covered the progression of the hack in his work log.

While it’s a little low to the ground, it should be a hit at college parties where being on the floor is not unusual. Join us after the break for a demonstration video and get your game on. It is, of course, missing one thing. There needs to be some type of latch inside to secure the beverages until the Konami code is entered.

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