A 1982 Modem For $100

October 30, 2026 by Al Williams 20 Comments

[Dave Farquhar] takes a walk down memory lane about the Commodore 1600 VICModem, perhaps the first phone modem to sell for less than $100. Commodore, of course, was famous for making cheaper computers like the VIC20, the Commodore 64, and lower-cost peripherals like disk drives. But how did they hit the $100 price point with the modem when competing 300 baud modems sold for at least twice that, and a 1200 baud unit would set you back at least $600?

First, Commodore didn’t handle the design themselves. Instead, they outsourced to Anchor Automation, a well-known modem manufacturer. It used a Motorola MC14412 modem on a chip, along with six other chips. The chip could, in theory, do 600 baud, but the modem was rated for 300. But it did make some interesting design choices.

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A Modern Smalltalk

October 30, 2026 by Al Williams 12 Comments

In the history of object-oriented (OO) computer languages, Smalltalk has a special place. It wasn’t the first OO language, and it hasn’t spread as well as some others. But it was the first OO language many people encountered, and it influenced many other languages you’ve probably seen. Developed at the famed Xerox PARC, it also introduced many people to the “model/view/controller” (MVC) architecture. Cuis Smalltalk is a free and portable modern Smalltalk-80 environment. It replaces the traditional MVC framework with Morphic, but otherwise, it would be very familiar to someone who used Smalltalk in the 1990s. The project’s goal is to stay simple at the core, although you can add complexity via packages.

The software has been around for a while, but it is on a rolling release model, so the install page suggests you clone the Git repo. You can, however, get a stable release, which might be important if you were deploying applications. Running the program results in a Cuis desktop where you can open various things like workspaces, help documents, and the transcript.

Smalltalk throws some people because it takes OO to an extreme. For example, you don’t add two and three using an operator. You send the object two a message that includes another object, three. You can think of sending a message as calling a method on an object. As with virtual functions in C++, different objects can respond differently to the same request. For example, an Animal class might have a speak message that causes a cow to print “moo” and a chicken to print “cluck.”

You get used to it, and there’s a very nice class browser that lets you examine classes and what you can do with them. There are even packages to work with an Arduino over a serial port. They haven’t been updated lately, so they might (or might not) need a little work.

We’ve looked at GNU Smalltalk before. We’ve also seen a version that runs directly on a Raspberry Pi.

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Robot Picks Up Othello

October 29, 2026 by Al Williams 5 Comments

Experience is a great teacher. Ask [Jeneus], who, in high school, tried to make a program that played Othello. It didn’t go well. But years later, the idea produced an impressive Othello robot. At first glance, the robot looks a bit like a 3D printer with an aluminum extrusion XYZ motion system. But there’s a lot more to it, not to mention the software to play the game. Check it out in the video below.

The Z-axis has a vacuum system that can pick up clear tokens and place them on the board. If you know the game, you might remember that on a real board, players have to flip the tokens as they “capture” pieces. The robot has a smarter way to go. The tokens are clear because they are lit with one of two colors. So flipping the token is a simple LED color change. The LEDs also flash a different color to show you where you can move.

The device uses laser-cut components and 3D printed parts in PLA and TPU. Of course, there is a camera for the computer — a Raspberry Pi — to see the board. Overall, a very nicely done project. We’ve seen several checker and chess robots. We wonder if some of them could also play Othello?

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An AI Chatbot For The Apocalypse

October 29, 2026 by Al Williams 43 Comments

You don’t have to be a full-on “prepper” to at least occasionally wonder what would happen if civilization collapsed. One thing you probably couldn’t do is go on the Internet and ask your favorite AI how to purify water, repel zombies, or treat a burn, all of which may be highly relevant depending on your situation. Now, with Survival LLM, you have a chance.

The LLM is pretty much the stock chatbot, but it is trained on survival topics, and it runs locally. Naturally, you need the Internet to set it up, so you’d want to do that now before everything hits the fan. The training set uses medical references, survival manuals, FEMA and CDC documents, and nearly a million Wikipedia articles. It includes the survival references in a library and links to them when answering, too.

The installer is small, but it assesses your system and loads a model based on what you have. If you have less than 32 GB of RAM, you’ll get the IBM Granite 4.2 8B model, which was able to correctly answer 14 of 22 test questions. Other models do better, including the NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super model, which got 21 correct, but requires at least 128 GB of memory.

Now, somehow you have to power your computer, but that’s a separate problem. At least there will be plenty of GPUs to scavenge from abandoned data centers. We’ve seen prepper digital libraries before. More than one, in fact.

Magnetic Lock Opens By Magic

October 29, 2026 by Al Williams 35 Comments

Over on IEEE Spectrum, [Stephen Cass] has a project that would probably have seemed like a magic a few centuries ago. Imagine a box that uses a magnetic device to holds a locking bolt, requiring a magnet to disengage it. The only problem is that any strong magnet can open the box. [Stephen], instead, used an array of 64 Hall-effect sensors developed by [Peter Jansen] to look for a specific magnetic gesture.

Inside is a Teensy that can read the 8×8 grid of sensors. A magnetic stylus allows you to draw an unlock pattern. The system lets you train the gesture you want. There are a few problems. The sensor covers a small area, so it is hard to reliably produce the gesture. Putting an obvious mark on the box is a dead giveaway, so [Stephen] put a Celtic knotwork pattern on the box and uses part of it as a reference.

The other problem is that if you run out of battery, the box is locked forever. Well, at least until you apply mechanical force and break the box open. Wireless charging would be an option, but we might favor a small jack that would allow you to plug in an external battery.

This is a clever use of the sensor. However, we might have preferred a mechanical solution that didn’t require batteries. Or, perhaps, you could use a few normally open and normally closed reed switches to make a kind of magnetic combination lock. It would still need a battery, but it wouldn’t draw current until you connected the switches. Both methods also have drawbacks, of course. Like most things, you just get to pick the drawbacks you can live with.

You can see a video of the magnetic imaging tile from [Peter] below. We really want a setup like this for our secret door. We also wonder whether switchable magnets could provide a battery-free solution.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 392: Microscopes, Drones, And Other DIY Things

October 23, 2026 by Al Williams 1 Comment

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams met to review the week in Hackaday. Turns out, it was a week for tiny things, cybersecurity, nostalgia, and projects that would have been nearly impossible for the average hacker not that long ago. But first, you can hear a little about the upcoming Supercon badge and the trials of importing and exporting parts for the badges.

How many props does your drone have? [Joshua] has one. Want to fabricate semiconductors at home? Do you have a microwave? What about using NFC in your next project? There’s all that and more in this episode.

The quick hacks include a request from NASA for ideas (and, yes, there is prize money) and slide rule tricks, among other things. For the can’t miss articles, the cybersecurity weekly got some appreciation and Al took a trip down memory lane at the Altair 8800 he always wanted.

Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments, or drop us a line on the mailbag.

Download in DRM-free macroscopic MP3.

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The Age Of Altair

October 21, 2026 by Al Williams 29 Comments

I recently got the Amazon Christmas toy book in the mail, and it is definitely the modern version of the Sears Christmas Wish Book for last century’s youth. Or at least the majority of last century’s youth. For the true hacker, we had a different set of wishes. Recently, I found something I’ve clung to for over 50 years: the 1975 “The Age of Altair” catalog from MITS. Now that was a wish book!

The poor thing has been dragged around for decades and, I’m sad to say, it looks it. It isn’t totally trash, but I decided I should scan it. Then I realized that Bitsavers has already done it for me and with a much nicer copy, too. The images in this post are from their scan instead.

About the Altair

The magazine that started it all (World Radio History).

If your first computer ran Windows, you might not get the significance of the Altair. Back in 1974, the idea of having your own computer was practically ludicrous. Sure, Radio Electronics had published plans for the Mark 8 in July of that year. But it used an anemic 8008 CPU, and it wasn’t easy to get all the parts you’d need to build one. Other limited computers, like the Kenbak-1 or the occasional surplus minicomputer, ended up in personal hands. But you couldn’t just decide you wanted a real computer, plunk down some money, and have one delivered unless you had extremely deep pockets.

To stay on magazine stands longer, old print mags would come out earlier than their cover date suggested. The January 1975 Popular Electronics arrived, actually, in December of 1974 — just in time for the holidays. It showed a computer you could buy as a kit or assembled: the Altair 8800. Many of us were mesmerized by the idea of owning an actual useful computer.

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