NASA is going back to the Moon! We’ll follow the crew of Artemis II every step of the way.
Continue reading “Following Artemis II’s Journey Around The Moon”
Scrap Vintage Camera Goes Digital With Scanner Parts
Every collector ends up with items that are worthless, usually because they are broken or incomplete. When [Graindead] found a 1920s glass-plate reflex camera for pennies with plenty of missing parts, it was obvious that what he had was a piece of junk. Throw it away? No, he turned it digital with the aid of a small document scanner.
A reflex camera like this one is the ancestor of the 35mm single-lens reflex cameras we may still be familiar with today, in that is has a flip-up mirror inside to bounce the light onto a ground glass screen. The photographer can see what the lens sees to set up the shot, before flipping the mirror out of the way and exposing the glass plate film by pulling out a dark slide. This one was missing the ground glass and the lens, so he has to grind a replacement, and bodge in a similar-age Carl Zeiss Tessar lens.
In the video below you can see the build, and a range of pictures including some trichrome colour shots. It gives an imperfect result even compared to the same camera with its period film, but the point here is the art rather than the clarity. We’d take this one out with us, if it were ours.
For more vintage digital fun, have a look at a similar adaptation that shoots video.
Continue reading “Scrap Vintage Camera Goes Digital With Scanner Parts”
Open Graphics Card Powers Cyberpunk “Laptop”
For once, we can avoid debating in the comments what constitutes a “cyberdeck”, because [LCLDIY] does not refer to his cyberpunk masterpiece as such — he calls it a laptop. Considering the form factor is more like an all-in-one with a built-in laser projection keyboard, that’s arguably an even more controversial label to use, but as stylish this build is, it’s what’s inside it that interests us most.
No, not the cash-register motherboard that serves as the brain, though that has got to be worth some hacker cred. No, it’s the graphics card [LCLDIY] designed to drive 10″ electroluminescent (EL) displays that really has us interested. EL screens have a unique and beautiful glow that many find captivating, but we don’t see them all that often for two reasons. One is price: if you can’t find them surplus, they’re not cheap. The other is driving them, which [LCLDIY]’s project helps with, because the graphics card is open source.
The card is PCI, so you’ll need an adapter to plug it into a modern PCIe slot, or you’d have to redesign the thing. Since this isn’t elegant-engineering-a-day, we know which we’d do. The card is based on the CHIPS65548/5 chip, which means you should be able to find driver support under Linux and Windows. [LCLDIY] seems to be using Windows 2000, but that might just be because it’s all been downhill since then.
If the cyberpunk laptop wasn’t enough inspiration, [LCLDIY] also created a giant-scale Game Boy using the same 10″ screen and DIY graphics card. The soft glow of the EL display is particularly suited to the low-res nature of the retro games, as it’s not entirely unlike a CRT. You can see it in action–both builds!– in videos embedded below.
The last time somebody posted an EL display here, they had to build the driver board for it, too. Continue reading “Open Graphics Card Powers Cyberpunk “Laptop””
The Rapper, The Canadian Academics, And The Secret Behind The Earworm
There are many events so far in 2026 that could reasonably have been predicted, but perhaps one which couldn’t is a Hackaday scribe in Europe unexpectedly finding herself with a constant earworm from Afroman. The rapper, who most of us know only from his year 2000 hit single about getting high, made the news after an inept police raid on his house, and in turn a court case over his musical denunciations of the authorities.
It’s fair to say they picked on the wrong guy, but in thinking about why, the answer is in the earworm. He has the unique skill of making a song irritatingly catchy, which led us to the question of how a catchy song works. As luck would have it a team from the University of Waterloo have recently released a paper in which they explain it all in terms of maths, giving the rest of us a formula where the likes of Afroman are presumably born with it.
We won’t pretend that Hackaday’s mathematical expertise stretches beyond that needed for engineering, but for the more advanced numberphiles among us the university’s write-up goes into some detail about their use of group theory to study the patterns and symmetry in a given piece of music. It’s a new approach that joins other more famous guides to musical success, so perhaps if you couple it with the stuff your music teacher failed to tell you in school, you could be on your way to the top of the charts. Meanwhile here at Hackaday we’ll stick to more conventional inspiration.
Header: Chris Gilmore, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Heathkit Tuner Saved From Junk Pile
We miss the old Heathkit. You could build equipment that rivaled or even surpassed commercial devices. The cost was usually reasonable and, even if you could get by with less, the satisfaction of using gear you built yourself was worth a lot. Not to mention the knowledge you’d gain and your confidence in troubleshooting should the need arise. So we were jealous of [RCD66] when he found a Heathkit AJ-43C stereo tuner in the recycle bin.
As you can see in the video below, it needed a lot of love to get back to its former self. The device dates from around 1965, when the kit cost $130. In 1965, that was a lot of money. Back then, that would have bought you about four ounces of gold and would have been a great down payment on a $1,500 VW bug.
Things were a bit of a mess, so he removed all the parts and replaced most of them. Unsurprisingly, the electrolytic capacitors all tested bad. The transistors were all germanium, but if they tested good, his plan was to reuse them. There were several PCBs inside, and he made some changes, such as replacing the zener diode power supply with something more modern.
How did it sound? Watch the video and see for yourself. We usually like troubleshooting specific problems on gear like this, but in this case, it was probably smart to just do a total rework.
Heathkit had quite an origin story. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone strip and rebuild a Heathkit.
Making A Vintage Allen Scythe Electric
The Allen Scythe is one of those fantastic pieces of vintage agricultural machinery which would never be allowed to be manufactured today for health and safety reasons. It’s a two-wheel walk-behind device with a frightening reciprocating cutter bar which makes short work of almost anything. It’s the perfect tool for the roughest of brush clearance, but it demands respect. [Way Out West Workshop Stuff] has one, and is replacing the vintage Villiers two-stroke engine with an electric motor.
The conversion is straightforward enough, the Villiers crankshaft being replaced with a straight-through axle that can be driven by the motor. We particularly like the use of a cable tie as a splash lubricator. The shaft is turned to accept the Villiers’ bearings, the gear to drive the Allen, and a chain sprocket where the cord start would go on the engine. A mounting plate puts the motor above, a chain is fitted, and it’s ready to go once a hefty battery pack has been installed.
There are two videos below the break, showing construction, and finally the machine in action. The electric Allen is every bit as useful as the original, without the noise and vibration. Villiers motors can be temperamental, so we’d view it as an upgrade worth having.
Reverse-Engineering A Handheld Car Tire Pressure Gauge
In this wonderful world of MEMS technology, sensor technology has been downsized and reduced in cost to the point where you can buy a car tire pressure sensor for less than $3 USD on a site like AliExpress. Recently [electronupdate] got his mittens on one of these items to take a look inside, and compare it against his trusty old mechanical tire pressure gauge.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there isn’t a whole lot inside these devices once you pop them open to reveal the PCB. The MEMS device is a tiny device at the top, which has the pressurized air from the tire guided to it. The small hole inside the metal can leads to the internals that consist of a thin diaphragm with four piezoresistors that enable measurements on said diaphragm from which pressure can be determined.
Handling these measurements and displaying results on the small zebra connector-connected LCD is an 8-bit MCU manufactured by Chinese company SDIC. Although the part number on the die doesn’t lead to any specific part on the SDIC site, similar SDIC parts have about 256 bytes of SRAM and a few kB of one-time programmable ROM.
This MCU also integrates the clock oscillator, thus requiring virtually no external parts to work. Finally, its sigma-delta ADC interacts with the MEMS device, rounding out a very simple device that’s nevertheless more than accurate enough for a spot check as well as quite portable.
Continue reading “Reverse-Engineering A Handheld Car Tire Pressure Gauge”
Simulating A Glowing Fireplace With An RP2040
Today, fireplaces, their cozy glow once a household staple, are mostly a thing of the past. In fact, a decent amount of old fireplaces are completely blocked up! [David Capper] brings back the atmosphere without the actual flames, with his RP2040-based fireplace glow simulator.
It’s not just a string of LEDs with some PWM brightness control, either. No, [David] goes into detail about the black body radiation that gives these fires their colors. He then uses the theory of black-body radiation to determine the colors that the LEDs glow to simulate the colors of a real fire.
But the colors alone don’t make for a good simulated fire, so [David] adds the heat equation. It starts with a grid wherein each cell has a temperature. Over time, cells are randomly selected to have heat added to them (increasing the cell’s temperature), then he applies the heat equation to diffuse and decay the heat within the grid for a nice simulated crackling fire. Add in a custom PCB and a nice little 3D-printed case and you’re ready for a cozy hacker time.
