Retrotechtacular: Color TV

November 12, 2024 by 20 Comments

We have often wondered if people dreamed in black and white before the advent of photography. While color pictures eventually became the norm, black and white TV was common for many years. After all, a TV set was a big investment, so people didn’t run out and buy the latest TV every year. Even if you did buy a new or used TV, a black and white model was much less expensive and, for many years, some shows were in black and white anyway. RCA, of course, wanted you to buy a color set. [PeriscopeFilm] has a 1963 promotional film from RCA extolling the virtues of a color set. The video also shows something about how the sets were made, as you can see below.

We aren’t sure we’d have led with the idea that color could save your life in this context, but we have to salute the melodrama. There is a good bit of footage of picture tube manufacturing, although the technical detail is — understandably — aimed at the general public.

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You Wouldn’t Download A Chair…But You Could

November 12, 2024 by 15 Comments

[Morley Kert] had a problem. He’s a big fan of the lovely Fortune Chair from Heller Furniture. Only, he didn’t want to pay $1,175 for a real one. The solution? He printed his own instead!

The basic concept is simple. Capture or recreate the geometry of the fancy expensive designer chair, and then print it out on a 3D printer. That would be easy, except for scale. Chairs have to be both big enough to seat humans, and strong enough to carry their weight. For the average 3D printer owner, meeting the big requirement is difficult, since most printers are quite small compared to chairs.

[Morley] gets around this in the typical fashion—he prints the chair in multiple segments. Indeed, we’ve seen [Morley] tackle a similar project before, too. Only, last time, he had the benefit of a print farm and some easily-accessible geometry for the target object. This time, he’s working very much more from scratch, and chose to print everything at home. That made things quite a bit harder.

Scaling up is never as easy at it seems at first!

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Ubiquitous Successful Bus: Version 3

November 12, 2024 by 60 Comments

USB 2 is the USB we all know and love. But about ten years ago, USB got an upgrade: USB 3.0. And it’s a lot faster. It started off ten times the speed of USB 2, with 5 Gbps, and later got 20 Gbps and 40 Gbps revisions. How does that work, and how do you hack on it? Well, for a start, it’s very different from USB 2, and the hacking differs in many important ways.

In fact, USB 3 is an entirely separate interface from USB 2, and it does not depend on USB 2 in any way whatsoever – some people think that USB 3 negotiation happens through USB 2, but that’s a complete myth. USB 2 and USB 3 are electrically, physically, and logically distinct interfaces. Except for the fact that USB 3 is backwards compatible with USB 2, they are simply entirely different.

This also means that every USB-A port with USB 3 capabilities (typically blue, but not always) carries two interfaces; indeed, if you want, you can split a typical USB 3 port into a USB 3-only USB-A port and a USB 2-only USB-A port. USB 3-only ports are not legal per USB 3 standard, you’re expected to keep USB 2 there, but only for user convenience; you can split it with a hub and get, like, three extra USB 2 branches for your own use. Even if it’s forbidden, it works flawlessly – it’s what I’m currently using to connect my mouse to my laptop as I’m typing this!

Not to say that USB 3 is all easy to work with – there’s a fair bit of complexity.

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Minuteman ICBM Launch Tests Triple Warheads

November 12, 2024 by 75 Comments

On November 5th, the United States launched an LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBM from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Roughly 30 minutes later the three warheads onboard struck their targets 4,200 miles (6,759 km) away at the Reagan Test Site in the Marshall Islands. What is remarkable about this test is not that one of these ICBMs was fired — as this is regularly done to test the readiness of the US’ ICBMs — but rather that it carried three warheads instead of a single one.

Originally the Minuteman III ICBMs were equipped with three warheads, but in 2014 this was reduced to just one as a result of arms control limits agreed upon with Russia. This New Start Treaty expires in 2026 and the plan is to put three warheads back in the 400 operational Minuteman III ICBMs in the US’ arsenal. To this end a validation test had to be performed, yet a 2023 launch failed. So far it appears that this new launch has succeeded.

Although the three warheads in this November 5 launch were not nuclear warheads but rather Joint Test Assemblies, one of them contained more than just instrumentation to provide flight telemetry. In order to test the delivery vehicle more fully a so-called ‘high-fidelity’ JTA was also used which is assembled much like a real warhead, including explosives. The only difference being that no nuclear material is present, just surrogate materials to create a similar balance as the full warhead.

Assuming the many gigabytes of test data checks out these Minuteman III ICBMs should be ready to serve well into the 2030s at which point the much-delayed LGM-35 Sentinel should take over.

Z80 Testing The 80s Way

November 12, 2024 by 23 Comments

According to [MTSI], if you used a Z80 chip back in the 1980s, it almost certainly passed through the sole Fairchild Sentry 610 system that gave it the seal of approval.

The Sentry was big iron for its day. The CPU was a 24-bit device and ran at a blistering 250 kHz. Along with a tape drive and a specialized test bed, it could test Z80s, F8s, and other Mostek products of the day. There was a disk drive, too. The 26-inch platters stored under 10 kilobytes. Despite the relatively low speed of the CPU, the Sentry could test devices running up to 10 MHz, which was plenty for the CPUs it was testing. The actual test interface ran at 11 MHz and used an exotic divider to generate slower frequencies.

According to the post, an informal count of the number of chips in the device came up with around 60,000. That, as you might expect, took a huge power supply, too.

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A Handheld Replica Sound Voltex Game

November 11, 2024 by No comments

Sound Voltex is a music game from Konami; in fact, it’s a whole series of arcade games! [Luke] is a big fan, so decided to build a hardware handheld to play the Unnamed Sound Voltex Clone.  No—Voltex is not a typo, that’s the name.

If you’re unfamiliar, the Unnamed SDVX Clone is basically a community-built game that’s inspired by the original Konami titles. [Luke] decided to build a handheld console for playing the game, which is more akin to the arcade experience versus playing it on a desktop computer.

[Luke’s] build relies on a Raspberry Pi 4B, which donates its considerable processing power and buckets of RAM to the project. The Pi was installed into a 3D-printed case with a battery pack, touchscreen, and speakers, along with multiple arcade buttons  and rotary encoders for controlling the game. Booting the Pi and clicking the icon on the desktop starts up the Unnamed Sound Voltex Clone. The game itself will be fairly familiar to any rhythm game player, though it’s a tough more sophisticated than Audiosurf. [Luke] demonstrates the gameplay on YouTube, and the finished project looks great.

We always love seeing handheld hacks, from PlayStations that never were to retro DIY creations. Video after the break.

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Photo manipulation of Skynet-1A hovering a planet

Britain’s Oldest Satellite On The Move: A Space Curiosity

November 11, 2024 by 9 Comments

Space and mystery always spark our curiosity, so when we stumbled upon the story of Skynet-1A, Britain’s first communication satellite from 1969, we knew it was worth exploring. The BBC recently highlighted its unexpected movement across the sky – you can check out their full coverage here. The idea that this half-century-old hunk of metal mysteriously shifted orbits leaves us with more questions than answers. Who moved Skynet-1A, and why?

Launched just months after the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Skynet-1A stood as a symbol of Cold War innovation, initially placed above East Africa to support British military communications. But unlike the silent drift of inactive satellites heading naturally eastward, Skynet-1A defied orbital norms, popping up halfway across the globe above the Americas. This wasn’t mere chance; someone or something had made it fire its thrusters, likely in the mid-1970s.

Experts like Dr. Stuart Eves and UCL’s Rachel Hill suggest the possibility of control being temporarily transferred to the US, particularly during maintenance periods at the UK’s RAF Oakhanger. Still, the specifics remain buried in lost records and decades-old international collaborations. Skynet-1A’s journey serves as a stark reminder of the persistent challenges in space and the gaps in our historical data.

Looking for more space oddities? Hackaday has some interesting articles on space debris. You can read the original BBC article here.