The Seductive Pull Of An Obsolete Home Movie Format

December 15, 2021 by 53 Comments

It’s dangerous for a hardware hacker to go into a second-hand store. I was looking for a bed frame for my new apartment, but of course I spent an age browsing all the other rubbish treasures on offer. I have a rough rule of thumb: if it’s not under a tenner and fits in one hand, then it has to be exceptional for me to buy it, so I passed up on a nice Grundig reel-to-reel from the 1960s and instead came away with a folding Palm Pilot keyboard and a Fuji 8mm home movie camera after I’d arranged delivery for the bed. On those two I’d spent little more than a fiver, so I’m good. The keyboard is a serial device that’s a project for a rainy day, but the camera is something else. I’ve been keeping an eye out for one to use for a Raspberry Pi camera conversion, and this one seemed ideal. But once I examined it more closely, I was drawn into an unexpected train of research that shed some light on what must of been real objects of desire for my parents generation.

A Thrift Store Find Opens A Whole New Field

One f the surprises comes in just how small this thing is.
One of the surprises comes in just how small this thing is.

The Fuji P300 from 1972 is typical among consumer movie cameras of the day. It takes the form of a film magazine with a zoom lens assembly on its front, a reflex viewfinder on its side, and a handle with a shutter trigger button on it protruding vertically below the magazine and also housing the batteries.

Surprisingly it still has a mercury cell that would have powered its light meter; a minor annoyance to dispose of this correctly. Sometimes these devices had clockwork motors, but this one has an electric motor. It also has a light sensor that is coupled to some kind of electromechanical aperture. It would have been an expensive camera when it was new, probably as much of a purchase as an SLR or a decent mirrorless camera here in 2021.

The surprise came when I opened it up, for it looked like no other 8mm camera I had seen. I’m familiar wit the two reels of a Standard 8 or the boxy cassette of Super 8, but this one used something different. That film magazine is made to fit a compact twin-reel cartridge whose film fits in a metal film gate. This is a Single 8 camera, Fuji’s entry in the all-in-one 8 mm film market, and a format I never knew existed. To explain my unexpected discovery it was necessary to delve into the world of home movie formats in the decade before videotape arrived and drove them out. Continue reading “The Seductive Pull Of An Obsolete Home Movie Format” →

You Can Always Use An ATtiny Instead Of A 555

December 15, 2021 by 62 Comments

It’s a constant of writing for Hackaday, that whenever a project appears using a 555 timer, someone will say “You could have used a microcontroller to do that!”. It’s something that [Shranav Palakurthi] has approached with the ATTiny555, a project that emulates an entire 555 by making clever use of the humble and ubiquitous microcontroller chip. We’ve all been guilty of it at some time, but now at last the ATTiny85 enthusiasts have conclusive proof that their favourite piece of cheap silicon can prove its mettle.

The full details of the ingenious 555 replacement can be found in its GitHub repository, and for those willing to take the plunge it’s as simple as adding a resistor and updating the firmware. It’s not the perfect 555 replacement with its imperfect analogue performance and swapped reset and ground pins, but it does however bring the advantage of a lower supply voltage.

You can see the device in action in the YouTube video below the break, but meanwhile rejoice that finally there’s a way to replace all those unnecessary 555s with your favourite inexpensive 8-pin chip!

While we’re on the subject of the 555, don’t forget we’re running our 555 contest again.

Continue reading “You Can Always Use An ATtiny Instead Of A 555” →

Google’s T-Rex Game Ported To The ESP32

December 15, 2021 by 3 Comments

Most Chrome users will have come across a neat little Easter egg when their Internet connection has gone down – a game known as “T-Rex” where a dinosaur must be jumped over cactii. Whether or not this is accurate in terms of the evolutionary timeline, it’s a bit of fun, and Volos Projects educator [Danko Bertović] decided to port the game to the ESP32.

The game runs on the LILYGO TTGO T-Display development board, which pairs the powerful microcontroller with a 1.14-inch color LCD. His clone goes as far as authentically replicating the “No Internet” page from within Google Chrome, before kicking into the game at the press of a tactile button.

The game is built using a sprite-based engine, which enables gameplay with a minimum of flickering on the screen. Transparency is included to stop the sprites from occluding other screen elements unnecessarily. [Danko] hasn’t yet released a full tutorial on using sprites on the ESP32, but code is available for your own digestion.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen [Danko]’s ESP32 games, as he’s developed a few over the years. Others have gone so far as coding 8-bit emulators for the platform. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Google’s T-Rex Game Ported To The ESP32” →

A Slim 7400 Logic VGA Board For All Your Retro Needs

December 14, 2021 by 10 Comments

Over the years we’ve seen a number of hackers generate VGA with 74xx logic chips, but they’ve generally not been the most practical of builds. Often put together as part of a competition or purely for the challenge, these circuits are usually implemented in a mass of jumper wires and often take up multiple breadboards. Not exactly something you can toss in a drawer when you’re done with it.

But the Vectron VGA Plus, created by prolific hacker [Nick Bild], manages to improve on things considerably. Designed specifically to be smaller and simpler than its predecessors, the custom PCB contains far fewer chips than we’re used to seeing for this kind of thing. At the same time it provides a handy header row along the bottom that allows the user to connect whatever they’re working on, from microcontrollers to retro computers.

When your breadboard looks like this, it’s time for a PCB.

It looks like the PCB could still be shrunk down considerably if you’re really looking to maximize desk space, but we imagine for his purposes, [Nick] felt this was more than compact enough. Especially when you look at what the same circuit looked like during the breadboard phase. Yikes.

So, what did it take to simplify this 640 x 480 VGA interface? The short answer is adding more RAM. Wherever possible, dedicated hardware was replaced with software operations that could be performed by the externally connected device. [Nick] has provided some sample code for the Arduino that lets the microcontroller push data into the board’s memory and take control.

We can trace the origins of this project back a few years, to when [Nick] was working on adding an LCD to his homebrew 6502 computer. A few months later he put together the earlier version of this board, the Vectron VGA, before switching gears and handing VGA generation duty over to a FPGA. We’re excited to see the next evolution of this project, and given the track record of this particular hacker, we shouldn’t have to wait long before it hits our inbox.

A Programming Language To Express Programming Frustration

December 14, 2021 by 26 Comments

Programming can be a frustrating endeavor. Certainly we’ve all had moments, such as forgetting punctuation in C or messing up whitespace in Python. Even worse, an altogether familiar experience is making a single change to a program that should have resulted in a small improvement but instead breaks the program. Now, though, there’s a programming language that can put these frustrations directly into the code itself into a cathartic, frustration-relieving syntax. The language is called AHHH and it’s quite a scream.

While it may not look like it on the surface, the language is Turing complete and can be used just like any other programming language. The only difference is that there are only 16 commands in this language which are all variants of strings of four capital- or lower-case-H characters. The character “A” in the command “AHHH” starts the program, and from there virtually anything can be coded as a long, seemingly unending scream. The programming language is loosely related to COW which uses various “moos” to create programs instead of screams, and of course is also distantly related to brainfuck which was an esoteric programming language created in order to have the smallest possible compiler.

We can’t really recommend that beginner programmers start to learn this language instead of something more practical like Python, esoteric languages like these can teach us a lot about the way that computers work. This language, for example, lets you code in pixels instead of characters. Others are more for fun such as this language which turns your code into an ’80s rock ballad.

Thanks to [Kyle F] for the tip!

PCB internal bodge

PCB Microsurgery Puts The Bodges Inside The Board

December 14, 2021 by 23 Comments

We all make mistakes, and there’s no shame in having to bodge a printed circuit board to fix a mistake. Most of us are content with cutting a trace or two with an Xacto or adding a bit of jumper wire to make the circuit work. Very few of us, however, will decide to literally do our bodges inside the PCB itself.

The story is that [Andrew Zonenberg] was asked to pitch in debugging some incredibly small PCBs for a prototype dev board that plugs directly into a USB jack. The six-layer boards are very dense, with a forest of blind vias. The Twitter thread details the debugging process, which ended up finding a blind via on layer two shorted to a power rail, and another via shorted to ground. It also has some beautiful shots of [Andrew]’s “mechanical tomography” method of visualizing layers by slowly grinding down the surface of the board.

[Andrew] has only tackled one of the bodges at the time of writing, but it has to be seen to be believed. It started with milling away the PCB to get access to the blind via using a ridiculously small end mill. The cavity [Andrew] milled ended up being only about 480 μm by 600 μm and only went partially through a 0.8-mm thick board, but it was enough to resolve the internal short and add an internal bodge to fix a trace that was damaged during milling. The cavity was then filled up with epoxy resin to stabilize the repair.

This kind of debugging and repair skill just boggles the mind. It reminds us a bit of these internal chip-soldering repairs, but taken to another level entirely. We can’t wait to see what the second repair looks like, and whether the prototype for this dev board can be salvaged.

Thanks to [esclear] for the heads up on this one.

Fabulous Flexure Mechanism Makes For Resetting Cat Calendar

December 14, 2021 by 18 Comments

When we met [Amy Makes Stuff] at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference, we were immediately impressed with the array of flexure mechanisms displayed on a board hanging around her neck. That must be where we saw [Amy]’s original version of the cat calendar — a simple way to know for sure whether the shared house’s cat has been fed once, twice, or not at all on a given day.

Left: a simple flexure that gets heavily stressed when actuated. Right: a slightly more complicated flexure that uses less force.

Awesome as it is, the flexure mechanism doesn’t reset the yes/no indicators when the day clicks over — that has to be done manually. So when [Amy] was offered to try a small desktop CNC, she decided it was time to make a new version that resets automatically. Check it out in the video after the break, which also includes an exploration of [Amy]’s choice of flexure design as well as a bonus review of the CNC.

This is just an all-around great video, especially after [Amy] neglected to mill out the check marks and circles, sending her down a rabbit hole of attempting to make branding bits for these that could be chucked into a soldering iron. Unfortunately, the mill stops short of having the necessary mettle for milling metal.

Although [Amy] is likely known for her flexures, she has a ton of skills. Remember when she resurrected that burned and bubbled laser cutter? Or the time she machined a honing jig for hand-sharpening chisels and planes?

Continue reading “Fabulous Flexure Mechanism Makes For Resetting Cat Calendar” →