Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Gaming Typewriter

June 17, 2025 by 3 Comments

Can you teach an old typewriter new tricks? You can, at least if you’re [maniek-86]. And a word to all you typewriter fanatics out there — this Optima SP 26 was beyond repair, lacking several internal parts.

A sleek typewriter with a monitor and a mouse.
Image by [maniek-86] via reddit
But the fully available keyboard was a great start for a gaming typewriter. So [maniek-86] crammed in some parts that were just laying around unused, starting with a micro-ATX motherboard.

But let’s talk about the keyboard. It has a standard matrix, which [maniek-86] hooked up to an Arduino Lenoardo. Although the keyboard has a Polish layout, [maniek-86] remapped it to English-US layout.

As you’ll see in the photos of the internals, this whole operation required careful Tetris-ing of the components to avoid overheating and ensure the cover could go back on.

The graphics were a bit of a challenge, since the motherboard had no PCI-E x16 slot. To address this, [maniek-86] used a riser cable, probably connected to a PCI-E x1 slot with an adapter, in order to use an NVIDIA GT 635 GPU. It can’t run AAA games at 4k, but you can bet that it’ll play Minecraft, Fortnite, or Dota 2 just fine.

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A DIY Version Of The Franck-Hertz Experiment

June 17, 2025 by 5 Comments

The Franck–Hertz experiment was a pioneering physics observation announced in 1914 which explained that energy came in “packets” which we call “quanta”, marking the beginning of quantum physics. Recently, [Markus Bindhammer] wrote in to let us know he had redone the experiment for himself.

In the original experiment a mercury vacuum tube was used, but in his recreation of the experiment [Markus] uses a cheaper argon tube. He still gets the result he is looking for though, which is quite remarkable. If you watch the video you will see the current readings clump around specific voltage levels. These voltage levels indicate that energy is quantized, which was a revolutionary idea at the time. If you’re interested in how contemporary physics regards, particles, waves, and quanta, check out this excellent presentation: But What Actually Is a Particle? How Quantum Fields Shape Reality.

Before closing we have to say that the quality of [Markus]’s build was exceptional. He made a permanent enclosure for his power supplies, made custom PCBs, used ferrule crimps for all his wire interconnects, included multiple power switches and dials, professionally labeled and insulated everything, and even went to the trouble of painting the box! Truly a first class build. One thing that surprised us though was his use of rivets where we would almost certainly have used bolts or screws… talk about confidence in your workmanship!

If you’re interested in quantum physics it is certainly a topic we have covered here at Hackaday. Check out Quantum Mechanics And Negative Time With Photon-Atom Interactions or Shedding Light On Quantum Measurement With Calcite.

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A Gentle Introduction To Ncurses For The Terminally Impatient

June 17, 2025 by 24 Comments

Considered by many to be just a dull output for sequential text, the command-line terminal is a veritable canvas to the creative software developer. With the cursor as the brush, entire graphical user interfaces can be constructed, or even a basic text-based dashboard on which values can be updated without redrawing the entire screen over and over, or opting for a much heavier solution like a GUI.

Ncurses is one of the most well-known and rather portable Terminal User Interface (TUI) libraries using that such cursor control, and more, can be achieved in a fairly painless manner. That said, for anyone coming from a graphical user interface framework, the concepts and terminology with ncurses and similar can be confusingly different yet overlapping, so that getting started can be somewhat harrowing.

In this article we’ll take a look at ncurses’ history, how to set it up and how to use it with C and C++, and many more languages supported via bindings.

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How Discord Was Ported To Windows 95 And NT 3.1

June 17, 2025 by 26 Comments

On the desktop, most people use the official HTML and JavaScript-based client for Discord in either a browser or a still-smells-like-a-browser Electron package. Yet what if there was a way to use a third-party client and even run it on Windows XP, Windows 95, and NT 3.1? This is exactly what [iDontProgramInCpp] did with their Discord Messenger project.

Fortunately, as a web ‘app’ the Discord API is readily accessible and they don’t seem to be in a rush to ban third-party clients. But it did require a bit of work to add newer versions of TLS encryption to Windows XP and older. Fortunately OpenSSL still supports these older platforms, so this was not a major hurdle and Windows XP happily ran this new Discord client. That left porting to older Windows versions.

Most of the challenge lies in writing shims for API calls that do not exist on these older platforms when backporting software from Windows XP to older Windows versions, and GCC (MinGW) had to be used instead of MSVC, but this also was a relatively minor detail. Finally, Windows NT 3.1 was picked as the last challenge for Discord Messenger, which ran into MSVCRT runtime issues and required backporting features to the NT 3.1 version that was still part of the OS back then.

[MattKC] covers the project in a recent video, as well as the AeroChat client which targets Windows Live Messenger fans.  Hopefully the API that allows these projects to operate doesn’t get locked down, as third-party clients like these bring their own unique advantages to the Discord ecosystem.

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Robot Dinosaur YOLOs Colors And Shapes For Kids

June 17, 2025 by 1 Comment

YOLO can mean many things, but in the context of [be_riddickulous]’s AI Talking Robot Dinosaur it refers to the “You Only Look Once” YOLOv11 object-detection algorithm by Ultralytics, the method by which this adorable dino recognizes colors and shapes to teach them to children.

If you’re new to using YOLO or object recognition more generally, [be_riddiculous]’s tutorial is not a bad place to get started. She goes through how many images you’ll need and what types to get the shape-and-color recognition needed for this project, as well as how to annotate them and train the model, either locally or in the cloud.

The project itself is an adorable paper-mache dinosaur with a servo-actuated mouth hiding some LEDs and a Raspberry Pi camera module to provide images. In operation, the dinosaur “talks” to children using pre-recorded voice lines, inviting them to play a game and put a specific shape, or shape of a specific color (or both) in its mouth. Then the aforementioned object detection (running on a laptop) goes “YOLO” and identifies the shape so the toy can provide feedback on the child’s choice via a speaker in the belly of the beast.

The link to the game code is currently not valid, but it looks like they used PyGame for the audio output code. A servo motor controls the mouth, but without that code it’s not entirely clear to us what it’s doing. We expect by the time you read this there’s good odds [be_riddickulous] will have fixed that link and you can see for yourself.

The only thing that holds this back from being a great toy to put in every Kindergarten class is the need to have a laptop close by to plug the webcam into. A Raspberry Pi 5 ought to have the horsepower to run YOLOv11, so with a little extra effort the whole thing could be standalone — there might even be room in there for batteries.We’ve had other hacks aimed at little ones, like a kid-friendly computer to relive the glory days of the school computer lab or one of the many iterations of the RFID jukebox idea. If you want to wow the kiddos with AI, perhaps take a look at this talking Santa plush.

Got a cool project, AI, kid-related, or otherwise? Don’t forget to toss us a tip!

Rhapsody OS is shown in its boot sequence on a monitor; the edge of the motherboard running it is just visible in the right side of the image.

Bringing An Obscure Apple Operating System To Modern Hardware

June 16, 2025 by 17 Comments

During Apple’s late-90s struggles with profitability, it made a few overtures toward licensing its software to other computer manufacturers, while at the same time trying to modernize its operating system, which was threatening to slip behind Windows. While Apple eventually scrapped their licensing plans, an interesting product of the situation was Rhapsody OS. Although Apple was still building PowerPC computers, Rhapsody also had compatibility with Intel processors, which [Omores] put to good use by running it on a relatively modern i7-3770 CPU.

[Omores] selected a Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3-B3 motherboard because it supports IDE emulation for SATA drives, a protocol which Rhapsody requires. The operating system installer needs to run from two floppy disks, one for boot and one for drivers. The Gigabyte motherboard doesn’t support a floppy disk drive, so [Omores] used an older Asus P5E motherboard with a floppy drive to install Rhapsody onto an SSD, then transferred the SSD to the Gigabyte board. The installation initially had a kernel panic during installation caused by finding too much memory available. Limiting the physical RAM available to the OS by setting the maxmem value solved this issue.

After this, the graphical installation went fairly smoothly. A serial mouse was essential here, since Rhapsody doesn’t support USB. It detected the video card immediately, and eventually worked with one of [Omores]’s ethernet cards. [Omores] also took a brief look at Rhapsody’s interface. By default, there were no graphical programs for web browsing, decompressing files, or installing programs, so some command line work was necessary to install applications. Of course, the highlight of the video was the installation of a Doom port (RhapsoDoom).

This isn’t the first obscure Apple operating system we’ve seen; some of them have even involved updates to Apple’s original releases. We’ve also seen people build Apple hardware.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip!

History Of Forgotten Moon Bases

June 16, 2025 by 37 Comments

If you were alive when 2001: A Space Odyssey was in theaters, you might have thought it didn’t really go far enough. After all, in 1958, the US launched its first satellite. The first US astronaut went up in 1961. Eight years later, Armstrong put a boot on the moon’s surface. That was a lot of progress for 11 years. The movie came out in 1968, so what would happen in 33 years? Turns out, not as much as you would have guessed back then. [The History Guy] takes us through a trip of what could have been if progress had marched on after those first few moon landings. You can watch the video below.

The story picks up way before NASA. Each of the US military branches felt like it should take the lead on space technology. Sputnik changed everything and spawned both ARPA and NASA. The Air Force, though, had an entire space program in development, and many of the astronauts for that program became NASA astronauts.

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