The Computer Of Yesterday, Today

June 27, 2017 by 16 Comments

There are a handful of computers that have become true museum pieces. The Altair, of course, is tucked away in the Smithsonian’s warehouse waiting for some time in the future when Apple’s legacy fades or until there’s a remake of War Games. Likewise, the French Micral and American SCELBI are important historical artifacts, and even a modern component-accurate reproduction of an Apple I could fetch a decent amount of cash at the right auction.

There’s something special about these old kit computers – even though the instructions for these machines provided volumes of documentation, no one is building these machines anymore. You just can’t buy the PCBs, and sourcing period-correct components is hard. [Brad] is an exception. He found original, untouched PCBs for the cover story of the July, 1974 edition of Radio-Electronics. It’s an unbuilt Mark-8 minicomputer. Now [Brad] is in a position no one else has been in since the 1970s: he can build a vintage minicomputer, with a TV Typewriter, from scratch. He’s documenting the whole thing.

Since this is the first opportunity this century anyone has had to build a truly retro minicomputer, [Brad] is going all-in with this project. For an interface, he’s building [Don Lancaster]’s TV Typewriter, a device introduced in the September 1973 issue Radio-Electronics. When combined with an old CRT TV, the TV Typewriter becomes a serial terminal. While today something like this could be built around a single microcontroller, constructing the TV Typewriter is no small feat: it’s spread across four boards, uses character generator ROMs, and is currently housed in a beautiful red oak case.

Just because [Brad] is building an ancient computer using ancient parts doesn’t mean he can’t get a little help from modern technology. He’s applying white silk screen to his custom TV Typewriter boards using the toner transfer process. Yes, apparently you can get toner cartridges filled with white (and neon!) toner, and this works well enough to replicate the look of professionally silk screened boards.

This is one of the greatest retrocomputing projects we’ve seen in a very long time. This is a true retrocomputer, complete with custom transformers and gigantic linear power supplies. When this project is complete, [Brad] will have a museum piece, all thanks to a lucky find of an eBay auction and a lot of hard work.

The PDP-1: The Machine That Started Hacker Culture

June 27, 2017 by 32 Comments

One of my bucket list destinations is the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California — I know, I aim high. I’d be chagrined to realize that my life has spanned a fair fraction of the Information Age, but I think I’d get a kick out of seeing the old machines, some of which I’ve actually laid hands on. But the machines I’d most like to see are the ones that predate me, and the ones that contributed to the birth of the hacker culture in which I and a lot of Hackaday regulars came of age.

If you were to trace hacker culture back to its beginning, chances are pretty good that the machine you’d find at the root of it all is the Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-1. That’s a tall claim for a machine that was introduced in 1959 and only sold 53 units, compared to contemporary offerings from IBM that sold tens of thousands of units. And it’s true that the leading edge of the explosion of digital computing in the late 50s and early 60s was mainly occupied by “big iron” machines, and that mainframes did a lot to establish the foundations for all the advances that were to come.

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CastAR Shuts Doors

June 27, 2017 by 100 Comments

Polygon reports CastAR is no more.

CastAR is the brainchild of renaissance woman [Jeri Ellsworth], who was hired by Valve to work on what would eventually become SteamVR. Valve let [Jeri] go, but allowed her to take her invention with her. [Jeri] founded a new company, Technical Illusions, with [Rick Johnson] and over the past few years the CastAR has appeared everywhere from Maker Faires to venues better focused towards innovative technologies.

In 2013, Technical Illusions got its start with a hugely successful Kickstarter, netting just north of one million dollars. This success drew the attention of investors and eventually led to a funding round of $15 million. With this success, Technical Illusions decided to refund the backers of its Kickstarter.

We’ve taken a look a CastAR in the past, and it’s something you can only experience first-hand. Unlike the Oculus, Google Cardboard, or any of the other VR plays companies are coming out with, CastAR is an augmented reality system that puts computer-generated objects in a real, physical setting. Any comparison between CastAR and a VR system is incomplete; these are entirely different systems with entirely different use cases. Think of it as the ultimate table top game, or the coolest D&D game you could possibly imagine.

Tiniest Control Board Fits Inside An N-Gauge Model Train

June 27, 2017 by 18 Comments

[kodera2t] discovered the VL53L0X Time of Flight sensor and thought it would make a great way to control the operation of a model train without touching it. He explains it in his own words in the demo video.

The sensor was small enough for an N-gauge train, which translates to 1:148 scale or about 9mm from rail to rail. His idea was to build a tiny control board that could fit inside the locomotive: 10mm by 40mm. His board consists of the ToF sensor, an ATMega328P-MMH, USB-serial, and a Texas Instruments DRV8830 motor driver. he powers the board via the 6V running through the track.

Right now [kodera2t]’s using the ToF as sort of a gestural controller to get the train to start rolling, but one could imagine the sensor could be incorporated into more advanced programming, like having the train speed up on straightaways and slow down on a curve, based on the height of the bridge over it.

We’ve published a bunch of [kodera2t]’s tiny circuit board projects here on Hackaday, including the smallest basic computer, his minimal frequency counter, and his VFD amplifier.

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Using Machine Learning To Cut Down Surgical Videos

June 26, 2017 by 5 Comments

Recording video of medical surgeries is a great way to both educate doctors in training and identify process improvements. However, surgeries can be very time consuming, and it can be a gargantuan task to sort through endless hours of video searching for relevant points where the action happens. To tackle this issue, researchers at MIT have used machine learning techniques to analyse videos of surgical procedures.

There’s some fairly serious mathematics behind this sort of videographic analysis.

The machine learning algorithm needed to be trained to identify the relevant parts of surgical videos. To do this, the laparoscopic surgeries being investigated were split up into distinct stages, each relating to a different part of the surgical process. Researchers would then watch recordings of prior surgeries and mark the start of each stage. This data was used to train the model which was then used to sift through other recordings to capture the key moments of each surgery.

The time-saving advantages of such technology could be applied to a great many fields – such an algorithm could be put to great use to sort through hours of uneventful security footage looking for anomalies, or rapidly cut together holiday footage so you only have to see the good parts. We’d love to see the researchers release footage showing the algorithm’s work – thus far, all we have to go off is the project paper.

If you’re thirsty for more machine learning knowledge, read up on the state of working with neural networks in 2017.

Simple Wave Generation In Python (and SciPy)

June 26, 2017 by 15 Comments

[153Armstrong] did a short post on how easy it is to generate waveforms using Python. We agree it is simple, but actually, it isn’t so much Python per se, it is some pretty cool libraries (SciPy, in particular) that do all the hard work. That may be splitting hairs, but it is worth nothing that SciPy (pronounced “Sigh Pie”) also does other handy tricks like Fourier transforms, too. You can see a video of his results, below.

The code is simple and one of the commenters pointed out an even more efficient way to write the data to a WAV file. The basic idea is to create an array of samples in a buffer using some features of SciPy’s NumPy component.

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Ambitious ATtiny85 Board Tests A Beginner’s Skills

June 26, 2017 by 31 Comments

[Chris O’Riley] has been playing around with Arduinos for around a year, and decided he wanted a breadboardable ATtiny85 in order to prototype using the actual controller that would be used in the final project. He wants to use it to interface with a Bosch BMP280 pressure sensor, but for now it stands alone.

It’s a simple board with the Tiny85, 3.3 V and 5 V regulators, a power LED, as well as the usual resistors and caps [Ed: not resistor sand caps]. The double-sided PCB [Chris] milled himself — he’s an illustrator and photographer by day, so it’s no surprise the board turned out gorgeous. He designed the board in Illustrator after taking a stab at Eagle, then ran it through his CNC to mill the circuits using a .017 inch end mill as well as drilling the vias. He add solder paste using the tip of a knife, but after messing around with an iron, he ended up investing in a hot air rework station.

We love our Tiny85s here on Hackaday. Check out the ATtiny85 gaming console, the NTSC-generating ATTiny85, and making DIY I2C devices with the chip.