Retrotechtacular: [Walt] Builds A Family Fallout Shelter

November 9, 2016 by Jenny List 114 Comments

In the 1950s it seemed likely that the Cold War could at any minute take a turn for the worse, and we might all be consumed in the fiery conflagration of nuclear war. Fortunately neither the leaders on our side of the fence nor those on the other were the dangerous unpredictable lunatics their opponent’s propaganda might have portrayed them as, and instead we continued on our way uneasily gazing at each other over the Iron Curtain.

For civilian America, the Government created a series of promotional efforts to prepare them for the effects of nuclear war and equip them with the means to survive. Some of them like the infamous “Duck and cover” film seem quaint and woefully inadequate when viewed with several decades hindsight, but others tried hard to equip the 1950s American with what looked like the real means to survive.

Our film below the break today is part of one such effort. The Family Fallout Shelter was a booklet produced in 1959 by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, and it described in detail the construction of a series of fallout shelters of differing designs. There was a concrete underground shelter, a partially buried twin-wall shelter with infill, and the one shown in the film, a basement fallout shelter made from concrete blocks. Our narrator and protagonist is [Walt], a capable bespectacled middle-aged man in a check shirt who takes us through the shelter’s construction.

We start with him giving some friends a tour of the finished shelter, and we see its cozy furnished interior with bunk beds and all mod cons. We’re told it would make a useful extra spare bedroom, or a darkroom. Then we flash back to construction as [Walt] takes us through all the steps required to build your own basement shelter. As he says, it’s a project that could be attempted by almost anyone, and what follows is a pretty good introduction to basic bricklaying. We can’t help being concerned about the security of those unmortared roof blocks in the face of a Tsar Bomba, but fortunately they were never put to the test. We do find it amusing that this is presented by the National Concrete Masonry Association — how better to boost sales than get the populace to build extra brick walls in every home?

The film and booklet provide a fascinating window into some of the culture surrounding preparations for nuclear war in the early Cold War era. The ideas that it would be survivable, and that two weeks in a home-made fallout shelter would be sufficient to ensure that civilians would be safe are in stark contrast to the then-secret deep shelters and long-term survival plans that the governments of the time created for themselves. It would be interesting to know how many of these home shelters were built, and how many survive. Did you ever spend a night in a basement spare bedroom with a blast wall?

We’ll leave you with the film’s closing words from the Director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization.

“No home in America is modern without a family fallout shelter. This is the nuclear age.“

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Resurrection — Pressing WW2 Radio Equipment Back Into Service

November 9, 2016 by Gregory L. Charvat 37 Comments

Mass production was key to survival during the Second World War. So much stuff was made that there continues to be volumes of new unpacked stuff left over and tons of used equipment for sale at reasonable prices. Availability of this war surplus provided experimenters in the mid 20th century with access to high performance test equipment, radio equipment, and high quality components for the first time.

Even today this old stuff continues to motivate and inspire the young generations because of its high build quality, unique electro-mechanical approaches, and overall innovative designs which continue to be relevant into the 21st century. In this post we will show you how to get started in the hobby of resurrecting WW2 radio equipment and putting it back on the air.

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A Pipe Organ For The MIDI Generation

November 9, 2016 by Jenny List 20 Comments

If you are a musician and you are also a Hackaday reader, there’s a good chance you’ll own at least one MIDI instrument. A synthesizer of some description, maybe a keyboard, or perhaps a drum machine. A pipe organ? Probably not.

If you answer to the name of [Wendell Kapustiak] though, you’d say yes to that question. He’s built himself a beautiful pipe organ from scratch, with hand-tuned wooden pipes, and for a modern touch he’s made it MIDI controlled. An Arduino Due sends its commands to a set of solenoid drivers, the solenoids then control the air flow from his wind chest through a set of plastic tubes to his organ pipes. Air supply comes from a shop vac in a sound-insulated box, with a pressure regulating chamber. The result is not perfect, he believes that the pipes are too close together and this somehow makes them difficult to tune, but to an outsider’s eye it’s a pretty impressive instrument.

[Wendell] is both a skilled and prolific maker, and his blog is rather a good read. The organ project is spread over a few years, so to get the full picture it is best to read his previous posts on the subject as well as the one first linked. He recounts his early experiments as well as giving us details of the electronics and the pipes. He’s put up a video showing the completed instrument which you can see below the break, and another more recently showing a recent one-LED-per-note modification.
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Anti-Drone Fence: Science Or Snakeoil?

November 9, 2016 by Elliot Williams 81 Comments

Remember when it was laser pointers? Well, now it’s drones.

[Thinkerer] sent us this link to what’s essentially a press release for a company called Sensofusion that makes a UAV detector and (they claim) smart jammer, and apparently one is being installed at Denver International airport.

We buy that the “Airfence” system will be able to detect known systems by signature, and possibly even take them over. We’ve seen two exploits of quadcopter radio protocols (one a timing attack and the other a controller ID spoof) that would allow them to do just that. But is that the problem? Don’t most of the major manufacturers fence off airports in software these days anyway? And are drones really the droids that you’re looking for?

They also make some claims about being able to detect and stop DIY copters, but we don’t see how. Imagine that your copter ran encrypted on 2.4 GHz. How is this different from any other WiFi signal? Or imagine that it sends and receives infrequent data in the congested pager bands? And short of jamming, we don’t see how they’re going to take down anything that they don’t already understand.

So, commenteers, how would you do it? Detect and even take over an arbitrary drone? Possible or snakeoil?

When A CRT Isn’t Retro Enough: LEDs

November 8, 2016 by Jenny List 31 Comments

When we think of an old-style computer terminal, it has a CRT screen: either one of the big 1970s VDUs with integrated keyboard, or maybe one from a later decade with more svelte styling. You would have found other displays in use in previous decades though, and one of them came our way that we think it worthy of sharing.

[Dan Julio] was given several tubes of Siemens DL1416B 4-digit 17-segment LED displays by a friend, and decided to use them as an unusual retro display for his terminal project. These devices are an alphanumeric display with a parallel interface that can show a subset of the ASCII character set as well as a cursor. He had 213 of them, so made plans for a 64 character by 16 line display, however on discovering a quantity of the parts were non-functional he had to scale back to 12 lines of 48 characters.

The displays are mounted on PCBs in groups of four, controlled by a PIC16F1459 and some shift registers. These boards are then daisy-chained via a TTL serial line. The whole display shares one of the three serial ports on a Teensy 3.1 with his retro keyboard that has its own PIC controller, the others serving a serial printer port and the terminal serial port. The Teensy software has two modes: serial terminal or a Tiny Basic interpreter, and the relevant repositories are linked from the project page.

Since each set of DL1416Bs takes 250 mA, the whole display consumes about 9 A at 5 volts. On top of that the keyboard uses another 500 mA, so a sufficiently powerful supply had to be incorporated. This is mounted along with the Teensy in a very well-made enclosure, and the whole is mounted on what looks like a surplus monitor stand for a very professional finish.

To take us through the terminal’s features he’s posted a YouTube video that we’ve placed below the break. It comes across as a surprisingly usable machine, as he logs into a Raspberry Pi and edits a file, and takes us through some features of the BASIC interpreter.

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Simple Hearing Amplifier

November 8, 2016 by Al Williams 25 Comments

Hearing aids are probably more high-tech than you think. They are tiny. They have to go through a lot of trouble to prevent feedback. They need a long battery life. The good ones match their amplification to the inverse of your hearing loss (amplifying only the bands where you don’t hear as well).

[NotionSunday] put together a hearing amplifier project that probably doesn’t hit many of those design criteria. However, thanks to a 3D printed case, it looks pretty good. The device uses a dual opamp to boost the output from two microphones and feeds it to a conventional headphone.

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The Travelling Hackerbox Is Going International

November 8, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

Over the last year, Hackaday.io has seen an incredible project. It’s a migratory box of random electronic junk, better known as the Travelling Hackerbox. The idea behind this mobile electronic surplus store is simple: receive the box, take out some cool electronic gizmos, add some of your own, and send it on to the next person on the list. It is the purest expression of the hacker aesthetic, all contained in a cardboard box.

The previous travels of the Travelling Hackerbox — The previous travels of the (second) Traveling Hackerbox

Last week, the Travelling Hackerbox appeared at the Hackaday Superconference where it was torn asunder. Its silicon and plastic innards were spilled for a badge hacking competition. The body of the box is gone from this world but the spirit lives on. Parts were collected, pins straightened, the contents of anti-static bags condensed, and now it’s time for the Travelling Hackerbox to leave the nest. It’s going down to the post office, sending in its passport application, and it’s finally heading out into far-flung lands that are not the United States.

Over the last year, and despite some jerk in Georgia, the Traveling Hackerbox has racked up the miles. From Maine to Flordia, and from Alaska to Hawaii, the Hackerbox has distributed parts to dozens of labs and workstations. If you want to get an idea of the box, the last recipient, Carl Smith, put together a great summary and photo log of what he found in this magical box.

I’ve always promised the Hackerbox would go international after racking up 25,000 miles – the distance around Earth’s equator. Now, it’s finally time. This is happening, and I’m looking for volunteers to take care of the box.

How this is going to go down

Right now, the Travelling Hackerbox is sitting at the Hackaday Overlords office in Pasadena. The next trip will be to Canada, hopefully around Vancouver, where it will eventually make it to the Maritimes. From there, the box will travel to Europe (West to East, possibly ending in Russia). The box will then travel through Africa, ending South Africa, and head over the Indian Ocean to Australia. The rest of Oceania, Southeast Asia, India, and China will be next, possibly followed by South and Central America. With any luck, the Travelling Hackerbox will arrive back at home base by next year.

Of course, this all depends on how many members of the hackaday.io community would like to receive the box and where those people are located. If you want to receive the box, ~~this is the sign-up form~~ [the sign up form is now closed]. This form will be open for the next week, afterwards I will look at the responses, consider each of them, and plan this epic trip around the world.

The current state of the box

The Travelling Hackerbox was originally based on a US Postal Service flat rate box. Because flat rate boxes are for US destinations only, the physical manifestation of the box must change. At the very least, this gives me an opportunity to laminate a new box in packing tape and reinforce the edges of the cardboard.

The new body for the Travelling Hackerbox is a 12x12x3 inch (about five liters) cardboard box, lovingly protected and reinforced with stickytape. This does reduce the overall volume of the somewhat, which required the disposal of a few parts that weren’t really cool. I assure you, nothing of great value was lost, and I only removed the larger, bulkier components I remember seeing the last time I had it.

All the coming travels will be planned next week when I get a few submissions to the international sign-up form.