Sony VTR with replacement foam brushes

Resurrecting A 1960’s VTR With Foam

February 18, 2016 by 12 Comments

Nearly fifty years back, Sony launched the DVC-2400, their first consumer grade video camera. This unit weighed in at 10 pounds, and recorded only 20 minutes of footage per reel. It left something to be desired for $1250, or nearly $9000 in today’s dollars.

[NeXT] got his hands on one of these camera kits, and began bringing it back to life. While all the pieces were included, the Video Tape Recorder (VTR), which is used to play back the footage, didn’t power up. A little poking found a dead transistor. After determining a modern replacement part, the voltages checked out. However, the drum still wasn’t spinning.

Further disassembly found that the drum’s DC motor was made on the cheap, using a foam instead of springs to apply pressure on the brushes. This foam had worn out and lost its springy qualities, so no electrical contact was made. New foam was cut out as a replacement. Once reassembled, the drum spun successfully. After some adjustment, the VTR was running at the correct speed once again.

With this working, the VTR should be ready to go. However, camera still isn’t working, so we’re awaiting a part 2.

5D Glass Disc Can Store 360TB!

February 18, 2016 by 154 Comments

There’s a small subset of hackers out there concerned with the end of the world. What if our entire existence vanished? How would an alien race learn not to do what we did, what resulted in our demise? We’ve all heard of laser etching metal disks with the Bible, accounts of history, and even just names — pretty sure we’ve sent quite a few into space. But researchers at the University of Southampton’s Optical Research Center have come up with an even superior storage method. They call it the 5D Disc.

According to the researchers, each disc could hold a theoretical 360TB. They can withstand temperatures of up to 1000C, and it’s believe that they could last up to 13.8 billion years at room temperature without degrading — if that’s true, our sun would be long dead before the disc degraded! Continue reading “5D Glass Disc Can Store 360TB!” →

TV Control With Hand Gestures

February 17, 2016 by 12 Comments

The cell phones of yesteryear were covered in buttons. Today’s cell phones are mostly a touch display with maybe one or two buttons. As time marches on, we find ourselves using our fingers more for gestures and swipes than button pushing to control our devices. Sadly, the television remote has been stuck in an antiquated state and most are still covered in archaic buttons.

[Frederick] has decided to dig the TV remote out from the stone age and updated it to use simple gestures for control. We’ve seen gesture control before, but this one is certainly the most elegant. He’s using a Raspberry Pi with a Skywriter HAT gesture recognition board. The driver is super easy to install and can be done in a single command line. The Skywriter hat interpreters the hand gesture and the Pi fires the appropriate signal via an IR emitter. This approach made the project fairly simple to put together, with surprisingly good results.

Be sure to check out his blog for all code needed, and take a look at the video below to see the remote in action.
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All This Bike Needs Is Some Snow!

February 17, 2016 by 12 Comments

It’s safe to say that the southern UK is not known for its winter snowfall. If you have lived through a British February then the chances are you’ll know a lot about rain and grey skies.

Happily this hasn’t deterred [Stuart]. Ever the optimist, he’s turned a pile of scrap metal and an unloved mountain bike into a fully functional ski-bike, and he’s just ready to go should the jet stream deliver a covering of the white stuff on the Thames Valley.

Using the facilities of rLab – Reading Makerspsce (he’s also a founder member of the up-and-coming Newbury and District Hackspace), [Stuart] didn’t just bodge together his “iCycle”. Instead he’s made it a really high quality build, with CNC’d aluminium fork stanchions to mount his skis, and foot pegs that are engineered not to let him down on the slopes. Best of all, the bike is nearly all made from scrap materials, only the bearings, axles and paint were brought in for the project.

Skiing hasn’t been featured very often in our coverage of the world of makers, however we have featured a skiing robot, back in 2009.

Musical Shades

February 17, 2016 by 17 Comments

There are only so many blinking light patterns you can create with a microcontroller before you get bored. [Garrett] apparently felt that way and decided to build a music-driven LED display on some LED shades. The system has three main elements: a microphone, a preamp, and a 7-band spectrum analyzer chip. You can see the results in the video below.

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The Voice Recognition Typewriter

February 17, 2016 by 29 Comments

Typewriters with voice recognition have existed for over one hundred years; they were called secretaries. Robots are taking all the jobs now, and finally dictation and typing is a job that can be handled by a computer. [Zip Zaps] used an old Smith Corona typewriter to automate the process of turning dictation into print. Like a secretary hunched over an anachronistic IBM Selectric in the first season of Mad Men, this robot will take dictation and accept the overt sexism of a 1960s Manhattan ad agency.

Instead of the machinations of a few biological actuators, this typewriter is controlled with an array of servos driven by Pololu Maestro servo controller. There are twelve servos that move a small actuator down onto the keys, and another twelve servos that move the others above the correct row of the keyboard. The carriage return lever is actuated by a stepper motor, linear rail, and giant plastic lever.

While a robot that can use a typewriter is impressive, the real trick is getting it to take dictation. [Zip Zaps] used the built-in voice recognition found in Windows for this, streaming characters over a serial port to the Arduino-based electronics.

Does it work? Yes, surprisingly it does. Is it useful? Well, typewriters naturally have a cleaner, more analog tone about them, and you can’t replicate the typing experience of an old Smith Corona typewriter with a digital format. This build is just the natural extension of what digital electronics are capable of these days, and we look forward to seeing someone with this amazing device in our local Starbucks.

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FAXing In 1843

February 17, 2016 by 21 Comments

By 2016, it is evident the FAX machine has peaked. Sure, you still see a few. There are even services that will let you send and receive FAXes via Internet–which could mean no FAX machine was involved at all. But looking back, you have to wonder where it all started. Most people had never seen a FAX machine until the late 1960s or early 1970s. It was 1980 before there was a standard. Some, like hams and weather service employees, were using them even earlier. But would it surprise you to know that the first experimental FAX machine appeared in 1843?

Wait a minute. Bell didn’t even build a telephone until 1875 (the patent issued in 1876). Turns out the first FAX machines didn’t work with a phone. They worked over a telegraph wire.

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