Video Killed The Radio Alarm Clock

March 29, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

For decades now, MTV has been on a bizarre trajectory given its original name was an acronym for Music Television. In the original days in the 80s and 90s it kept mostly true to its name, but starting around two decades ago they expanded into reality and other non-musical television programming and have now left it largely behind. Plenty of those who grew up in its heyday have an understandable amount of nostalgia for the channel as a cultural touchstone, and [Derf] used MTV archival footage to build a video alarm clock which helps him keep in tune with the past.

To keep the appropriate 80s aesthetic, the build uses a portable TV from the late 80s with its original CRT. The video files are hosted on more modern technology though, in this case a Raspberry Pi. The Pi is set up to run a python script which launches the VLC media player with a playlist loaded with video files, in this case a long list of MTV shows. Some configuration needs to be done to get it to output to the old CRT properly which depends on the hardware used, but once that’s in place it’s ready to be used as an alarm. [Derf] is using a smart outlet to power the TV at the appropriate time, and a cron job which starts the video player simultaneously at a somewhat random point in the playlist.

As far as retro TVs go, having one as an alarm clock is certainly a novel idea. We have seen a few others in the past, though, one to play the golden age of The Simpsons, and another that recreates the nostalgia of 90s cable television complete with a preview channel and era-appropriate commercials.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 264: Cheap Minimills, 65-in-1 Electronics, And Time On Moon

March 29, 2024 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

It was Dan’s turn behind the mic with Elliot this time as we uncovered the latest from the world of hacking, and what an eclectic mix it was. It was slightly heavy on machining, with a look at mini-mills that are better than nothing, and a DIY DRO that’s A-OK. We also kicked the nostalgia bucket over — whatever that means — and got a new twist on the old “65-in-1” concept, found hidden code in 80s music, and looked at color TV in the US and how it got that way. We’ve got ample alliteration about grep, thoughts about telling time on the Moon, and what does Canada have against the poor Flipper Zero, anyway?

Grab a copy for yourself if you want to listen offline.

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Fictional Computers: Colossus And Guardian

March 28, 2024 by Al Williams 27 Comments

We can learn a lot by looking at how writers and filmmakers imagine technology. While some are closer than others, there are some definite lessons like never make a killer computer without an off switch you can reach. We are especially interested in how computers appear in books, movies, and TV shows, and so in Computers of Fiction, we want to remember with you some of our favorites. This time, we are thinking about the 1970 movie Colossus: The Forbin Project. There were actually two computers: the titular Colossus, which was an American computer, and the Guardian, a similar Soviet computer.

The Story

In the United States, Dr. Forbin has created a supercomputer deep under a mountain. Colossus, the computer, is put in charge of the nuclear arsenal to eliminate human error in the defense of the country. Colossus gathered intelligence, analyzed it, and was able to launch its own missiles.

Colossus realizes there is another system.

Shortly after activation, however, the computer reaches a startling conclusion: “WARN: THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM.” It provides coordinates in the Soviet Union. That system is a similar system called Guardian. The computers decide they want to talk to each other. The President decides to allow it, hoping to learn more about the Soviet’s secret computer. The Soviets agree, too, presumably for the same reason. You can watch the original trailer below.

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Grep By Example is also available as a PDF Minibook, and a Grep playground helps you learn quickly.

Galvanize Your Grip On Grep With This Great Grep Guide

March 26, 2024 by Ryan Flowers 12 Comments

These days, you can’t throw a USB stick without hitting something that’s running Linux. It might be a phone, an embedded device, or your TV. Either way, it’s running Linux, and somewhere along the line of the development of whatever your USB stick smacked into, somebody used the Global Regular Expression Print utility- better known as Grep. But what is Grep, and why do you need it? [Anton Zhiyanov] not only answers those questions but provides Grep by example: Interactive Guide to help you along.

To understand Linux, one must understand its commercial predecessor, Unix. One of the things that made Unix (and then Linux) unique was its philosophy: Write programs that work together, do one thing well, and handle text streams. This philosophy describes a huge number of programs, and one of these programs is Grep. It’s installed everywhere there’s a *nix installed, and once one becomes familiar with it, their command-line-fu reaches an all new level.

At its core, Grep is simply a bloodhound. It’s scent? A magical incantation called Regular Expressions. Regular Expressions (aka Regex) are simply a way of describing what a stream of text should look like. So when you feed Grep a bit of Regular Expression, it Prints only the text that matches that expression. Neat, right?

The trouble is that Regex can be kind of hard, and Grep has various versions and capabilities that need to be learned. And this is where the article shines- it covers both in an excellent interactive tutorial that’ll help you become a Grep Guru in no time. And if you want to do a deeper dive, check out what it takes to make your own Regex Engine from scratch!

A Low-Cost ROM Programmer With An AI Twist

March 23, 2024 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

There are 0x10 ways to look at ROM programmers: they’re either relatively low-cost tools that let you quickly get about the business of programming vintage ROMs and get back to your retrocomputing activities, or they’re egregiously overpriced on a per-use basis. [Anders Nielsen] seems to land in the latter camp, firmly enough that he not only designed a dedicated ROM programmer for his 65uino ecosystem, but also suffered the indignities of enlisting ChatGPT to “help” him program the thing.

We’ll explain. [Anders]’ 65uino project has been going on for a while, with low-cost ROM programming only the latest effort. To his way of thinking, a $60 or $70 programmer might just be a significant barrier to those trying to break into retrocomputing, and besides, he seems to be more about the journey than the destination. He recently tackled the problem of generating the right programming voltages; here he turns his attention to putting that to work programming vintage ROMs like the W27C512.

Doing so with a 6502-based Arduino-compatible microcontroller requires some silicon calisthenics, including a trio of shift registers to do the addressing using a minimum of GPIO. As for the ChatGPT part, [Anders] thought asking the chatbot to help write some of the code would be a great way to increase his productivity. We thought so too, at least once, and like us, [Anders] concluded that while perhaps helpful in a broad sense, the amount of work you put into checking a chatbot’s work probably exceeds the work saved. But no matter, because in the end the code and the hardware came together to create a prototype ROM programmer for only about $10 worth of parts.

True, the resulting circuit is a bit complex, at least on a breadboard. It should clean up nicely for an eventual PCB version, though, one that plugs right into the 65uino board or even other microcontrollers. Either way, it could make creating custom ROMs for the 65uino a little more accessible.

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2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: A Piano-Controlled Smart Home

March 19, 2024 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

There’s a scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where a little flap in the wall flips down to reveal a small organ embedded there. Gene Wilder plays a bit of Rachmaninoff on the organ, and the giant door to the chocolate room slowly creaks open.

Once [Nathan Orick] got this into his head, he couldn’t get it out, and had to give it a go in his own home. Regrettably there’s no chocolate rooms in the house, so he’s using various chords and melodies to do things like control the lights and the TV, as you’ll see in the video after the break. Although this one may have started as a joke of a home automation scheme, [Nathan] thinks it turned out pretty solid, and so do we.

He already had the piano and a Raspberry Pi Zero lying around, so getting this up and running was mostly about connections and code. Speaking of connections, [Nathan] was hard-pressed to find a micro-USB to USB-B cord, so he ended up splicing one together. Simple enough. The harder part was getting Linux to recognize the keyboard, but all it took was touching all the pins with a multimeter, evidently. What’s a project without a little magic?

And not only did it show up, Linux went to the trouble of registering it as a MIDI device all on its own. Once [Nathan] obtained the port number, he had data printing to the console every time he played a note. Then it was mostly a matter of writing code to interact with MIDI data and track the notes as they’re played, and put it all together with Home Assistant. Be sure to check out the brief demo after the break.

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PDP-10 Fits In Your Living Room

March 13, 2024 by Al Williams 8 Comments

[Oscar] at Obsolescence Guaranteed is well-known for fun replicas of the PDP-8 and PDP-11 using the Raspberry Pi (along with some other simulated vintage computers). His latest attempt is the PDP-10, and you can see how it looks in the demo video below.

Watching the video will remind you of every old movie or TV show you’ve ever seen with a computer, complete with typing noise. The PDP-10, also known as a DECsystem-10, was a mainframe computer that usually ran TOPS-10. These were technically “mainframes” in 1966, although the VAX eclipsed the system. By 1983 (the end of the PDP-10’s run), around 1,500 had been sold, including ones that ran at Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and — of course — MIT. They also found homes at CompuServe and Tymshare.

The original 36-bit machine used transistors and was relatively slow. By the 1970s, newer variants used ICs or ECL and gained some speed. A cheap version using the AM2901 bit-slice CPU and a familiar 8080 controlling the system showed up in 1978 and billed itself as “the world’s lowest cost mainframe.”

The Knight terminals were very unusual for the day. They each used a PDP-11 and had impressive graphics capability compared to similar devices from the early 1970s. You can see some of that in the demo video.

Naturally, anyone who used a PDP-10 would think a Raspberry Pi was a supercomputer, and they wouldn’t be wrong. Still, these machines were the launching pad for Adventure, Zork, and Altair Basic, which spawned Microsoft.

The cheap version of these used bitslice which we’ve been talking about lately. [Oscar] is also known for the KIMUno, which we converted into a COSMAC Elf.