Vintage Computers At Maker Faire

May 17, 2015 by 6 Comments

It’s no secret that Maker Faire is highly geared toward the younger crowd. This doen’t mean the Faire is completely devoid of the historic; the Bay Area Maker Faire is right in the heart of the beginnings of the computer industry, and a few of the booths are showing off exactly how far computers have come over the last forty years.

Superboard[Vince Briel] of Briel Computers has a booth showing off his wares, mostly modern reimaginings of vintage computers. His table is loaded up with replica 1s, a board that’s much smaller but still completely compatible with the Apple I. The MicroKIM made an appearance, but the crown jewel is [Vince]’s Superboard III, a replica of the Ohio Scientific Superboard II. It’s your basic 6502 computer with 32k of RAM, but unlike just about every other modern retrocomputer out there, [Vince] put the keyboard right on the main board.

The switches are Cherry MX, the keys are from WASDkeyboards. [Vince] is actually getting a lot of interest in making modern ASCII keyboards to replace the old and busted boards that came in the home computers of the 70s and 80s. That might be a project [Vince] will release sometime in the future.

The Superboard III
MicroKIM
The Replica I, fully compatible Apple I replica
A much, much smaller version of the Altair

[Jef Raskin], the Swift Card, and the Canon Cat

[Steve Jobs] may have been the father of the Macintosh, but he was, by no means, solely responsible for the Mac. It was a team of people, and when you talk about the UI of the Mac, the first name that should come up is [Jef Raskin].

One of [Jef Raskin]’s finest works was the Swyft Card, an add-on to the Apple II that was basically just a ROM card that had an OS and Forth interpreter on it. The distinguishing feature of the Swyft card was the use of ‘leap’ keys, a simple way to change contexts when using the computer. We’ve seen replicas of the Swyft card before, courtesy of [Mike Willegal] at the Vintage Computing Festival East.

Woodie[Dwight Elvey] of the vintage-computer.com forum brought a few extra special items related to [Raskin] and the Canon Cat. The first was a Swyft card installed in an Apple IIe. The second was a prototype Swyft computer, with SERIAL NUMBER 1 printed on a Dymo label and fixed to the case.

The ‘woodie’, as [Dwight] calls it, has two 1.44 MB disk drives, of which half of the disk is actually usable. [Dwight] didn’t take the machine apart, but I’m 99% sure the CRT in it is the exact same tube found in early 9″ Macs.

Also in [Dwight]’s display is a production Swyft computer and a Canon Cat, the final iteration of [Jef Raskin]’s idea of what a text-based computer should be.

The vintage-computer booth also had a few interesting retrocomputers including a Commodore 128D, the Apple made, Bell & Howell branded Apple II, and an Amiga 2000. Right next door was the Computer History Museum, who brought a very kid-friendly storage medium display. Showing a 10-year-old an 8″ disk is fun.

A Collection of [Jef Raskin]’s work
Cat Keyboard
Analog computer from the Computer History Museum. It was display Chua’s Circuit.
Leap keys for the Canon Cat
Bell & Howell branded Apple II
Laminated iPod Dock Speaker

Solid Plywood Enclosure IPod Speaker Dock

May 17, 2015 by 14 Comments

Portable Media Players are great for listening to music on the go. At home though, using headphones may not be the most convenient or comfortable option. [decpower] didn’t have a stereo to connect his iPod to. Since he didn’t want to shell out a bunch of money to buy one, he decided to build his own iPod dock and powered speaker combo.

Laminated iPod Dock Speaker The case is made out of plywood: many, many layers of plywood. Each layer of plywood was cut out using a laser cutter. Unlike most speaker cabinets that have a distinct boxy enclosure, this unit is mostly solid with cutouts in each layer only where voids were designed to be. [decpower] tried to replicate the Bose Wave Radio internal sound passages. Up top a dock slot complete with a 30-pin connector makes connecting an iPod super simple.

Unfortunately, [decpower] doesn’t say what he’s using for an amplifier or where his speakers came from. He does indicate that there is an internal battery for powering the setup and it appears there is a volume knob out back. Regardless, the final project looks pretty good and [decpower] deserves some kudos for the unique construction method.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Multispectral Imaging For A UAV

May 16, 2015 by 21 Comments

At least part of the modern agricultural revolution that is now keeping a few billion people from starving to death can be attributed to remote sensing of fields and crops. Images from Landsat and other earth imaging satellites have been used by farmers and anyone interested in agriculture policy for forty years now, and these strange, false-color pictures are an invaluable resource for keeping the world’s population fed.

The temporal resolution of these satellites is poor, however; it may be a few weeks before an area can be imaged a second time. For some uses, that might be enough.

For his Hackaday Prize entry (and his university thesis), [David] is working on attaching the same kinds of multispectral imaging payloads found on Earth sensing satellites to a UAV. Putting a remote control plane up in the air is vastly cheaper than launching a satellite, and being able to download pictures from a thumb drive is much quicker than a downlink to an Earth station.

Right now, [David] is working with a Raspberry Pi and a camera module, but this is just experimental hardware. The real challenge is in the code, and for that, he’s simulating multispectral imaging using Minecraft. Yes, it’s just a simulation, but an extremely clever use of a video game to simulate flying over a terrain. You can see a video of that separated into red, green, and blue channels below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Hackaday Wants All Your Bitcoin

May 16, 2015 by 37 Comments

Bitcoin, the solution to the two generals’ problem, an economic case study in the history of currency, and the reason AMD graphics cards were so expensive a few years ago, is now accepted in The Hackaday Store.

Yes, we have a store, loaded up with swag, tools, and cool toys. We’re always stocking more  If you have coin sitting around, you can pick up a great little logic analyzer, a 3D printer, an ingenius two channel multimeter, ESP8266 boards, the ever popular Hackaday swag and a ton more. That 3D printer will cost you ฿ 3.75. A Mooshimeter is just ฿ 0.50.

It’s the perfect time to turn magical Internet money into something with real, intrinsic value, before the value of Bitcoin drops even more. Sure, we accept government-backed currency as well… but when will you have the chance to spend those hard-mined dollars hashes?

2-Stroke Engine Too Beautiful To Behold

May 16, 2015 by 41 Comments

The sheer beauty of this build is blinding. We enjoy keeping a minimalistic household — not quite on the level of [Joe MacMillan] but getting there — yet this would be the thing we choose as decoration. It’s a hand-built 2-stroke Engine designed specifically to make the combustion process visible rather than locking it away inside of a block of metal.

If you have a nagging feeling you’ve seen this before it’s because the amazing craftsmanship is unforgettable. A couple years back we looked at the 4-stroke engine also built by [Huib Visser]. This new offering does away with the belt, leaving a build that is almost entirely glass and metal polished to a high sheen. The glass cylinder contains the combustion, pushing the graphite piston to drive the fly-wheel. A passing magnet triggers the spark plug to ignite the white-gas fuel, all of which is well-illustrated in the video after the break.

This is not for sale, which doesn’t surprise us. How hard would it be to part with something of such beauty especially knowing you created that beauty? But don’t worry, you can definitely build your own. Just make sure to set the bar lower for your first half dozen tries. We’ve even seen engine builds using hardware store parts.

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Live Steam… Chugga Chugga

May 16, 2015 by 4 Comments

At Maker Faire this weekend. tucked in between a building full of homegrown foodstuffs and a rock polishing booth is the Bay Area Garden Railway Society (BAGRS). They’re running a few live steam locomotives, and they’re beautiful works of engineering and modeling. None of these trains are electric; they all move by boiling water with either coal or butane. It’s a true, proper locomotive running on 45mm gauge track.

[David Cole] of BAGRS gave me the walkthrough of their booth. It’s a simple oval track that took a solid day to level out. There are technically three sets of tracks, two G-scale, and another O scale sharing a rail with a G-scale track. Each and every one of these locomotives is powered by steam produced when water is heated by either coal or butane. Butane is the fuel of choice because of its ease of acquisition, but BAGRS had a few coal-fired locomotives with tiny shovels shoveling anthracite into tiny fireboxes. After loading up with water and getting the firebox nice and hot, these locomotives will cruise around the oval track for about half an hour, with the speed of the locomotive controlled by a servos and RC gear.

Maker Faire isn’t the headline event for BAGRS; in July 2016 they’ll be hosting the National Garden Railway Convention in San Francisco. If you’re local to the Faire, it will be a cool event to check out.

Setup Day At The Faire Is A Glorious Time!

May 16, 2015 by 1 Comment

The Bay Area Maker Faire starts today, but the Hackaday crew rolled in early for something new this year. Friday has traditionally been just for exhibitor setup but this year a few extra groups were on site to see everything come together. Most notably, school field trips. How awesome is it to skip the normal class schedule and hang out at the fair? Also able to get in are media and industry.

I had a great time. Watching everything get setup is often more interesting that seeing the finished display. It’s also much quieter, many fewer bodies (Saturday afternoon is usually a mad press of people) and people haven’t yet lost their voices or the fallen into the monotony of voicing the same explanation over and over again.

Above you can see a few of the friends I ran into. [Windell Oskay] is one of the 2015 Hackaday Prize Judges. He had a freshly minted copy of his new book which I first heard about when visiting Evil Mad Scientist Labs last fall. I also ran into [Kevin] who is the creator of the Arduboy. I first met him at BAMF last year and this year he makes a triumphant return with the new version of Arduboy which overshot it’s Kickstarter by an order of magnitude in just a few days. And who else should I bump into but [Brian Benchoff]. He lives in Pennsylvania and I in Wisconsin so we look forward to hanging out when Hackaday hits the road. I also said a quick hello to [Caleb Kraft] who was slinging veggie paella all evening.

[Brian], [Sophi], [Matt], [Jasmine], [Rich], and I will all be at tonight’s Hackaday Meetup. Anyone in the area won’t want to miss this one. There are a ton of awesome hackers already planning to clink glasses starting at 7pm. All you need to do to join in is RSVP.

The LEGO GP, get it?
An amazing world of masking tape
Probability machine
Google Wing — autonomous package delivery
The guts of Ark Reactor which grows probiotics

Back to the action; I made a quick Friday first pass which still took about three hours. The setup changes just a bit each year… generally things are in the same places but of course returning exhibitors have made a year of upgrades and there’s always a lot of fresh and new on hand. I don’t remember seeing the probability machine last year. It has reservoir of marbles at the top which are being steadily dropped into the “Plinko” style peg-board showing a distribution which has a higher probability toward the center.

Aquaponics grows food, filters water, and reuses fish waste as fertalizer
The business end of Firepick Delta
A huge sand plotter
SmartMatrix showing its colors
Lockpicking tent

Here are just a few more favorites. The Kijani Grows booth has a couple of full aquaponics setups that are worth checking out. I spent some time with the Firepick Delta guys. Sand plotters are always fun and there’s a giant one in one of the booths. I may try my hand at lock picking in The OPen Organization of Lockpickers tent today. And [Louis] of SmartMatrix is launching his Kickstarter to bring fully-assembled versions to people who don’t want to solder the one available in our store.

That’s all for now, I’m off to see as much as is humanly possible. If you’re at the Faire today or tomorrow track us down for some stickers and other swag, and don’t forget tonight’s meetup that I mentioned above!