Hackaday Retro Edition And Retro Roundup

January 25, 2014 by 24 Comments

Retro-Roundup

About a year and a half ago, We launched the Hackaday retro edition, a small off-shoot of the main edition that is written in pure HTML, with no Javascript or any other Web 2.0 cruft. It’s designed so you can load this edition on any computer, from an Apple Newton to a Commodore 64. And people have done just that.

After a long period of neglect, we’re re-launching the retro edition with a new feature: every hour or so, five random Hackaday pages, going all the way back to the very first post will show up on the retro site. Yes, this was a feature we originally planned for the retro site, but now Hackaday has awesome devs working behind the scenes. I mean, they can set up a cron job! It’s amazing!

As always, you’re more than welcome to load our retro site with any vintage hardware, take a picture, and send it in. Odds are, we’ll plaster it up in one of these semi-frequent retro roundup posts.

No retro roundup post would be complete without a few examples of people loading the retro edition on old hardware. You can check a few out after the break.

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Update From Wayback: AVGA Reborn As RetroWiz

January 25, 2014 by 9 Comments

retrowiz-vga-avr-gaming-system

This one has been a long time coming. We’re finally seeing an update to [Jaromir’s] retro gaming platform based around and ATmega chip. The thing that was novel about it back in 2009, and continues to be to this day, is the use of VGA output (PAL) from an AVR chip rather than composite video like most offerings.

Good projects never die and recently he picked the hardware up again, spinning a mostly surface mount board and putting together a new website to feature his work. Above you can see a demo of Commander Keen 4 running on the hardware (video below). He’s also has a rather trippy Super Mario port and adapted [Albert Seward’s] PacMan source for the hardware.

The chip is being clocked at 32MHz with VGA clock running at 19.6608 MHz. This gives him sixteen colors with a resolution of 192×144. He concedes that you get better resolution out of composite video, but who needs resolution for retro gaming?

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Bringing WiFi Into A Mobile Hackerspace

January 25, 2014 by 47 Comments

2013-11-23-00.04.14

[Philipp Protschka] has a pretty awesome mobile hackerspace (MHS) trailer. The only problem? How do you get WiFi when you’re inside what is basically a Faraday’s cage?

He didn’t think he’d have a problem, since he has a fairly powerful router (Netgear R7000 Nighthawk), not more than 20m from the trailer. But as soon as he shuts the door, he loses all connectivity — he can’t even see his SSID. Leaving the door open a crack results in a signal with a speed of about 54Mbits — not bad, but when it’s cold outside this really isn’t an option.

The solution? Install a WiFi repeater with an external antenna. He’s using a TP link station with two antennas — he’s removed one and hooked it up to a rugged outdoor antenna that gives the MHS a bit of an FBI van look — awesome. With the repeater in place he’s suddenly got access to over 24 SSID’s in the neighborhood from inside! It’ll also be extra handy when travelling because with the extra range it means he’ll be able to hook into local WiFi networks with ease.

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Electric Imp Thermal Printer

January 25, 2014 by 8 Comments

imp_printer_01_23

If you’re the type of person that doesn’t mind having a pocket/purse full of crumpled receipts, then maybe you should check out this tutorial from [tombrew] on giving a thermal printer internet-connectivity.

For some of us, there’s something kind of cool about thermal printers, but it’s probably not the kind of project you’d want to burn a lot of calories on. As a developer over at Electric Imp, [tombrew] agrees with this statement, but since the Electric Imp contains both a WiFi module and processor built in, it makes it pretty easy to get your thermal printer printing off the daily weather, stock prices, news headlines, etc… In fact, the claim here is that you could have this project completed before you even finish your morning coffee… knock on wood!

From a hardware standpoint, the project is pretty straight forward; an Electric Imp with breakout board, thermal printer, and a power supply are pretty much all that’s needed. Local communication between the Electric Imp and the thermal printer is accomplished through a simple serial interface. With the roll-out of the new Electric Imp IDE a few months back, we were introduced to ‘Agents’. This is kind of a neat concept, and this tutorial breaks everything down, but basically the agent is server-side code that runs in the ‘ImpCloud’, thus giving your Electric Imp more power and capabilities to deal with complex APIs. Also, handling images (like something you want to print) can take up a ton of memory, so for this project, the agent is used to send down slices of the image you want to print one at a time. This project is just the beginning of what [tombrew] has planned, so we can’t wait to see more insanely detailed tutorials.

DIY Curved Display Makes Use Of Cool Thermochromic Properties

January 24, 2014 by 18 Comments

flexible screen

[Marin Davide] was on a mission. A mission to build his own curved display screen, using an Arduino, nichrome wire, and thermochromic liquid crystal ink.

The prototype he’s designed uses a sheet of plastic coated in thermochromic ink, curved on an MDF frame. This particular thermochromic ink turns bright blue when heated to around 27°C.

To display digits, he’s created tiny segments of the 7-segment display by wrapping the nichrome wire around pieces of cardboard, which then have been glued to the back of the display. Each of these is controlled separately from his Arduino Mega. He muses that you could also make a rudimentary dot matrix display with this — it would be interesting to see what kind of resolution you could obtain!

To see more photos check out the original DesignNews post linked above. We’re not sure why the bulk of the details are only available in this PDF. If we’re just missing a direct link to the original project page let us know in the comments and we’ll update the post.

Interested in more thermochromic black magic? How about these awesome temperature sensitive photos? Or what about a digital clock face, illuminated by heating resistors?

HackPhx Winter 2014 Hackathon Winners

January 24, 2014 by 9 Comments

HackPhx 2014

The HackPhx Winter 2014 hackathon was held at Heatsync Labs hackerspace in Mesa, Arizona, USA. The advertised theme was “Arduino Wearables”. Participating attendees were randomly placed on teams evenly distributed by their disclosed skills across all teams. There were 10 teams with 4 to 5 members per team competing for two winning spots.

Each team had to build an amazing wearable project utilizing the secret ingredient which was Seedstudio’s Arduino-compatible Xadow wearable platform and add-ons. The Xadow is similar to the Arduino Leonardo and participants used an Arduino cross compatibility and pin mapping chart to assist in development.

Top prize was the Judges’ prizes for the best completed and documented Xadow wearable team project. The second prize was the Jury’s prize given to the team project that the other teams liked the most regardless of event criteria.

Read more about the winning teams and watch their presentations after the break.

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Minicomputers On Microcontrollers

January 24, 2014 by 28 Comments

Developed in the very late 60s and through the 70s, the PDP-11 series of minicomputers was quite possibly the single most important computer ever created. The first widely distributed versions of Unix and C were developed on the PDP-11, and it’s hardware influence can be found in everything from the Motorola 68000 to the MSP430.

When [Dave Cheney] saw the recent 8086 simulator written in 4kB of C code, he realized simulating entire computer systems doesn’t actually require a whole lot of resources outside a big chunk of memory. Armed with an Arduino Mega clone, he set out on one of the coolest projects we’ve seen in a while: simulating a PDP-11 on an AVR.

[Dave] used an ATMega2560-powered Arduino Mega clone with an Ethernet module for the hardware of this build. Attached to it is a shield filled up with a pair of RAM chips that expand relatively limited amount of RAM on the ‘Mega.

So far, [Dave] has his simulated system booting Unix V6 off an SD card. For PDP-11 storage, he’s also simulating an RK05 disk drive, a massive 14 inch platter containing 2.5 Megabytes of data. Compared to the original PDP-11/40, [Dave] estimates his machine is about 10 times slower. Still, an original 11/40 system fills multiple server racks, and the most common installations consume several kilowatts of power. The Arduino Mega can fit in a pocket and can be powered over USB.

Future developments for this system include improving the accuracy of the simulator, running more advanced operating systems and the DEC diagnostic programs, and possibly speeding up the simulation. We’d suggest adding some switches and blinkenlights on an additional shield, but that’s just us.

All the code can be found on [Dave]’s git, with a description of his SPI RAM shield coming shortly.