Rubik’s Cube Table Has A Hidden Surprise

December 25, 2017 by Adam Fabio 9 Comments

[Nothorwitzer] built a pretty incredible Rubik’s Cube table with hidden storage. The coolest feature of this table is the way it opens. Twisting the top section of the cube causes two drawers to pop out from the sides. The further you turn the top, the more the drawers extend. As the top hits its rotational limit, the lid of the cube lifts up, revealing the entire top section is hollow.

[Nothorwitzer] built the table from plywood, hardboard, and MDF. Hiding inside the base is an old car wheel hub and bearing. The entire rotating system spins on this assembly. The drawers are actuated by an ingenious set of plywood cams which push the two opposing drawers out as the top assembly rotates. Two levers pop the top open.

The attention to detail here is amazing. [Nothorwitzer] build a set of hidden hinges that make the lid invisible, yet allows it to lift up and over the edge of the cube. A spring ensures that the heavy lid will pop open neatly. The lid fit is so close that air pressure ensures the top doesn’t slam down when it is dropped.

While the internal parts of the table are left in bare wood, that the external parts had to match a real Rubik’s Cube. [Nothorwitzer] scrambled a cube, then copied the colors. The panels are made of cut hardboard. Each panel is spray painted, then hot glued to the cube. The body is plywood which [Nothorwitzer] grooved with a router to match the profile of a real Rubick’s Cube.

The project doesn’t end here. [Nothorwitzer] has created a second cube, which is even more tricky. The lid pops by pressing in one section. The drawers operate in a similar way, but there is a lever to engage or disengage the drawer opening. This may be the perfect place to hide your retro gaming systems!

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New Life For An Obscure Apple Plotter

December 23, 2017 by Jenny List 10 Comments

We’ve all at some point or other seen something done online by somebody else, and thought “I’d like to have a go at that!”. When [Phooky] saw the artwork on the #PlotterTwitter hashtag, he remembered a past donation of a plotter to the NYC Resistor hackerspace. Some searching through the loft revealed a dusty cardboard box containing not the lovely Hewlett-Packard he’d hoped for, but instead an Apple 410 Color Plotter. This proved to be such an obscure part of the legacy Apple product line that almost no information was available for it save for a few diagrams showing DIP switch settings for the serial port.

Undeterred, he took a look inside and found a straightforward enough control board featuring a Z80 processor and support chips with 1983 date codes. The ROMs were conveniently socketed, so after dumping their contents, he was able to identify the routine for the plotter’s test program, and thus work from there to deduce its command set. A small matter of the plotter using hardware handshaking lines to signal a full buffer later, and he was able to use it to produce beautiful plots. Should you be one of the lucky few remaining Apple 410 owners, you may find his software library for it to be of some use.

If you’d like to see some more aged plotter action on these pages, we’ve had an analog Hewlett Packard here in the past, as well as a vintage drum plotter.

Thanks [Sophi] for the tip.

Coffee Table Model Railroad With All The Bells And Whistles (and Lights And Sirens)

December 22, 2017 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

For some, the allure of a real, physical world that you create and control is overwhelming. Combine that with a love of trains, and you get the model railroad. Some are incredibly detailed, and it seems like the larger the layout the better. Not everyone has the real-estate to devote to such a hobby, though, and moving down to N-gauge railroads is often the key to scratching the model railroad itch in a confined space.

But [Chris Plumley]’s complete N-gauge model railroad in a coffee table takes the concept to a new and tiny level. The superlatives to describe this layout are many and begin with the coffee table itself, a free-form sculptural design intended to evoke the natural contours of a landscape. Removing the lid reveals an intricately detailed world that rises up on a lift. The mainline train and a two-station trolley line ply the imaginary world under full computer control, complete with sound effects and animated lighting. An LCD screen stands in for a drive-in movie theater — remember drive-ins? — and a house fire rages on, never to be quenched by the arriving fire engines. And as a bonus, the locomotive has a dash cam to provide an engineer’s eye view of the layout. The attention to detail is wonderful, but the kicker is that this layout has existed in one form or another for sixty years. Talk about persistence!

If you’re intrigued by combining the world of microcontrollers and model railroads, you should really check out this tutorial to get started.

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Can This Commodore 64 Be Saved?

December 21, 2017 by Al Williams 29 Comments

If you are a certain age, there’s a fair chance your first computer was a Commodore 64. These machines are antiques now, and [RetroManCave] received one from a friend’s loft in unknown condition. He’s made two out of three videos covering the machine, its history, and its internals. Assisting is Commodore 64 expert [Jan Beta] who apparently owned one way back when. You can see the first two videos, below.

The machine isn’t as old as you might think — it is the “newer” case style (circa 1987). [Jan] gives a great overview of the different motherboards you might encounter if you are lucky enough to come across one of these in a dumpster somewhere.

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Building A Supersized Game Boy Advance

December 21, 2017 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Unless you really look closely at the image above, you might not realize you aren’t looking at a normal Game Boy Advance; which is sort of the point. Even though it retains the looks of the iconic Nintendo handheld, this version built by [Akira] is supersized for adult hands. How big is it? To give you an idea, that screen is 5 inches, compared to the 2.9 inch screen the original sported.

Unlike most of the portable gaming hacks we’ve covered recently, this big-boy GBA isn’t powered by a Raspberry Pi. Internally it’s packing a genuine GBA motherboard, which has been wired into a portable screen originally intended for the PlayStation.

Though that may be understating things a bit, as getting the round PCB of the original screen into the rectangular shape of the GBA meant it had to be cut down and the traces recreated with jumper wires. The original CCFL backlight of the screen had to go in the name of battery life, and in its place is the backlight system pulled from a Nintendo DSi XL.

But where did [Akira] get a giant GBA case to begin with? No, it isn’t 3D printed. It’s actually a hard carrying case that was sold for the GBA. The carrying case obviously didn’t have a cartridge slot or openings for buttons, so those sections were grafted from a donor GBA case. So despite the system overall being so much bigger than the original, the D-Pad, face buttons, and cartridge slot on the back are at normal GBA scale.

The GBA XL is really a labor of love; browsing through the build log you can see that [Akira] actually started the project back in 2014, but it kept getting shelved until more research could be done on how to pack all the desired features into the final device.

While this may be the most historically accurate attempt at making a bigger Game Boy, it certainly isn’t the first. There seems to be a fascination with turning the quintessential pocket game system into something that’s quite the opposite.

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Emulating A Forgotten UNIX Box

December 20, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

The AT&T 3B2 series of computers are historically significant, being the main porting platform for System V Release 3 UNIX. Unfortunately, the documentation for these computers has been nearly lost to the sands of time. They are, however, architecturally interesting machines, and [Seth Morabito] has been working for some time on reverse engineering them. Now, [Seth] is calling it: his AT&T 3B2/400 emulator is almost complete, resurrecting an ancient machine from the dead by studying UNIX source code.

The architecture of this computer is unlike anything you’ve seen before, but well-suited to a UNIX machine. The chipset is built around the WE32100 manufactured by Western Electric, and includes a WE32101 MMU for all the fancy memory-mapped I/O. The implementation of this computer is fairly complex, with oodles of glue logic, over a dozen PALs, and various support chips for a PLL and DRAM controllers. This is computer architecture the way it was intended: inscrutable, baroque, and with a lot of fancy custom chips.

The emulator for this system is a bit simpler: you can just download and run it with simh. This emulator simulates 1, 2, or 4MB of system memory, one 720KB floppy diskette, and either one or two 30MB, 72MB, or 161MB MFM hard disk drives. Not everything is implemented so far — [Seth] is still working on an 8-port serial card and a network card — but this is a minimum viable system for developing and analyzing the history of UNIX.

16-Cylinder Stirling Engine Gets A Tune Up

December 20, 2017 by Dan Maloney 33 Comments

Tiny catapults, kinetic sculptures, a Newton’s Cradle — all kinds of nifty toys can adorn the desk of the executive in your life. On the high end of the scale, a 16-cylinder butane-powered Stirling engine makes a nice statement, but when it comes equipped with a propeller that looks ready for finger-chopping, some mods might be in order before bestowing the gift.

We don’t knock [JohnnyQ90] for buying a rotary Stirling engine from one of the usual sources rather than building, of course. With his micro Tesla turbine and various nitro-powered tools, he’s proven that he has the machining chops to scratch-build one of these engines. And it wasn’t just the digit dicing potential of the OEM engine that inspired him. There was a little too much slop in the bearings for his liking, so he machined a new bearing block and shaft extension. With a 3D-printed shroud, a small computer fan, and snappy brass nose cone, the engine started looking more like a small jet engine. And the addition of a pulley and a small generator gave the engine something interesting to do. What’s more, the increased airflow over the cold end of the engine boosted performance.

Need the basics of Stirling engines? Here’s a quick look at the 200-year history of these remarkable devices.

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