VCF East XIII Is Right Around The Corner

May 10, 2018 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

The middle of May is a very special time at the Jersey Shore. It’s finally warm enough that business owners decide they might as well unlock their doors, but still cool enough that you can go on the boardwalk without having to bump into sweaty strangers. It’s a time for saltwater taffy without the risk of skin cancer, for hot dogs without seagulls trying to steal them from you. You get the idea.

This year it’s also when the Vintage Computer Festival East will be held in Wall, New Jersey. Running from May 18th to the 20th, VCF East XIII will play host to talks, workshops, and demonstrations focusing on the storied days before we all started carrying supercomputers in our pants. Of course it wouldn’t be a computer festival without vendor tables, and there’s even a consignment area where VCF staffers will sell your old gear while you peruse the show.

Here’s hoping that [Don Eyles] brings his hardcopy of the lunar module source code with him. Our own [Greg Charvat] got a close look at this incredible piece of history.

A trio of keynote speakers will help set the tone of VCF East. On Friday [Bill Dromgoole] will discuss the ongoing restoration of a UNIVAC 1219-B military mainframe. Once designed to handle the radar on a Navy destroyer, thanks to the tireless efforts of [Bill] and his merry band, it’s currently on the hunt for the Wumpus. Saturday will see NASA contractor [Don Eyles] explain how he hacked his way around a stuck “Abort” button on Apollo 14, deftly avoiding the kind of problems the previous guys had in getting to the Moon. Finally on Sunday [Dave Walden] will talk about his work in Ye Olden Days of the Internet: programming the very first routers, known as “Internet Message Processors” or IMPs.

If you’re looking to get up close and personal with tech of yesteryear, you’ll definitely want to check out the exhibit area. Arguably the largest single draw of VCF, this is where you’ll see everything from 1980’s robots to software defined radio on the MITS Altair 8800. In previous years we’ve seen WWII Enigma machines, as well all the cool toys that kids had back in the day.

As usual we’ll be there to take plenty of pictures and dive into the sundry amusements offered by the show and the InfoAge Museum which plays host to it. Hackaday is once again a proud sponsor of VCF East and their continuing efforts to preserve technology history for future generations. We’d love to see you there and we’re always looking for the inside scoop on interesting hardware so don’t be shy about tracking me down with your story!

1960’s Console Stereo Gets Raspberry Pi Touch Screen

May 10, 2018 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

When he was but a wee hacker, [WhiskeyDrinker] loved to play with the big console stereo his grandparents had. The idea of a functional piece of furniture always appealed to him, and he decided that when he grew up and had a place of his own he’d get a similar stereo. Fast forward to the present, and a Craigslist ad for a working Penncrest stereo seemed to be a dream come true. Until it wasn’t.

The original physical controls are connected to the Pi’s GPIO

As difficult as it might be to believe, sometimes things we read on the Internet are not true. The “working” Penncrest radio turned out to be a dud. But realizing that the look of the cabinet was more important to him than historical accuracy, [WhiskeyDrinker] decided to outfit it with a Raspberry Pi powered touch screen that would look as close to stock hardware as possible.

The final result really does look like some kind of alternate timeline piece of consumer electronics: where chunky physical buttons and touch screens coexisted in perfect harmony. The vintage stereo aficionados will probably cry foul, but let them. [WhiskeyDrinker] did a fantastic job of blending old and new, being respectful to the original hardware and aesthetic where it made sense, and clearing house where only nostalgia had lease.

A HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro is used to get some decent audio out of the Raspberry Pi, and the touch screen interface is provided by Volumio. [WhiskeyDrinker] mentions that it even has a GPIO plugin which he successfully used to handle getting the physical buttons to play nice with their digital counterparts.

Updating old audio gear is always a sensitive subject around these parts. Sometimes they go so far that the original hardware is almost an afterthought. On the other side of the spectrum are the projects which try to take modern gear and mimic the look of the classics. In any event, one thing is clear: they don’t make ’em like they used to.

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8-bit Game Uses Our Favourite IC And Zero Lines Of Code

May 9, 2018 by Anool Mahidharia 17 Comments

If a hacker today wanted to build a simple game, he or she could whip it up using an Arduino board and a few other bits and pieces in about an hour, only to be greeted with “where’s the hack?” But when you look at [OiD]’s SPEBEG (Single Player Eight Bit Electronic Game), you’ll understand why building anything using old-skool 70s tech is so awesome and educational.

The SPEBEG is a simple 8-bit game where you aim with the joystick at the target and fire to gain points. As your score increases, so does the game speed. It doesn’t need a single line of code, since the whole design is completely hardware based. And it uses the venerable 555. The display is an 8×8 LED matrix while score and levels are displayed on two 7-segment LED displays.

An 8-bit bus forms the backbone of the game and it is all held together by lots of 74-series TTL logic. The 555 provides a 47 kHz secondary clock, while the 100 Hz signal after the rectifier diodes is used to introduce the essential “randomness” that every game requires. [OiD] does a good job of describing the whole circuit by breaking it down into byte-sized chunks and walking us through each. For something so simple to build using modern technology, he needed over 25 different chips to build it, and ended up setting himself back by almost 200 €.

But there’s one more part of this project that amazes us, and that is its construction technique. [OiD] purchased IC sockets with extra long pins and a lot of thin, enamel (insulated) copper wire. A soldering station with a fine tip and high temperature setting allowed him to heat the end of the copper wire to melt its enamel insulation, so it could be soldered to the long pin sockets. Using this method, he assembled the circuit using point-to-point soldering, pretty much like wire wrapping. Only, instead of wrapping the wires, he soldered them.

Despite all of his efforts, the game was pretty much unplayable when he first built it almost five years back. He recently pulled it out of storage, swatted all the hardware bugs, and fixed it nicely. Check out the video after the break. [OiD]’s project is decidedly more simple compared to this game that was Fabricated from the Original Arcade Pong Schematics.

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Raspberry Pi Becomes Cycle Exact Commodore Drive Emulator

May 7, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 83 Comments

The Commodore 1541 disk drive is unlike anything you’ll ever see in modern computer hardware. At launch, the 1541 cost almost as much as the Commodore 64 it was attached to ($400, or about $1040 at today’s value). This drive had a CPU, and had its own built-in operating system. Of course, anyone using a Commodore 64 now doesn’t deal with this drive these days — you can buy an SD2IEC for twenty dollars and load all your C64 games off an SD card. If you’re cheap, there’s always the tape drive interface and a ten dollar Apple Lightning to 3.5mm headphone adapter.

But the SD2IEC isn’t compatible with everything, and hacking something together using the tape drive doesn’t have the panache required of serious Commodoring. What’s really needed is a cycle-accurate emulation of the 1541 disk drive, emulating the 6502 CPU and the two 6522 VIAs in this ancient disk drive. The Raspberry Pi comes to the rescue. [Steve White] created the Pi1541, an emulation of the Commodore 1541 disk drive that runs on the Raspberry Pi 3B.

Pi1541 is a complete emulation of the 6502 and two 6522s found inside the Commodore 1541 disk drive. It runs the same code the disk drive does, and supports all the fast loaders, demos, and copy protected original disk images that can be used with an original drive.

The only hardware required to turn a Raspberry Pi 3 into a 1541 are a few transistors in the form of a bi-directional logic level shifter, and a plug for a six-pin serial port cable. This can easily be constructed out of some Sparkfun, Adafruit, Amazon, or AliExpress parts, although we suspect anyone could whip up a Raspberry Pi hat with the same circuit in under an hour. The binaries necessary to run Pi1541 on the Raspberry Pi are available on [Steve]’s website, and he’ll be releasing the source soon.

This is a great project for the retrocomputing scene, although there is one slight drawback. Pi1541 requires a Raspberry Pi 3, and doesn’t work on the Raspberry Pi Zero. That would be an amazing bit of software, as ten dollars in parts could serve as a complete emulation of a Commodore disk drive. That said, you’re still likely to be under $50 in parts and you’re not going to find a better drive emulator around.

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Commodore 64 To Raspberry Pi Conversion Is Respectful & Complete

May 4, 2018 by Richard Baguley 27 Comments

We’re big fans of taking old computers and giving them a new lease on life, but only when it is done respectfully. That means no cutting, no hot glue, and no gouging out bits to make the new computer fit. It’s best if it can be done in a way that the original parts can be restored if required.

This Commodore 64 to Raspberry Pi conversion from [Mattsoft] definitely fits our criteria here, as it uses the old keyboard, joystick connectors and output portholes for the required authentic look. It does this through the clever use of a couple of 3D-printed parts that hold the Raspberry Pi and outputs in place, mounting them to use the original screw holes in the case.

Combine the Pi with a Keyrah V2 to connect the C64 keyboard and a PowerBlock to juice up all of the parts, and you’ve got a fully updated C64 that can use the keyboard, joysticks or other peripherals, but which also comes with a HDMI port, USB and other more modern goodies.

[Mattsoft] suggests using Combian 64, a C64 emulator for the Pi for the authentic look and feel. Personally, I might use it as a thin client to the big-ass PC with 16 CPU cores and 32GB of memory that’s hidden in my basement, but that’s just because I enjoy confusing people.

Oddball Mercury Vapor Rectifier Is A Tube Geek’s Delight

May 2, 2018 by Al Williams 29 Comments

Even if you aren’t a tube aficionado, you can’t help but be mesmerized by the blue glow inside a mercury vapor rectifier when it operates. It looks less like early 20th century tech and more like something that belongs on a Star Trek set. [Uniservo] acquired an 866 rectifier that was interesting due to the markings, which he explains in detail in the video below. Most people though will probably want to skip to closer to its end to see that distinctive blue glow. The exact hue depends on the mercury vapor pressure and usually contains a fair amount of ultraviolet light.

These tubes have an interesting history dating back to 1901, the year [Peter Cooper Hewitt] developed a mercury vapor light which was much more efficient than conventional bulbs. They had two main problems, they required some special process to get the mercury inside to vaporize when you turned them on, but worse still, the light was blue-green which isn’t really appropriate for home and office lighting. In 1902 though, [Hewitt] realized the tube would act as a rectifier. Electrons could readily flow out of the mercury vapor that was the cathode, while the carbon anodes didn’t give up electrons as readily. This was important because up until then, there wasn’t an easy way to convert AC to DC. The usual method was to use an AC motor coupled to a DC generator or a similar mechanical arrangement known as a rotary converter.

In later decades the mercury vapor lamp would wind up with a phosphor coating that converted the ultraviolet light to cool white light and became the fluorescent bulb, so while the rectifier mostly gave way to more efficient methods, [Hewitt’s] bulb has been in use for many years.

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The Internet Of Claw Machines

May 2, 2018 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Remote administration of machines is a very useful tool for all manner of commercial, industrial, and home applications. Now, it’s available for claw machines, too – thanks to [Code Your Venture Free].

The project uses an ESP32 board that includes a battery case on the back for a standard 18650 lithium battery that makes getting small battery powered projects off the ground much easier. You can find them at Banggood and AliExpress, but we’re not 100% sure that they’re kosher because they’re branded WeMos, but don’t show up on WeMos’ website or their official online retail store. Anyway, it’s a cute idea to strap a LiPo cell to the back like that. Let us know in the comments if you know more.

Back to the claw! An off-the-shelf thumbstick is then connected to the ESP32 which is programmed to send packets over the network to control the claw machine, which is wired up with its own network-connected microcontroller. It’s all wrapped up in the usual 3D printed case.

The one problem that the project doesn’t solve is delivery – how does the remote player, whether on the local network or online, collect their prize? We can only assume some cutting-edge form of drone delivery is the solution. It’s not the first remote claw machine we’ve seen, either. Video after the break.

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