Dot Matrix Printer Spits Out Any Tweet Mentioning @KWF

May 31, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

Earlier this month, [Kenneth] picked up an old dot matrix printer at the Silicon Valley Flea Market and subsequently found two cases of tractor feed printer paper. It’s a marriage made in heaven for a dot matrix twitter printer.

[Kenneth] used a BeagleBone – a tiny single board computer running Linux – to connect to the Internet and fetch any new tweets mentioning KWF every minute or so. The BeagleBone spits out these tweets over the USB port which is connected to the ancient printer by means of a cheap adapter cable.

Interestingly, [Kenneth] wrote the code for this project as a shell script. A lot of effort went into scrubbing the input of any escape characters, but he still implores his admirers to not attempt to break his project.

In case you’re wondering, at couple Twitter accounts announced this post’s headline to the Twitterverse when this story was published. This should have immediately sent [Kenneth]’s printer into motion, recording that harsh mistress that is sending a build log of a Twitter connected device into Hackaday.

After the break you can see [Kenneth]’s demo. Be sure to share this post on Twitter!

Fine Tune Your Morse Code Skills With This Mint Tin Practice Keyer

May 28, 2012 by Mike Nathan 9 Comments

mint-tin-keyer

Hackaday reader [svofski] wrote in to share a device he built, which would be useful to any ham operators out there trying to hone their CW skills. He calls his practice keyer the Morseshnik, and it is a combination of various items [svofski] found while digging through his parts drawer.

He disassembled an old hard drive, saving its read arm to serve as the keyer’s paddle. He purchased some small angle brackets to create a set of contacts for the device, between which the lever sits, automatically centered by a pair of springs.

An MSP430, which was also collecting dust in [svofski’s] junk pile, resides inside the Morseshnik’s mint tin base on a small DIY PCB. It allows him to toggle between manual and automatic keying modes with the flick of a switch as he whiles his time away practicing his dits and dahs.

Continue reading to see a short video of the Morseshnik in action, and swing by his site for code and PCB schematics should you want to build one of your own.

Continue reading “Fine Tune Your Morse Code Skills With This Mint Tin Practice Keyer” →

Making Instagram With An Old CRT

May 25, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

If you’re not familiar with Instagram, it’s a mobile app that takes pictures, applies low-fi ‘lomographic’ digital filters, and shares them on the Internet. For reasons we can’t comprehend, Instagram has been wildly successful as of late and was recently purchased by Facebook for a Billion dollars. [Martin Ström] figured he could do something much cooler than applying digital filters to a cell phone picture, so he built InstaCRT, an app that turns your pictures into grainy CRT images and satiates the geek and hipster in everyone.

From [Martin]’s project page, InstaCRT uses a small black and white CRT from an old camcorder and a Canon 7D to apply real-world analog filters to all the uploaded pictures. Once the pictures are uploaded to the MacBook Pro server, they’re displayed on the CRT and a picture is taken with the 7D. Once an Android/iOS device sends a picture to the server, it’s displayed on the CRT, the 7D snaps a picture, and the resulting ‘filtered’ picture is sent back to the mobile device.

While we’re sure a few Hackaday commentors are going to ask ‘why’, it’s still a very cool build that is the first real world digital camera filter we’ve seen. You can check out the video demo of InstaCRT after the break.

Continue reading “Making Instagram With An Old CRT” →

Cemetech’s Ultimate Calculator V2

May 24, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

[Christopher] piped up in our comments on a recent post about using laptop touch pads in other things, noting that he had done this on his Ultimate Calculator Version 2. What he’s done is upgraded his TI-83+ calculator to house a number of improvements and customizations. It now has a stronger RGB backlight so he can illuminate his screen in whatever color strikes his mood. He also integrated a PS2 port so he could use an external mouse/ keyboard. What brought this to our comments though, was the embedded laptop touchpad on the back that is also fully functional. He topped it all off with a rather pleasing paint job as well.

The funny thing is, we caught a glimpse of this thing in a previous post about networking these calculators.

Building A 6502 In Minecraft

May 20, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

We’ll admit that we haven’t been following Minecraft like we used to; its been a while since we’ve seen something amazing in Minecraft, but [eloraam]’s 6502 emulator (part of her RedPower Minecraft mod) takes the cake.

The RedPower mod adds a lot of industrial technology to Minecraft. Pumps, solar panels, and pneumatic tubes to move blocks around are the staple of this mod, but with the addition of a fully emulated 6502 computer, Minecraft moves from an anachronistic medieval-themed steampunk aesthetic to a full-on machine age, mainframes everywhere style.

The heart of the 6502 portion of the RedPower mod are three craftable blocks; a CPU, a monitor, and a disk drive. All these blocks are connected together with ribbon cables and can interact with other blocks in the Minecraft universe. The CPU is an emulated 6502, with a few instructions borrowed from the 65816 and the addition of MUL and DIV. It’s possible to program this computer in assembly, but [eloraam] a Forth interpreter with the OS to make programming a little easier.

It’s been almost two years since we first saw the beginnings of a CPU made in Minecraft, but this mod takes everything to the next level. In actuality, this isn’t very different from the game [notch] is currently working on; both feature an emulated 80’s era computer that can do all your in-game bidding. We can’t imagine anything better to get us hooked on Minecraft again, and we’ve got to commend [eloraam] for some seriously awesome work.

After the break is a 23-minute tutorial on the functions of the RedPower CPU, as demonstrated by Minecraft aficionado [direwolf20].

Continue reading “Building A 6502 In Minecraft” →

A Color Maximite For Glorious 3-bit BASIC

May 18, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

[Kilian] sent in a link to a color version of a tiny educational computer. It’s called the Quantumite and it’s designed to be a throwback to the early 80s microcomputers we all grew up on.

The Quantumite is a clone of the Maximite, the tiny single board computer / BASIC interpreter designed by [Geoff Graham]. Both the Quantumite and Maximite are meant to be a throwback to the amazingly simple microcomputers of the early 80s, giving the 8-year-olds of today the simplicity of a BASIC compter most Hackaday readers had back in 1980s.

Both the Maximite and Quantumite are powered by the same 32-bit PIC microcontroller and have connections for a composite or VGA monitor, SD card, and PS/2 keyboard. Unlike the Maximite, the Quantumite can display 8 colors on its screen; a great addition that somehow seems even more retro than a monochrome display.

As far as getting the younglings to learn programming, we couldn’t think of a better tool than the ‘boot straight into a programming language’ Maximite. With a retro-impressive 3 bits of color, it’s sure to be a hit with the schoolchildren this computer is targeted at.

Giving A Powerpoint Presentation With An Apple ][

May 17, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

When [Vince] saw a coworker give a presentation with an iPad, he thought to himself what a tremendous waste of computing resources he was witnessing; an iPad is just as powerful as an early Cray supercomputer, and displaying slides isn’t a computationally intensive task. We’re assuming [Vince]’s train of thought went off the rails at that point, because he came up with a neat way to give a presentation with an Apple ][.

To get his slides onto his Apple ][, [Vince] created a tool to convert the text and images for a presentation to an Applesoft BASIC program. Yes, six-color images are supported in a wonderful 280×192 resolution. The presentation was transferred onto a CompactFlash card and loaded onto the Apple with the help of a CFFA card, making it much faster to load images during the presentation than a 5.25″ disk would allow.

Of course, after the presentation some of [Vince]’s coworkers wanted to play Oregon Trail, a request easily handled by the voluminous CF card loaded with Apple ][ programs. You can check out video demo/walkthrough of his presentation after the break.

Continue reading “Giving A Powerpoint Presentation With An Apple ][“ →