Very Impressive Steampunk Keyboard

October 4, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 31 Comments

After spending more than 250 hours on his project, [Admiral Aaron Ravensdale]’s steampunk keyboard is finally done.

The keyboard mod was designed around a Model M. After removing the keycaps, [The Admrial] upcycled the keys from old Continental typewriters. Because his typewriters only had 47 keys and the Model M needs 104, three typewriters needed to be sourced off of eBay. Polishing the metal rings of the typewriter keys ate up more than 100 hours.

After building a brass frame from 8mm tubing and candle holders, the stained wood inlay was drilled for the keys. Status lights were installed and the PCB was connected. A pair of ‘gaslight’ keyboard lights were fabricated using 3mm tubing and very fitting “Golden White” LEDs.

[Admrial Ravensdale] put up an Instructable walking through the build process of his keyboard. There’s also a German-language PDF build log that shows every picture of every step.

This isn’t [Admrial Ravensdale]’s first Hack A Day feature, but with a build that might one-up the original steampunk keyboard we can’t wait to see what comes out of [The Admiral]’s workshop next.

Resurrecting An XT

October 3, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry. At least that’s what we’d tell ourselves if we couldn’t find a 30-year-old computer monitor. [Andrew] picked up an old IBM XT on eBay recently and tried to get the video working. He hasn’t seen any success yet, but the way he goes about solving this problem is very clever.

[Andrew] was stuck with a cool old computer with no way to output anything onto a screen. The XT had an MDA port but neither his TV nor his VGA monitor would accept MDA frequencies. As a workaround, [Andrew] connected an Arduino to the XT keyboard port. On the factory floor, IBM workers used the XT keyboard to load code onto the machines while POSTing. He was able to change the frequency of the MDA CRT controller to CGA frequencies, and with the help of some small components got some video working.

The Hsync and Vsync are still off, and [Andrew] hasn’t been able to get the machine to finish POSTing, but he figures he can use the XT keyboard port for bidirectional communication. He’s written a very small kernel to test out a few things, but unfortunately the XT’s power supply died recently. Once [Andrew] replaces that, we’re sure he’ll get his box up and running.

Recreating The First PC

September 30, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

If you’re looking for a simple Ardunio project, why not replicate the first personal computer?

After discovering the Arduino, [Mark] realized recreating really old computers would be a fun project. An Altair 8800 was on the table, but the sheer number of blinkenlights, switches and the Intel 8080 CPU made that a fairly difficult project. After a bit of searching, [Mark] discovered the Kenbak-1, widely regarded as the first personal computer. The Kenbak also had the added bonus of having a very minimal I/O compliment and was built entirely with TTL components.

Since the Kenbak-1 is an extremely simple computer, [Mark]’s build ended up being fairly minimal. The schematic is only an ATmega328, a few shift registers and a real-time clock for a few added features the OG computer didn’t have. The completed build is programmed by pushing buttons to enter machine code into the mega’s RAM and then executed. [Mark] has a few programs already figured out – a program that counts in binary, a ‘Cylon eye’ and a BCD and binary clock. While the Kenbak-uno doesn’t have the awesome vintage case of the original, it’s still a remarkable build.

Check out the videos after the break for a walk through.

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Booting A 1989 Mac With Mario

September 29, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

As a new recruit to the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army, [dougg3] is really showing off his hardware hacking ability. He came up with a replacement ROM SIMM for his Mac IIci and made it play the Mario theme on boot instead of the normal chimes.

Swapping out the ROM in these old macs isn’t an uncommon procedure. On some 68k machines, there’s a SIMM slot to either replace or expand the soldered ROM. In fact, it’s fairly common to take the ROM SIMM out of a IIsi and put it in the king of kings computer to make an SE/30 32-bit clean. We’ve never seen a re-writable ROM SIMM for these old macs, so we’re pretty sure [dougg3] just spared a Mac IIsi from the dumpster.

Now that the entire 68k Liberation Army is clamoring for one of [dougg3]’s re-writable ROMs (we’ve got cash), the question of what to do with it comes up. Of course, SE/30s can now be 32-bit clean without installing MODE32 and new startup chimes can be added. We’d really like to see some hard-core ROM hacking going on, like installing a 68060 in a Quadra 950.

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Capacitive Sensing Tutorial

September 26, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

[Bertho]’s submission for the 74xx logic contest is really impressive. He designed a capacitive sensing touchpad using only 74xx and 40xx logic chips. We’re impressed with the build and his writeup is one of the best resources we’ve ever seen for capacitive sensing.

There are two ways to go about designing a capacitive touchpad. The first option is put a voltage through an RC circuit. Measure the voltage-time curve, and you have a measure of the capacitance of the circuit. The second method is setting up an RC circuit to change polarity after a threshold for C has been reached. Microprocessors only use one of these methods (AVR uses the first, PIC uses the second), but [Bertho] decided to implement both methods for unknown reasons we still respect.

The circuit [Bertho] designed has a 30MHz clock using only 74xx logic chips, an amazing feat in itself. An 8×8 channel panel was fabricated and the whole build connects to a computer over RS-232.

The finished build is good enough has 64 points of resolution and is able to detect proximity very well. The touchpad is even able to recognize when a pen is placed on the panel. Check out the video after the break for the walk through and demo of this amazing build.

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Record Sound Without A Microcontroller

September 15, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

For his A-level electronic course work, [Andrew] decided to build a digital sound recorder that doesn’t use a microcontroller.

[Andrew]’s build captures audio from an on board microphone at 8000 samples/second. The audio is digitized into 8-bit sound data and sent to an SRAM. The recording and playback functions are controlled entirely by 4000-series logic chips. He admits the sound quality is pretty poor; this is mostly due to the 8kHz sample rate. In some circles, though, a terrible sample rate is seen as being pretty cool so we’re not going to say [Andrew]’s build is useless.

There’s some pretty smart design choices in [Andrew]’s build, like a cut off filter on the microphone set at 4000 Hz (the Nyquist frequency of his system). For the recording medium, he used an SRAM that can hold about half a megabyte of data. At 8000 samples/second, [Andrew]’s build can store a little more than 60 seconds of audio. The build may not be a logic chip computer, but there’s not any question in our mind that [Andrew] learned something. Check out [Andrew]’s 66-page coursework report here (PDF warning).

Recovering Data For A Homemade Cray

September 8, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 41 Comments

In our hubris, we pat ourselves on the back when we’re able to pull data off our old SCSI drives. [Chris Fenton]’s attempt to get an OS for a homebrew Cray-1 puts us rightfully to shame.

Last year we saw [Chris]’ fully functional 1/10th scale Cray-1 supercomputer built around FPGA. While the reproduction was nearly cycle-accurate, [Chris] hasn’t had an opportunity to test out his system because of the lack of available Cray software. A former Cray employee heard of his plight and loaned an 80 Megabyte CDC 9877 disk pack to in the hope of getting some system software.

[Chris] acquired a monstrous 100 pound disk drive to read the disk pack, but after 30 years in storage a lot of electrical problems cropped up. Since reading the drive digitally proved to be an exercise in futility, [Chris] hit upon the idea of taking analog data straight from the read head. This left him with a magnetic image of the disk pack that was ready for some data analysis.

After the disk image was put up on the Internet, the very talented [Yngve AAdlandsvik] figured out the data, header, and error correction formats and sent [Chris] a Python script to tease bits from the analog image. While no one is quite sure what is on the disk pack provided by the Cray employee, [Chris] is remarkably close to bringing the Cray-1 OS back from the dead. There’s also a great research report [Chris] wrote as penance for access to the CDC disk drive. Any Hack A Day readers feel like looking over the data and possibly giving [Chris] a hand?