Highway Based Soundtrack Recordings

September 1, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

[Urpo Lankinen] has a father who is a huge movie buff, and once you care deeply about something it begins appearing everywhere you look. While driving on a back-country road one day, [Urpo]’s dad noticed that the shadows of the trees on the road looked like an optical film soundtrack, so it was up to the son to make it happen.

Early sound-on-film technologies like the RCA Photophone, and Movietone recorded audio onto the film stock with a variable area exposure. This exposure corresponds to the waveform of the audio signal. [Urpo] figured that his small digital video camera served the same purpose as the audio sensors inside the projector, so he put a piece of tissue paper over the lens and wound up with a video that was just frames of gray.

[Urpo] built an app in Processing that averages the pixels in each frame of the video. Of course, recording at 30 frames/second won’t produce any audio this way, so he modulated a triangle wave with this data in Audacity. In the end it really doesn’t sound like much, but it’s great to see such a geeky build.

We’d love to post the video after a break but [Urpo] doesn’t believe in YouTube embeds. We’ll honor his wishes, so you can check out the video here.

High Voltage Hacks: Transmute The Elements In Your Garage

August 27, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

The magnum opus of alchemy was the Philosopher’s stone, a substance that was able to turn common metals into gold. Unlike alchemists, [Carl Willis] might not be poisoning himself in a multitude of ways, but he did build a Farnsworth fusor that’s capable of turning Hydrogen into Helium.

To fuse Hydrogen in his device, [Carl] first evacuates a vacuum chamber. Deuterium (Hydrogen with an added neutron) is injected into the chamber, and a spherical cathode made of Tungsten is charged to 75 kV. The deuterium gas is heated and confined by the cathode and fuses into Helium. The electrostatic confinement of the plasma isn’t very much different from some old CRT tubes. This isn’t a coincidence – both the fusor and CRTs were invented by the same man.

While no fusion experiments – including some billion dollar experiments – have ever produced a net energy gain, this doesn’t mean it’s not an impressive engineering feat. If you’d like to try your hand at building your own fusor, drop by the surprisingly active research forum. There’s a lot of really good projects to look through over there.

High Voltage Hacks: Shrinking Coins

August 20, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

The anthem for the Great Recession might be something along the lines of, “That we’re gonna do it anyway, even if doesn’t pay.” Some men just want to watch the world burn, so Hackerbot Labs posted a great walkthrough about shrinking coins and in the process making our pocket change worth just a little bit more.

Their build pushes 15,000 Joules (from a 10kV 300μF cap) through a coil of wire wrapped around a coin. This creates a magnetic field in the coil and the coin. These two fields repel each other, and there’s only one way that it can end: the coin shrinks and the coil of wire explodes. The team at Hackerbot Labs linked to a great theory of operations that ~~does a great job explaining the physics~~ has some awesome pictures.

During our research, we saw a few questions about the legality of altering currency. According to the U.S. Code, shrinking coins only illegal if it’s done fraudulently, like shrinking a penny down to the size of a dime to fool a pay phone or vending machine. Check out a video of the Hackerbot Labs setup putting as much energy as 100 heart defibrillators into a coin after the break.

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Adding Wireless Controls To Vintage Stereo Equipment

August 19, 2011 by Mike Nathan 11 Comments

marantz_wifi_remote_control

[Jean] was shopping around for a vintage stereo receiver, and happened upon a broken, but repairable Marantz 4240. After getting things back to working order, he thought it would be great if he could use his iPhone to remotely control the unit (PDF Writeup, Schematics and Code).

He scrounged around for parts, and after locating a PIC and a handful of parts from old copiers and printers, he got down to business. He etched some custom boards to house electronic bits, then strapped motors to the volume and source selection knobs. He also rigged up the push button power switch on the receiver, using a small servo and a bit of string.

Now, he can control everything using his iPhone, which communicates with the stereo over WiFi. While the power, volume knob, and input selector can be triggered remotely, he still has the ability to tweak any of these items manually if desired.

We think that this is a great way to add modern amenities to vintage electronics, without ruining the aesthetics of the components. Don’t take our word for it though, check out the video demonstrations [Jean] but together after the jump.

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Easy To Build Z80 Single Board Computer

August 16, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

[Alexis] sent in a single board computer he’s been working on. The project goal of his build was making it easily reproducible. From looking at the schematics, it’s one of the simplest fully-functional computers we’ve seen. The build runs CP/M 2.2 off of two 3.5 inch floppies. This opens up a lot of options as to what software is already available. Although it operates over a serial terminal, [Alexis] pretty much duplicated an Osborne I, only at double the speed.

[Alexis] got a little e-fame from his earlier 8088 homebrew computer built from very early 8088’s rescued from an electronics junk shop. These 8088 computers made the blog rounds by playing Still Alive with a SID chip from a Commodore 64 and a YM2151 FM synth chip.

For now, I guess we’ll have to settle for a video of [Alexis]’ Z80 computer running CP/M. Check out a video after the break of his computer running the greatest Infocom adventure, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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Playing SNES With An R/C Controller

August 14, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

Normally when we see an R/C transmitter used in a build we’re prepared for robots, quadcopters, or UAVs. [Alex] found a new use for his Futaba radio – hooking it up to his Super Nintendo.

We’ve seen a lot of builds using game controllers as interfaces to other hardware. The N64 media remote comes to mind, as does the NES iPod dock. Outside of a few builds to automatically win in-game currency for you, we haven’t seen much of anything to control a video game with additional electronics. [Alex]’s build happily bucks that trend, and technically gives the SNES an analog controller.

The build uses an mBed microcontroller to capture the radio’s button and stick positions. This is sent through a two shift registers to produce the 16-bit packet required of the SNES controller protocol. [Alex] posted all the software for his build, and from the looks of it the code seems pretty portable. [Alex] says he’s working on getting his Sega Saturn running with his Futaba, so we can’t wait to see some Panzer Dragoon action. Check out [Alex] demoing his controller with Gradius III after the break.

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Overhaul An Old Mechanical Keyboard

August 12, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 16 Comments

Deskthority forum user [lowpoly] recently posted a writeup on his complete overhaul of an Apple M0110 mechanical keyboard. Any one familiar with the satisfying clack of a good mechanical key under their fingers can appreciate the effort put into this project.

[lowpoly] removed the keyboard’s PCB, rewired the key matrix adding diodes, built in a teensy USB board, broke apart the mechanical switches and fit replacement springs and finally applied a generous portion of retr0bright to all of the aging plastic. Since the teensy has no mounting holes [lowpoly] had to create a mounting assembly out of some spare plastic. A usb mini cable is even fitted into the original RJ-11 connector. To compensate for the lack of PCB the key assembly was fitting with some rubber washers. To top off the whole thing some nice new rubber feet were taped to the underside of the M0110.

[lowpoly] reports that with the foam, new springs, and lack of PCB the keyboard is much quieter and easy to use. The end result is a slick retro looking modern keyboard. If you’ll excuse us we have to go rooting through some old storage bins to find our own ancient keyboards.

We have seen our share of vintage keyboard hacks which can be useful, impressive and sometimes just odd. This build keeps it down to a nice simple, functional, useful retrofit. Nice work!