Modded C64 Eye Candy

February 8, 2010 by Phil Burgess 21 Comments

“Everyone needs a hobby,” they tell us. For the blogger mysteriously identified only as “R,” that hobby would be an almost fanatical nostalgia for the Commodore 64 computer.

At first we thought this was a fan community site, but apparently it’s all the work of a single person. [R] has tweaked, extended, repackaged and resurfaced this 1980’s icon in nearly every imaginable way. They tend to gloss over the technical aspects of these mods, but that’s okay – the C64 is such an exhaustively documented system now that the site dwells mainly on the aesthetics and meaning of these reborn devices.

The 64 has made an indelible impression on electronic music, and the machines are still sought after by collectors, composers and circuit-benders. [R] pays homage by housing these vintage systems in styles reminiscent of even vintage-er synthesizers. Any one of these would warrant a post here, yet there’s a whole collection to browse. Check it out!

[via Retro Thing]

Hardware Based Randomness For Linux

February 6, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

True randomness can be hard to come by in the digital world. [Andy Green] is making it easier to get true entropy by using this random USB dongle. The Whirlygig uses a CPDL to gather data from a set of of oscillators. The oscillators have a constantly fluctuating frequency due to temperature changes; if they run faster they generate more heat which in turn slows them down. This, along with the variable latency associated with polling a USB device, gives great depth of randomness. The device is detected and mounted under ‘/dev/hw_random’ and can then be fed into ‘/dev/random’ using the rng-tools package. [Andy’s] done a lot of testing, both on the hardware, and on the quality of randomness. We didn’t see an option to order this but he’s got hardware and firmware repositories so that you can throw one together yourself.

[Thanks Zunk]

Pre-spun Hard Drives

February 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 56 Comments

This device is lovingly called the SPINmaster. [Linux-works] built it to spin up multiple hard drives before the motherboard starts up. It detects the power-up from the PSU and uses a relay to hold the motherboard in reset, indicated by the red LED. Each of four relays then spins up a hard drive and illuminates the green LED when ready. Once all green lights come on the reset relay shuts off and the bios starts up. This type of staggered startup takes a lot of the load off of an under-powered PSU. He’s posted firmware and there’s a schematic available too. We took a look at his video but there’s not much to see as it’s just the inside of the machine while it boots up.

Repurposing A Click Wheel

February 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

We think the click wheel is the biggest contributor to the success of the original iPods. The devices were a brick with a monochrome screen but the user interface was slick and easy to use. [Jason] decided he wanted to add a click wheel to his own project. After using a logic analyzer he discovered that it doesn’t implement a common protocol such as I2C, perhaps a deliberate move by Apple to keep the controller under wraps? He managed to get past this hurdle, as seen in the video after the break, by bit-banging the data in from the click wheel and then reverse engineering the protocol.

It’s connected to an AVR ATtiny88 with feedback shown on a character LCD screen. We’re glad that [Jason] tipped us off about this, but he doesn’t have any code available yet. We love to dive into the source so the sooner he gets it up the better! We’ve got an old 3rd generation with a bad board that is begging to have the wheel ripped out of it, not to mention the dirt-cheap replacements available on ebay. Continue reading “Repurposing A Click Wheel” →

Propeller Takes Step-a-Sketch To A New Level

February 4, 2010 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

[Mpark’s] propeller controlled Etch-a-Sketch is well built and very accurate. He was inspired by the Step-a-Sketch project and he’s carried that design through to a stunning conclusion. The driver board was built around a Parallax Propeller P8X32A microcontroller. But this isn’t just a serial controller board for connecting the hardware to a PC running CNC software. He’s included TV out and a keyboard port so that programming can be done on the chip itself.

In the video after the break you can see how precise the plotting is on the Etch-a-Sketch. It is well mounted but also benefits from some software compensation for the toy’s imprecise controls. [Mpark] has also included an erase function that tilts the frame upside-down a few times. This is used not only to erase a drawing but to hide the line created when moving the stylus into its starting position.

Continue reading “Propeller Takes Step-a-Sketch To A New Level” →

IM-ME Screen Reverse Engineered

February 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

[Dave] figured out the command set for the IM-ME terminal. It took a bit of sleuthing to get this pink plastic peripheral to give up these secrets. He used an oscilloscope to sniff out the SPI connections, then used a hacked IM-ME to capture the traffic from a factory-fresh unit. He managed to extrapolate how write data was being sent but he still couldn’t figure out how commands were differentiated from that data. With the info at hand he searched around the interwebs to find that the screen uses an ST7565S controller. Now he’s got custom firmware to make the LCD display do his bidding and we’re wondering what’s next?

Adding A Netbook Keyboard Light

January 28, 2010 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

[Vikash] was having trouble using his netbook in the dark so he added a keyboard light. He’s got a Dell Vostro A90 which is the same hardware as the popular Dell Mini 9. We agree that the condensed keyboard layout makes it hard to type without looking; just try to find the quotation mark, brackets, and tilde keys! He added an LED to the bezel around the LCD screen in order to shed light on the situation. Now the LED can be turned on using CTRL. An ATtiny13 microcontroller monitors pins 1 and 11 of the keyboard, waiting for the CTRL keypress, then turns on the light when it receives it. This hardware solution means it doesn’t matter if you’re running a Hackintosh (like he is), Ubuntu (like we are), or that other OS.