Family Bass Is Musical NES Magic

January 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

The Family BASIC keyboard was a peripheral that was built for programming on the Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom. As [Linus Åkesson] demonstrates, though, it can do so much more. Meet the Family Bass.

The core of the project is a special adapter which [Linus] created to work with the Family BASIC keyboard. Traditionally, the keyboard plugs into the Famicom’s expansion port, but [Linus] wanted to hook it up to the controller port on a Nintendo Entertainment System instead. Getting them to talk was achieved with an ATtiny85 which could cycle through the 72-key matrix in the keyboard and spit out a serial stream of data the controller port could understand.

On the NES end, the console is set up to run custom code from [Linus] that lets him play the internal sound chip’s triangle wave with the keyboard. He demonstrates this ably in a video where he performs a song called Platform Hopping along with some of his other retro computer instruments.

We’ve seen [Linus] build some other great instruments in the past too, which are both creative and nostalgic. Video after the break.

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Cyber Walkman Does It In Style

January 21, 2025 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

One of the best things about adulthood is that finally we get to, in most cases, afford ourselves the things that our parents couldn’t (or just didn’t for whatever reason). When [Yakroo108] was a child, Walkmans were expensive gadgets that were out of reach of the family purse. But today, we can approximate these magical music machines ourselves with off-the-shelf hardware.

Besides the cyberpunk aesthetic, the main attraction here is the UNIHIKER Linux board running the show. After that, it’s probably a tie between that giant mystery knob and the super-cool GUI made with Tkinter.

We also like the fact that there are two displays: the smaller one on the SSD1306 OLED handles the less exciting stuff like the volume level and the current time, so that the main UNIHIKER screen can have all the equalizer/cyberpunk fun.

Speaking of, this user-friendly GUI shows play/stop buttons and next buttons, but it looks like there’s no easy way to get to the previous track. To each their own, we suppose. Everything is enclosed in a brick-like 3D-printed enclosure that mimics early Walkmans with orange foam headphones.

If you want an updated Walkman with keyboard switches (who wouldn’t?), check this out.

Close up of a Sony FX-300 'Jackal' radio

Packing Even More Features Into A Classic Radio

January 17, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 11 Comments

When it comes to hacking niches, breathing new life into vintage devices is always an exciting challenge. [t0mg]’s recent project exemplifies this with his 1978 Sony FX-300 ‘Jackal’ radio. He’d already upgraded the radio in 2021 and turned it into a feature-packed marvel, but there’s always room for improvement.

[t0mg]’s initial 2021 build had its quirks: noisy sound, a subpar display, and a non-functional radio module. Determined to enhance these aspects, he sourced an IPS version of the original 3.2″ ILI9431 LCD, significantly improving viewing angles. To tackle the audio issues, he integrated an M5Stack Atom microcontroller, utilizing its Bluetooth A2DP capabilities to deliver cleaner digital sound via I2S to the Teensy audio board. The Teensy itself got a complete wire overhaul just for the sake of good craftmanship.

The new setup also enabled the display of song metadata. Additionally, [t0mg] incorporated a dedicated Arduino Nano clone to manage inputs, streamlining the overall design. The revamped ‘Jackal’ now boasts a bunch of impressive features such as displaying RDS data for FM stations, voice recording, and an NFC reader for personalized playlists.

If you’re into radio makeovers, look into this post for a real golden oldie, or start out with the basics. For [t0mg]’s earlier improved version of this Jackal, read our article on it here.

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Piezo Buzzer Makes A Drum

January 15, 2025 by Jenny List 6 Comments

The humble piezo disc buzzer is much more than something that makes tinny beeps in retro electronic equipment, it can also be used as a sensor. Tapping a piezo buzzer gives an interesting waveform, with a voltage spike followed by an envelope, and then a negative rebound voltage. It’s something [Igor Brichkov] is using, to make a simple but effective electronic drum.

First of all, the output of the buzzer must be tamed, which he does by giving it a little impedance to dissipate any voltage spikes. There follows some simple signal conditioning with passive components, to arrive at an envelope for the final drum sound. How to turn a voltage into a sound? Using a voltage controlled amplifier working on a noise source. The result is recognizably the drum sound, entirely in electronics.

In a world of digital music it’s easy to forget the simpler end of sound synthesis, using circuits rather than software. If you hanker for the Good Old Days, we have an entire series on logic noise, doing the job with 4000 series CMOS logic.

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Cassette Tape Plays MP3s

January 6, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 65 Comments

Cassette tapes were a major way of listening to (and recording) music througout the 1980s and 1990s and were in every hi-fi stereo, boom box, and passenger vehicle of the era. Their decline was largely as a result of improvements in CD technology and the rise of the MP3 player, and as a result we live in a world largely absent of this once-ubiquitous technology. There are still a few places where these devices crop up, and thanks to some modern technology their capabilities as a music playback device can be greatly enhanced.

The build starts, as one might expect, by disassembling the cassette and removing the magnetic tape from the plastic casing. With the interior of the cassette empty it’s capable of holding a small battery, USB-C battery charger, and a Bluetooth module. The head of an old tape deck can be wired to the audio output of the Bluetooth module and then put back in place in the housing in place of the old tape. With the cassette casing reassembled, there’s nothing left to do but pair it to a smartphone or other music-playing device and push play on the nearest tape deck.

As smartphones continue to lose their 3.5 mm headphone jacks, builds like this can keep lots of older stereos relevant and usable again, including for those of us still driving older vehicles that have functioning tape decks. Of course, if you’re driving a classic antique auto with a tape technology even older than the compact cassette, there are still a few Bluetooth-enabled options for you as well.

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The Mystery Of The Messed-Up Hammond X5

December 24, 2024 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

[Filip] got his hands on a sweet old Hammond X5 organ, but it had one crucial problem: only half of the keys worked. Each and every C#, D, D#, E, F, and F# would not play, up and down the keyboard, although the other notes in between sounded just fine.

Those of you with an esoteric knowledge of older electric organs will be saying “it’s a busted top-octave generator chip”, and you’re right. One of the TOGs worked, and the other didn’t. [Filip] rolled his own top-octave generator with a Pico, in Python no less, and the old beauty roared to life once more.

But what is a top-octave generator, you may ask? For a brief period of time in the early 70s, there were organs that ran on square waves. Because a musical octave is a doubling or halving of frequency, you can create a pitch for every key on the organ if you simply create one octave’s worth of pitches, and divide them all down using something as simple as a binary counter IC. But nobody makes top-octave chips any more.

Back in 2018, [DC Darsen] wrote in asking us if we knew about any DIY top-octave designs, and we put out an Ask Hackaday to see if you all could make a top-octave generator out of a microcontroller. We got a super-optimized code hack in response, and that’s worth checking out in its own right, but we always had the nagging suspicion that a hardware solution was the best solution.

We love how [Filip]’s design leans heavily on the Pico’s programmable input/output hardware modules to get the job done with essentially zero CPU load, allowing him to write in Python and entirely bypassing the cycle-counting and assembly language trickery. The voltage shifters and the switchable jumpers to swap between different top-octave chip types are a nice touch as well. If you have an organ that needs a top-octave chip in 2024, this is the way we’d do it. (And it sounds fantastic.)

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Calling Pink Floyd

December 24, 2024 by Al Williams 38 Comments

[Corelatus] said recently that “someone” asked them to identify the phone signals in the 1982 film The Wall, based on the Pink Floyd song of the same name. We suspect that, like us, that someone might have been more just the hacker part of the brain asserting itself. Regardless, the detective work is fascinating, and you can learn a lot of gory details about phone network in-band signaling from the post.

The analysis is a bit more difficult because of the year the film was made. At that time, different countries used slightly different tone signaling standards. So after generating a spectrogram, the job was to match the tones with known standards to see which one best fit the data.

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