The Bendix G-15 Runs 75,000 Lines Of Code

December 21, 2024 by Adam Fabio 17 Comments

There’s a Blue Bendix in Texas, and thanks to [Usagi Electric] it’s the oldest operating computer in North America. The Bendix G-15, a vacuum tube computer originally released in 1956, is now booting, and running code from paper tape. [David, aka Usagi] received the G-15 about a year ago from The System Source museum. The goal was to get the computer running so museum patrons could interact with a real tube computer. We’ve been following along since the project began.

[Usagi’s] latest G-15 video covers the last few problems on the road to running code. The biggest hurdle was the fact that the system wasn’t responding properly to the GO button on the typewriter. [Usagi] was able to isolate the issue down to a flip flop and then to a particular signal on an AND gate — the RC signal. The gate appeared to be bad, but swapping the entire circuit card multiple times had no effect. Something else had to be going on.

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75-In-One Music

October 23, 2024 by Jenny List 18 Comments

It’s likely that many Hackaday readers will have had their interest in electronics as a child honed by exposure to an electronics kit. The type of toy that featured a console covered in electronic components with spring terminals, and on which a variety of projects could be built by wiring up circuits. [Matthew North Music] has a couple of these, and he’s made a video investigating whether they can be used to make music.

The kits he’s found are a Radio Shack one from we’re guessing the 1970s, and a “Cambridge University Recording Studio” kit that looks to be 1990s-vintage. The former is all discrete components and passive, while the latter sports that digital audio record/playback chip that was the thing to have in a novelty item three decades ago. With them both he can create a variety of oscillator and filter circuits, though for the video he settles for a fairly simple tone whose pitch is controlled by an light-dependent resistor, and a metronome as a drum beat.

The result is a little avant garde, but certainly shows promise. The beauty of these kits is they can now be had for a song, and as grown-ups we don’t have to follow the rules set out in the book, so we can see there’s a lot of fun to be had. We look forward to some brave soul using them in a life performance at a hacker camp. Continue reading “75-In-One Music” →

Hackaday Podcast Episode 275: Mud Pulse Telemetry, 3D Printed Gears In Detail, And Display Hacking In Our Future

June 14, 2024 by Tom Nardi No comments

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi for a review of the best stories to grace the front page of Hackaday this week. Things kick off with the news about Raspberry Pi going public, and what that might mean for everyone’s favorite single-board computer. From there they’ll cover the technology behind communicating through mud, DIY pressure vessels, pushing the 1983 TRS-80 Model 100 to its limits, and the reality of 3D printing how that the hype has subsided. You’ll also hear about modifying Nissan’s electric vehicles, bringing new life to one of the GameCube’s oddest peripherals, and an unusually intelligent kayak.

The episode wraps up with some interesting (or depressing) numbers that put into perspective just how much copper is hiding in our increasingly unused telephone network, and a look at how hardware hackers can bend the display technology that’s used in almost all modern consumer electronics to our advantage.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Grab the Collector’s Edition MP3 of this week’s episode right here. Certificate of authenticity not included.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 775: Meshtastic Central

March 20, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 4 Comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Rob Campbell chat with Ben Meadors and Adam McQuilkin to talk about what’s new with Meshtastic! There’s a lot. To start with, your favorite podcast host has gotten roped into doing development for the project. There’s a new Rust client, there’s a way to run the firmware on Linux Native, and there’s a shiny new web-based flasher tool!

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Retrotechtacular: The $175,000 Laser Printer

October 23, 2023 by Al Williams 38 Comments

Laser printers today are cheap and readily available. But in 1976, they were the height of printing technology. The IBM 3800 was the $175,000 printer to have in that year. (Video, embedded below.) But you couldn’t have one on your desktop. Even if you could afford it, the thing is the size of a car, and we don’t even want to guess what it weighs. The printer took tractor-fed continuous form paper and could do 167 pages a minute at about 150 dots per inch (actually 180 x 144). For the record, that was as much as 1.7 miles of paper an hour!

In those days, people who would use this printer traditionally had massive banks of noisy impact printers. We imagine this device saved many data processing person’s hearing. Compared to a modern laser printer, though, it needed a lot of maintenance. For example, the initial models needed a xenon flash lamp replaced every month, although later models could go years on one bulb. Looking at some of the hardware in the video, it was probably made closer to the end of life for these printers which were made through 1999.

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Laptoppin’ Like 1975

August 6, 2022 by Al Williams 22 Comments

When we first saw the PZ1 laptop — a 6502 laptop-style computer with a small display and 512K of RAM — we couldn’t help but think of the old AIM 65 computer from Rockwell, although that only had 1K of memory. The other thing the AIM didn’t have was an ancillary microcontroller to help out that is way more powerful than the main processor.

There are actually several versions of the PZ1 and you can find some very detailed information over on Hackaday.io and GitHub. Recently, [Adam] release version 2.0 and tested some PC boards that are working well.

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Hackaday Podcast 175: Moonrocks And Cockroach Chyme, A Raspberry Pi IPad, And A Retro-Respectful Tape Deck

July 1, 2022 by Kristina Panos No comments

Join Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we cuss and discuss all the gnarliest hacks from the past week. We kick off this episode with a gentle reminder that the Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest ends this Monday, July 4th, at 8:30 AM PDT. We’ve seen a ton of cool entries so far, including a new version of [Peter Lyons]’ Squeezebox keyboard that we’re itching to write up for the blog.

In other contest news, the Round 2 winners of the Reuse, Recycle, Revamp challenge of the 2022 Hackaday Prize have been announced. Elliot is super stoked about [Jason Knight]’s open-source recycled skateboard deck-making apparatus, and Kristina wishes she had the time and money to build some of the fundamental Precious Plastic machines.

Elliot managed to stump Kristina with this week’s What’s That Sound, though she probably should have made a semi-educated guess. From there, it’s on to missing moon rocks and the word of the day before we get into a handful of contest entries, including a mechanical keyboard to end all mechanical keyboards.

This really just scratches the surface of this week’s show, which includes some new hardware stuffed into old, as well as modern implementations of old technology. And in case you didn’t get enough of Kristina’s childhood memoirs, she goes a bit deeper into the teddy bears and telephones rooms of her memory palace.

Direct download, record it to tape, and play it on your boombox.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!