Hackaday Links: April 24, 2016

April 24, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

The Internet Archive has a truck. Why? Because you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck filled with old manuals, books, audio recordings, films, and everything else the Internet Archive digitizes and hosts online. This truck also looks really, really badass. A good thing, too, because it was recently stolen. [Jason Scott] got the word out on Twitter and eagle-eyed spotters saw it driving to Bakersfield. The truck of awesome was recovered, and all is right with the world. The lesson we learned from all of this? Steal normal cars. Wait. Don’t steal cars, but if you do, steal normal cars.

In a completely unrelated note, does anyone know where to get a 99-01 Chevy Astro / GMC Safari cargo van with AWD, preferably with minimal rust?

[Star Simpson] is almost famous around these parts. She’s responsible for the TacoCopter among other such interesting endeavours. Now she’s working on a classic. [Forrest Mims]’ circuits, making the notebook version real. These Circuit Classics take the circuits found in [Forrest Mims]’ series of notebook workbooks, print them on FR4, and add a real, solderable implementation alongside.

Everyone needs more cheap Linux ARM boards, so here’s the Robin Core. It’s $15, has WiFi, and does 720p encoding. Weird, huh? It’s the same chip from an IP webcam. Oooohhhh. Now it makes sense.

Adafruit has some mechanical keyboard dorks on staff. [ladyada] famously uses a Dell AT101 with Alps Bigfoot switches, but she and [Collin Cunningham] spent three-quarters of an hour dorking out on mechanical keyboards. A music video was the result. Included in the video: vintage Alps on a NeXT keyboard and an Optimus Mini Three OLED keyboard.

A new Raspberry Pi! Get overenthusiastic hype! The Raspberry Pi Model A+ got an upgrade recently. It now has 512MB of RAM

We saw this delta 3D printer a month ago at the Midwest RepRap festival in Indiana. Now it’s a Kickstarter. Very big, and fairly cheap.

The Rigol DS1054Zed is one of the best oscilloscopes you can buy for the price. It’s also sort of loud. Here’s how you replace the fan to make it quieter.

Here’s some Crowdfunding drama for you. This project aims to bring the Commodore 64 back, in both a ‘home computer’ format and a portable gaming console. It’s not an FPGA implementation – it’s an ARM single board computer that also has support for, “multiple SIDs for stereo sound (6581 or 8580).” God only knows where they’re sourcing them from. Some tech journos complained that it’s, “just a Raspberry Pi running an emulator,” which it is not – apparently it’s a custom ARM board with a few sockets for SIDs, carts, and disk drives. I’ll be watching this one with interest.

Giving The C64 A WiFi Modem

December 21, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

If there’s any indication of the Commodore 64’s longevity, it’s the number of peripherals and add-ons that are still being designed and built. Right now, you can add an SD card to a C64, a technology that was introduced sixteen years after the release of the Commodore 64. Thanks to [Leif Bloomquist], you can also add WiFi to the most cherished of the home computers.

[Leif]’s WiFi modem for the C64 is made of two major components. The first is a Microview OLED display that allows the user to add SSIDs, passwords, and configure the network over USB. The second large module is the a Roving Networks ‘WiFly’ adapter. It’s a WiFi adapter that uses the familiar Xbee pinout, making this not just a WiFi adapter for the C64, but an adapter for just about every wireless networking protocol out there.

[Leif] introduced this WiFi modem for the C64 at the World of Commodore earlier this month in Toronto. There, it garnered a lot of attention from the Commodore aficionados and one was able to do a video review of the hardware. You can check out [Alterus] loading up a BBS over Wifi in the video below.

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Golden Commodore C64 Brings The Bling To 8-Bit Computing

September 18, 2015 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

Sometimes, a hack is just a hack. And sometimes, a hack is nothing but a gold-plated Commodore C64.

Alright, it’s not gold-plated, it’s gilded. For the uninitiated, gilding is the process of gluing gold powder or gold leaf to an object. Gold is amazingly ductile – a tiny nugget 5mm in diameter can be hammered into a sheet of gold leaf that can cover about a half a square meter. It’s extremely thin and delicate and has to be handled very gingerly, and the gilder’s craft is therefore very meticulous. For more on gilding, see this post on signmaking with gold leaf.

[thefuturewas8bit], who runs a vintage Commodore web store, did a great job gilding a C64 case, just because. The attention to detail is fantastic – notice that even the edges of the keyboard cutouts are gilded and burnished. A nice finishing touch is swapping out the stock red power LED for a yellow one – red simply clashes too much. Lest you think there’s nothing to learn from a purely aesthetic hack, [thefuturewas8bit] shares a great tip for removing the metal badges from a plastic case – spray them with freeze-spray from the back to pop off the glue. No need to dig at them with a screwdriver and gouge or bend them. Nice trick.

Any hack can earn extra points for style, and we think that gold works well on the C64. But if gold is a little too overstated for you, you can always try to score a colorful new injection-molded case for your vintage Commodore.

Commodore 64 Mods Make A Mobile Computer

May 22, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 16 Comments

Some Commodore C64 owners and enthusiasts keep tinkering with their precious units, adding upgrades all the time. [wpqrek]’s latest upgrade to his C64 makes it totally portable – he added DC-DC converters to allow it to run off external battery sources.

He installed two separate DC-DC converters – one for 5V and another for 9V inside the enclosure. He opted for these high-efficiency converters because he planned to use batteries to power the device and wanted to maximize the juice he was extracting. He wired up a barrel jack socket to accept a 12V input, and another XT60 socket where he could attach a LiPo battery. A common 2200mAh RC battery is enough to power his C64 for 1.5 hours. To ensure the LiPo battery doesn’t get fully discharged, he’s added a simple buzzer circuit that starts beeping at around 3.3V.

How does just adding an external battery help make it portable? Well, he’s already added a small LCD display and a couple of other mods, that we featured in an earlier post. These earlier mod’s didn’t make the unit truly portable. Adding the latest hack does. Check out the video after the break.

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A VU-meter Indicator For A Commodore 1530 Datasette

April 11, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 9 Comments

For present-day owners of vintage Commodore computers, keeping data and programs safe and backed up is top priority. Disk drive storage was more common in the US, whereas in Europe, the audio cassette was the preferred medium of storage.

The Datasette device was what allowed interfacing the cassettes to the computer. Tape head alignment was critical to successfully writing and reading data to the cassette. Some models of the Datasette came with a small hole above the keys, to allow access to the adjustment screw of the tape head azimuth position. Tweaking this while looking at a signal meter could help you improve the signal from a bad cassette and prevent load errors. [Jani] tried a commercial solution called “Load-IT” which had a LED bargraph, but it couldn’t help much dealing with tapes with very bad signals. So he built a signal strength meter for his Datasette. He calls it the VU-sette since it uses an analog style meter quite similar to the VU-meters found in many audio equipment.

The hardware is simple and uses commonly available parts. The analog meter is extracted from a Battery Checker sourced from eBay. An op-amp drives the analog meter, and another transistor drives a separate speaker. This can be used to listen in on the cassette, if the speaker is enabled via a push button. [Jani] first breadboarded and tested the circuit before ordering out prototype boards.

To test performance, [Jani] used FinalTAP, a tool for examining, cleaning and restoring digitized data cassette tapes (TAP files) for the Commodore 64 computer. The “LOAD-IT” version worked well with tapes that were in fairly good condition. But his VU-sette version allowed him to adjust the head more precisely and get out a much better read from bad tapes. While on the subject, check out this nice 7-segment bubble LED digital counter for the 1530.

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A Raspberry Pi SID Player

February 6, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

Of all the vintage chiptune machines out there, the Commodore 64 is the most famous. Even 30 years later, there are still massive gatherings dedicated to eeking out the last cycle of processing power and graphics capability from the CPU and the infamous synth-on-a-chip, the SID. [Bob] wanted to build a SID jukebox. A C64 is capable of the job, but if you want to have every SID composition on an SD card and connect that to a network, a Raspberry Pi is the way to go.

The SID chip, in its 6581 or 8580 versions, is controlled directly by poking registers on the chip through the address and data busses. This means a lot of pins, too many for the original Raspi expansion header. That’s not a problem that can’t be solved with a few shift registers, though. The rest of the circuit is an LM386 audio amplifier, an LCD that displays the current song, and a can crystal oscillator for the SID.

Right now everything is wired up on a breadboard, but making this a Raspberry Pi hat would be a rather simple proposition. It’s only a matter of finding a SID with working filters, and if you can manage that, it’s a pretty easy build to replicate. Video below.

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Dual Porting A C64 Flash Cart

December 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

The old cartridges for the Commodore 64 use EEPROMs to store their data, and the newer Flash carts use either a Flash chip or an SD card to put a whole bunch of games in a small plastic brick. [Stian] and [Runar] thought that wasn’t good enough – they wanted to program cartridges in real time, the ability to reboot the C64 without ever touching it, and a device for coding and testing. What they came up with is the latest advance in Commodore cartridge technology.

The device presents 8k of memory to the C64, but it doesn’t do this with Flash or an EEPROM. Instead, [Stian] and [Runar] are using a dual-port static RAM, specifically one from the IDT7005 series. This chip has two data busses, two address busses, and /CE, /OE, and R/W lines for either side of the chip, allowing other digital circuits to be connected to one small section of the C64’s memory.

Also in the cart is an ATmega16 running V-USB to handle the PC communications. It takes about 1 to 1.5 seconds to transfer an entire 8k over to the cartridge, but this chip can read and write the RAM along with the C64 simultaneously.

If you want a box that will give you the ability to put ever game in existence on a single cartridge, this isn’t the one. However, if you want to write some C64 games and do some live debugging, this is the one for you. The Eagle files are available, and there’s a video demo below.

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