electromechanical

37 Articles

Mini Car Racing Game Really Shows Off Multicolor Printing

July 16, 2025 by 12 Comments

Quality 3D printing is a common hobbyist tool nowadays, and [wontonnn]’s mini arcade car racing game really shows off how 3D printing can bring parts from functional to fantastic. There are quite a few details we like in [wontonn]’s design, so let’s take a closer look.

The mini mechanical game is one of those treadmill-based car racing games in which the player navigates a little car between an onslaught of belt-borne obstacles. A little DC motor spins things up in a modular side assembly, and a hand-cranked option is available. The player’s car attaches via a magnet to a steering arm; if the player’s car gets knocked off the magnet, game over.

Treadmill belt segments print as large pre-assembled pieces, with ends that snap together without connectors. Belts like this are sometimes tricky, so this is worth keeping in mind should one ever need a similar part. Since there are no external fasteners or hardware to depend on, one could resize it easily to suit their own project purposes.

The finishing touches on the whole assembly look great. It used to be that the sort of colors and lettering seen here would come from a sticker or label, but [wontonn] gets clean lines and colors by raising (or sinking) different parts of the design. The checkerboard pattern, for example, has the light squares raised for printing in a different color.

Electromechanical arcade games have an appeal all their own, being a fusion of both mechanical and electric design that comes together in a special way. Want to make your own? Get inspired by the classic Lunar Lander reimagined, or check out this LEGO treadmill racer that takes an entirely different approach to the concept.

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Electromechanical Atari Is A Steampunk Meccano Masterpiece

June 15, 2025 by 21 Comments

If William Gibson and Bruce Sterling had written an arcade scene into “The Difference Engine”, it probably would have looked a lot like [Pete Wood]’s Meccano Martian Mission, as illustrated in the video below by the [London Meccano Club]. Meccano Martian Mission is an homage to Atari’s 1978 Lunar Lander video game, but entirely electromechanical and made of– you guessed it– Meccano.

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A Look Inside A 70-GHz Electromechanical Attenuator

March 15, 2024 by 4 Comments

It might not count as “DC to daylight,” but an electromechanical attenuator that covers up to 70 GHz is pretty close, and getting a guided tour of its insides is quite a treat.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this one comes to us from [Shahriar] at “The Signal Path,” where high-end gear most of us never get a chance to work with goes for one last hurrah after it releases the magic smoke. And indeed, that appears to be exactly what happened to the Rohde & Schwarz 75 dB step attenuator, a part that may have lived in the front end of one of their spectrum analyzers. As one would expect from such an expensive component, the insides have some pretty special engineering. The signal is carried through the five attenuation stages on a narrow strip of copper. Each stage uses a solenoid to move the strip between either a plain conductor or a small Pi pad with a specified attenuation. The attention to detail inside the cavity is amazing, with great care taken to maintain the physical orientation of the stripline to prevent impedance mismatches and unwanted reflections.

The Pi pads themselves are fascinating, too, especially under [Shahriar]’s super-duper microscope. All of them were destructively removed from the cavity before getting to him, but it’s still pretty clear what’s going on. That’s especially true with the 5-dB pad, which bears clear signs of the overload that brought on the demise of the whole attenuator. We suppose a repair would have been feasible if it had been just the one pad that needed replacement, but with all of them broken, it’s off to the scrap bin. Or to the recycler — there appears to be plenty of gold in there.

We thought this was a fantastic look under the covers of an exquisitely engineered part. Too bad it didn’t rate the [Shahriar] X-ray treatment, as this multimeter repair or this 60-GHz phased array did. Oh, well — maybe next time.

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If You Thought Sega Only Made Electronic Games, Think Again

March 1, 2024 by 4 Comments

Most of us associate the name Sega with their iconic console gaming systems from the 1980s and 1990s, and those of us who maintain an interest in arcade games will be familiar with their many cabinet-based commercial offerings. But the company’s history in its various entities stretches back as far as the 1950s in the world of slot machines and eventually electromechanical arcade games. [Arcade Archive] is starting to tell the take of how one of those games is being restored, it’s a mid-1960s version of Gun Fight, at the Retro Collective museum in Stroud, UK.

The game is a table-style end-to-end machine, with the two players facing each other with a pair of diminutive cowboys over a game field composed of Wild West scenery. The whole thing is very dirty indeed, so a substantial part of the video is devoted to their carefully dismantling and cleaning the various parts.

This is the first video in what will become a series, but it still gives a significant look into the electromechanical underpinnings of the machine. It’s beautifully designed and made, with all parts carefully labelled and laid out with color-coded wiring for easy servicing. For those of us who grew up with electronic versions of Sega Gun Fight, it’s a fascinating glimpse of a previous generation of gaming, which we’re looking forward to seeing more of.

This is a faithful restoration of an important Sega game, but it’s not the first time we’ve featured old Sega arcade hardware.

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A 1960s PLC Gives Up Its Secrets

February 15, 2024 by 7 Comments

When it comes to process automation, the go-to part in most industrial settings is a Programmable Logic Controller, or PLC. These specialized computers will have a modern microcontroller running the show, but surprisingly the way they are programmed still has echoes of a time before electronic PLCs when such control would have been electromechanical.

[Thomas Scherrer] has an interesting design to tear down, it’s a Siemens electromechanical motor controller from the early 1960s. It’s not quite the huge banks of relays which would have made a fully-blown PLC back in those times, but it’s a half-way house with some simple programming capability in the form of several channels of adjustable time delay.

We’re partly sad to see this unit being subjected to a destructive teardown, but nevertheless it’s interesting to see all those very period components. The current sensor has a mechanism similar to a moving coil meter, and the four-channel timer is a mechanical sequencer with four adjustable cam-driven switches. We’re not sure we would be cracking open selenium rectifiers with such nonchalance though.

These units were built to a very high quality indeed, and though it’s obvious this one comes from a decommissioned installation it’s not beyond possibility to think there might be some of them still doing their job over six decades after manufacture. Have any of you seen one of these or something like it in operation recently? Let us know in the comments. Meanwhile the video is below the break.

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Put Another Dime In The Jukebox

May 24, 2022 by 19 Comments

We don’t always acknowledge it, but most people have an innate need for music. Think of all the technology that brings us music. For decades, most of the consumer radio spectrum carried music. We went from records, to tape in various forms, to CDs, to pure digital. There are entire satellites that carry — mostly — music. Piracy aside, people are willing to pay for music, too. While it isn’t very common to see “jukeboxes” these days, there was a time when they were staples at any bar or restaurant or even laundrymat you happened to be in. For the cost of a dime, you can hear the music and share it with everyone around you.

Even before we could record music, there was something like a jukebox. Coin-operated machines, as you’ll recall, are actually very old. Prior to the 1890s, you might find coin-op player pianos or music boxes. These machines actually played the music they were set up to play using a paper roll with holes in it or metal disks or cylinders.

Early Days

That changed in 1890 when a pair of inventors connected a coin acceptor to an Edison phonograph. Patrons of San Francisco’s Palais Royale Saloon could put a hard-earned nickel in the slot and sound came out of four different tubes. Keep in mind there were no electronic amplifiers as we know them in 1890. Reportedly, the box earned $1,000 in six months.

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Antique Beat Box Showcases 1950’s Engineering Prowess

March 3, 2022 by 35 Comments

Before you could just put a drum machine app on your phone, or fire up Garage Band, there were breakthroughs like the Roland 808 drum machine. But that’s not where it all started. In 1959 a company called Wurlitzer (known for things like juke boxes, pianos, and giant pipe organs) produced a new device that had musicians worried it would put drummers out of a job: The 1959 Wurlitzer Sideman. And in the video below the break, we have the joy of watching [LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER] open up, explain, and play one of these marvelous machines.

Can you spot the early circuit sculpture?

It’s noteworthy that in 1959, almost none of the advancements we take for granted had made it out of the laboratory. Transistors? Nope. Integrated Circuits? Definitely not. What does that leave us with? Vacuum tubes (Valves for those across the pond), resistors, capacitors, relays, and… motors? Yep. Motors.

The unit is artfully constructed, and we mean that quite literally- the build was clearly done with care and it is easy to see an early example of circuit sculpture around the 3 minute mark. Electromechanical mechanisms take on tasks that we’d probably use a 555 for these days, but for any of you working on mechanical projects, take note: Wurlitzer really knew what they were doing, and there are some excellent examples of mechanical and electrical engineering throughout this primordial beat box.

If you move to the beat of interesting drum machines, you might enjoy this Teensy based Open Source drum machine that you can build. No tubes required!

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