[SrBlonde]’s wonderful micro Spectrum project has only the essential inputs, which makes for an interesting-looking keyboard for sure. Inside you’ll find an Orange Pi Zero 2 board loaded with Batocera so [SrBlonde] can play all their favorite childhood games on the 5″ IPS display.
Something else that’s interesting is that the switches are a mix of blues and blacks — clickies and linears. I can’t figure out how they’re distributed based on the numbers in the components list, but I could see using clickies on the alphas and linears everywhere else (or vice versa). At any rate, it’s a great project, and you can grab the STL files from Thingiverse if you’re so inclined.
The Titanic famously (or infamously) used Morse code to call out in distress at the end of its final voyage. Ships at sea and the land-based stations that supported them used Morse code for decades, but with the growing use of satellites, maritime Morse code ended in 1999. With one notable exception. [Saahil Desai] writing in the Atlantic tells the story of America’s last Morse code station, KPH just north of San Francisco.
In fact, KPH did shut down in 1997 as part of the wind down of Morse code in ocean vessels. But some radio enthusiasts, including [Tom Horsfall] and [Richard Dillman], have brought the venerable station back to life. The radio squirrels, as they call themselves, dutifully send news and weather every Saturday to anyone interested in listening. They also exchange radio traffic, primarily with the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, a World War II-era ship parked nearby. N2FQ visited the station and operated the station on video, which you can see below. Or, check out the tour in the second video, below.
What’s the worst thing about traditional Morse keyers? If you ask us, it’s the fact that you have to learn how to do two distinct things with one hand, and switch between them quite quickly and often.
This set of Morse code foot pedals is meant for those who are unable to use traditional methods of keying. It uses a retrofitted wireless keyboard to read Z and X as dit and dah, respectively, and convert the Morse code into text.
[Tevendale_Engineering] started by getting the controller out of the keyboard and figuring out which combination of pads sends Z and X. Then they wired those up with copper tape. The pedals themselves are made from 1/2″-thick wood, foam core board, and Nerf bullets to provide springiness.
There’s no solder here; it’s all copper tape and alligator clip test leads. So if this isn’t your hack for the day, we don’t know what is.
If you are a ham radio operator of a certain age, you probably remember ads for “The Instructograph,” a mechanical device for learning Morse code. [Our Own Devices] has an ancient specimen of the machine and shows us how it works in the video below. The machine is a model of simplicity. You wind up a spring-driven motor like you would for an old record player or music box. A slider sets the playback rate, and paper tape starts to spin.
The paper tape looks like computer tape, but since it only has literal long and short notches, it has two distinct sides. When you learned one set of messages, you could flip the tape over and get more practice that way. How did the machine read the paper tape? With a mechanical contact. Literally, if the paper had a hole in it, you made the circuit. If it didn’t, the circuit was broken. A buzzer and batteries or some other kind of sounder was all you needed.
The company was in business for 50 years. The newer versions had more electronics, but they always used the paper tape mechanism to store the code practice sessions. A 1962 ad noted that the machine could play back the tapes from three words a minute up to 40. You could buy or rent the machine, and we always assumed it was pretty pricey for its day. Around 1965, a new unit would cost $53 but did not include a headset or a key. So that was actually more reasonable than we expected. In 1965, a brand-name clock radio cost about $50, so it wasn’t any more than that.
For those with strokes or other debilitating conditions, control over one’s eyelid can be one of the last remaining motor functions. Inspired by [Jeremiah Denton] blinking in Morse code on a televised interview, [MBW] designed an ESP32-based device to decode blinks into words.
While an ESP32 offers Bluetooth for simulating a keyboard and has a relatively low power draw, getting a proper blink detection system to run at 20 frames per second in a constrained environment is challenging. Earlier attempts used facial landmarks to try and determine, based on ratios, whether an eye was open or closed. A cascade detector combined with an XGBoost classifier offered excellent performance but struggled when the eye wasn’t centered. Ultimately a 50×50, 4-layer CNN in TensorFlow Lite processes the camera frames, producing a single output, eye open or closed. For debugging purposes, it streams camera frames over Wi-Fi with annotations via OpenCV, though getting OpenCV to compile for ESP32 was also nontrivial.
[MBW] trained the model using the MRL dataset and then quantized to int8. Getting the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi stacks to run concurrently was a bit of a pain, as was managing RAM. After exhausting SRAM and IRAM, [MBW] had to move to PRAM. The entire system is built into some lightweight goggles and makes for a fairly comfortable experience.
While TensorFlow and microcontrollers might seem like a bit of an odd couple, at the end of the day, the inference engine is just doing some math on an array of inputs with some weights. We’ve even seen TensorFlow Lite on a Commodore 64. If you don’t know about [Admiral Jerimiah Denton] we can shed some light on it for you.
Morse code might seem obsolete but for situations with extremely limited bandwidth it’s often still the best communications option available. The code requires a fair amount of training to use effectively, though, and even proficient radio operators tend to send only around 20 words per minute. As a result of the reduced throughput, a type of language evolved around Morse code which, like any language, has evolved and changed over time. QRP initially meant something akin to “you are overloading my receiver, please reduce transmitter power” but now means “operating radios at extremely low power levels”. [MIKROWAVE1] explores some of the earlier options for QRP radios in this video.
There’s been some debate in the amateur radio community over the years over what power level constitutes a QRP operation, but it’s almost certainly somewhere below 100 watts, and while the radios in this video have varying power levels, they tend to be far below this upper threshold, with some operating on 1 watt or less. There are a few commercial offerings demonstrated here, produced from the 70s to the mid-80s, but a few are made from kits as well. Kits tended to be both accessible and easily repairable, with Heathkit being the more recognizable option among this category. To operate Morse code (or “continuous wave” as hams would call it) only requires a single transistor which is why kits were so popular, but there are a few other examples in this video with quite a few more transistors than that. In fact, there are all kinds of radios featured here with plenty of features we might even consider modern by today’s standards; at least when Morse code is concerned.
QRP radios in general are attractive because they tend to be smaller, simpler, and more affordable. Making QRP contacts over great distances also increases one’s ham radio street cred, especially when using Morse, although this benefit is more intangible. There’s a large trend going on in the radio world right now surrounding operating from parks and mountain peaks, which means QRP is often the only way to get that done especially when operating on battery power. Modern QRP radios often support digital and voice modes as well and can have surprisingly high prices, but taking some cues from this video about radios built in decades past could get you on the radio for a minimum or parts and cost, provided you can put in the time.
The Baader-Meinhof effect is the common name for what scientists call frequency illusion. Suppose you are watching Star Trek’s Christopher Pike explain how he makes pasta mama, and you’ve never heard of it before. Immediately after that, you’ll hear about pasta mama repeatedly. You’ll see it on menus. Someone at work will talk about having it at Hugo’s. Here’s the thing. Pasta mama was there all along (and, by the way, delicious). You just started noticing it. We sometimes wonder if that’s the deal with Morse code. Once you know it, it seems to show up everywhere.
Gen. Hideki Tojo in custody in 1947
One of the strangest places we’ve ever heard of Morse code appearing is the infamous case of Tojo’s teeth. If you don’t remember, General Hideki Tojo was one of the main “bad guys” in the Pacific part of World War II. In particular, he is thought to have approved the attack on Pearl Harbor, which started the American involvement in the war globally. Turns out, Tojo would be inextricably tied to Morse code, but he probably didn’t realize it.
The Honorable Attempt
At the end of the war, the US military had a list of people they wanted to try, and Tojo was near the top of their list of 40 top-level officials. As prime minister of Japan, he had ordered the attack that brought the US into the war. He remained prime minister until 1944, when he resigned, but the US had painted him as the face of the Japanese enemy. Often shown in caricature along with Hitler and Mussolini, Tojo was the face of the Japanese war machine to most Americans.
In Allied propaganda, Tojo was one of the “big three”
When Americans tried to arrest him, though, he shot himself. However, his suicide attempt failed. Reportedly, he apologized to the American medics who resuscitated him for failing to kill himself. Held in Sugamo Prison awaiting a trial, he requested a dentist to make him a new set of dentures so he could speak clearly during the trial.
