Vintage Slide Viewers Make Beautiful Retro Emulators

April 21, 2019 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

35mm still photography is still hanging on out in the wild, with its hardcore fans ensuring it never quite dies out despite the onward march of digital imaging. Slides are an even more obsolete technology, forgotten long ago when the quality of color negative films improved. The related paraphernalia from the era of the photographic slide continues to clutter up attics and garages the world over. [Martin Burlus] was in possession of some retro slide viewers, and found they made an excellent basis for a RetroPie build.

The build relies on stock standard fundamentals – a Pi Zero runs the show, combined with a USB hub and a power supply. [Martin] then chose to build this all inside the case of the slide viewer, combined with a 2.8″ PiTFT display. This neatly slots directly on to the Pi Zero’s 40-pin header, and comes complete with a touch screen. It’s the perfect size to slide into most slide viewers, though some models required removal of the tact buttons.

The slide viewers make for a charming enclosure, and the classic 1970s optics make for pleasant viewing. Throwing a modern display behind a vintage lens is a great way to give a project a more classic look and feel. One thing’s for sure – we’ll be keeping an eye out for a slide viewer of our own next time we’re passing through the local junk shops.

Handheld Linux Terminal Gets An A+

January 17, 2015 by Kristina Panos 40 Comments

Are you all thumbs when it comes to Linux? If you follow [Chris]’s guide to building a handheld Linux terminal, that particular condition could work to your advantage. His pocket-sized machine is perfect for practicing command line-fu and honing your scripting skills on the go.

[Chris]’s creation is built around a Raspberry Pi A+ that he stripped to its essentials by removing the GPIO pins, HDMI and USB ports, the audio port, and the camera and display ports. It’s housed in a pair of plastic 2.5″ hard drive enclosures connected with a piano hinge, making it about the size of a Nintendo DS. The display is an Adafruit PiTFT touch screen and in order to save space, he soldered it directly to the Pi.

The 2.4GHz wireless thumb keyboard has all the special characters necessary for Linuxing, but the four USB ports from a dismantled hub provide flexibility. If [Chris] were to make another one, he might use this slightly larger screen from Tindie and add some charging ports to the case.

[Thanks for the tip, ar0cketman]

Make Your Own Mac Pi For Some Desktop Nostalgia

August 28, 2014 by James Hobson 10 Comments

Mac Pi

Do you miss your Mac Classic? Well if you’re looking for a fun little project, why not build yourself a Mini Mac Pi that emulates Mac OS 7?

It’s a fairly simple project that makes use of the Raspberry Pi B, a 320×240 2.8″ touchscreen LCD (the PiTFT), a lithium-ion battery, a buck-boost circuit and of course, a power switch. The cute enclosure is made by 3D printing, and all the files are available on Thingiverse — they’ve been sliced up in a way that they will be printable on most consumer printer bed sizes.

Once everything is assembled, you’ll need to run Mini vMac alongside Raspbian in order to run Mac OS 7. There are a few caveats though — The original resolution is 512×342, so there’s a bit of screen clipping that occurs. There’s also minor application support, but for the purpose of nostalgia, we think the included selection is more than enough to satisfy most memories.

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