Putting A Teensy To Task As A Transputer Link

One downside of working with the old Inmos Transputer devices is the rarity and cost of the original silicon. Obviously, you can’t sidestep the acquisition of the processor—unless you emulate—but what about replacing the IMS C011/C012 link chip? You need this (expensive) part to interface the transputer to the programming host, but as [Erturk Kocalar] discovered, it’s perfectly possible to coax a Teensy to do that job for you just as well.

The unusual two-bit start sequence differentiates a data packet from an ACK. It’s simple to emulate if you use the LSB of a 9-bit word as a dummy start bit!

Transputers work by utilizing an array of bit serial interfaces to connect a network of devices, allowing for cooperative computation on tasks too large to fit on a single device. This protocol is, at its link level, a simple asynchronous bit serial affair, with 11-bit data messages, and a raw two-bit frame for the acknowledge. The C011 device at its heart is just a specialized UART—it takes 8-bit parallel data from the host, dealing with handshaking, and pushes it out to the first transputer in the chain at 5, 10 or 20 Mbps, but inverted and with two start bits and a single stop bit. In parallel, it performs the same task in the reverse direction.

[Erturk] realized that the Teensy UART has an inverted mode and, crucially, a 9-bit data mode. This allows the second start bit to be generated as bit 0 of the word, with the remaining eight bits forming the payload. Simple stuff. Additionally, the Teensy UART is capable of the maximum transputer bitrate of 20 Mbps, without breaking a sweat.

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O Brother, What Art Thou?

Dedicated word processors are not something we see much of anymore. They were in a weird space: computerized, but not really what you could call a computer, even in those days. More like a fancy typewriter, with a screen and floppy disks. Brother made some very nice ones, and [Chad Boughton] got his hands on one for a modernization project.

The word processor in question, a Brother WP-2200, was chosen primarily because of its beautiful widescreen, yellow-phosphor CRT display. Yes, you read that correctly — yellow phosphor, not amber. Widescreen CRTs are rare enough, but that’s just different. As built, the WP-2200 had a luggable form-factor, with a floppy drive, ̶m̶e̶c̶h̶a̶n̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ clacky keyboard, and dot-matrix printer in the back. Continue reading “O Brother, What Art Thou?”

C64 on desk with NFC TeensyROM and game token

TeensyROM NFC Game Loading On The C64

When retro computing nostalgia meets modern wireless wizardry, you get a near-magical tap-to-load experience. It’ll turn your Commodore 64 into a console-like system, complete with physical game cards. Inspired by TapTo for MiSTer, this latest hack brings NFC magic to real hardware using the TeensyROM. It’s been out there for a while, but it might not have caught your attention as of yet. Developed by [Sensorium] and showcased by YouTuber [StatMat], this project is a tactile, techie love letter to the past.

At the heart of it is the TeensyROM cartridge, which – thanks to some clever firmware modding – now supports reading NFC tags. These are writable NTag215 cards storing the path to game files on the Teensy’s SD card. Tap a tag to the NFC reader, and the TeensyROM boots your game. No need to fumble with LOAD “*”,8,1. That’s not only cool, it’s convenient – especially for retro demo setups.

What truly sets this apart is the reintroduction of physical tokens. Each game lives on its own custom-designed card, styled after PC Engine HuCards or printed with holographic vinyl. It’s a tangible, collectible gimmick that echoes the golden days of floppies and cartridges – but with 2020s tech underneath. Watch it here.

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Custom Frame Grabber Gets Vintage Kodak Digital Camera Back In The Game

What do you do with a four-megapixel monochrome digital camera from the 90s that needed a dedicated PC with a frame grabber card to do anything useful? Easy — you turn it into a point-and-shoot by building your own frame grabber.

At least that’s what [Frost Sheridan] did with a vintage Kodak MegaPlus 4.2i, a camera that was aimed at the industrial and scientific market at a time when everyone was still using film for snapshots. Making this workhorse ride again meant diving into the manual, luckily still available after all these years, and figuring out what pins on the 68 pin connector would be useful. [Frost] worked out the pins for serial commands plus the 10-bit parallel interface, although he settled for the eight most significant bits to make things simpler. A Teensy with some extra RAM and a serial interface chip takes care of sending commands to the camera and pulling pixels off the parallel interface, and a 128×160 LCD provides a much-needed viewfinder.

With a battery pack mounted the whole thing is reasonably portable, if a bit of a chore to use. It’s worth the effort, though; the picture quality is fantastic, with a wide dynamic range and plenty of contrast. Hats off to [Frost] for bringing this beauty back to life without making any permanent modifications to it.

Close up of a Sony FX-300 'Jackal' radio

Packing Even More Features Into A Classic Radio

When it comes to hacking niches, breathing new life into vintage devices is always an exciting challenge. [t0mg]’s recent project exemplifies this with his 1978 Sony FX-300 ‘Jackal’ radio. He’d already upgraded the radio in 2021 and turned it into a feature-packed marvel, but there’s always room for improvement.

[t0mg]’s initial 2021 build had its quirks: noisy sound, a subpar display, and a non-functional radio module. Determined to enhance these aspects, he sourced an IPS version of the original 3.2″ ILI9431 LCD, significantly improving viewing angles. To tackle the audio issues, he integrated an M5Stack Atom microcontroller, utilizing its Bluetooth A2DP capabilities to deliver cleaner digital sound via I2S to the Teensy audio board. The Teensy itself got a complete wire overhaul just for the sake of good craftmanship.

The new setup also enabled the display of song metadata. Additionally, [t0mg] incorporated a dedicated Arduino Nano clone to manage inputs, streamlining the overall design. The revamped ‘Jackal’ now boasts a bunch of impressive features such as displaying RDS data for FM stations, voice recording, and an NFC reader for personalized playlists.

If you’re into radio makeovers, look into this post for a real golden oldie, or start out with the basics. For [t0mg]’s earlier improved version of this Jackal, read our article on it here.

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Is That A Large Smartwatch? Or A Tiny Cray?

While we aren’t typically put off by a large wristwatch, we were taken a bit aback by [Chris Fenton]’s latest timepiece — if you can call it that. It’s actually a 1/25th-scale Cray C90 worn as a wristwatch. The whole thing started with [Chris] trying to build a Cray in Verilog. He started with a Cray-1 but then moved to a Cray X-MP, which is essentially a Cray-1 with two extra address bits. Then he expanded it to 32 bits, which makes it a Cray Y-MP/C90/J90 core. As he puts it, “If you wanted something practical, go read someone else’s blog.”

The watch emulates a Cray C916 and uses a round OLED display on the top. While the move from 22 to 32 address bits sounds outdated, keep in mind the Cray addresses 64-bit words exclusively, so we’re talking access to 32 gigabytes of memory. The hardware consists of an off-the-shelf FPGA board and a Teensy microcontroller to handle mundane tasks like driving the OLED display and booting the main CPU. Interestingly, the actual Cray 1A used Data General computers for a similar task.

Of course, any supercomputer needs a super program, so [Chris] uses the screen to display a full simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons. The Cray excels at programs like this because of its vector processing abilities. The whole program is 127 words long and sustains 40 MFLOPs. Of course, that means to read the current time, you need to know where Jupiter’s moons are at all times so you can match it with the display. He did warn us this would not be practical.

While the Cray wouldn’t qualify as a supercomputer today, we love learning about what was state-of-the-art not that long ago. Cray was named, of course, after [Seymour Cray] who had earlier designed the Univac 1103, several iconic CDC computers, and the Cray computers, of course.

A3 Audio: The Open Source 3D Audio Control System

Sometimes, startups fail due to technical problems or a lack of interest from potential investors and fail to gain development traction. This latter case appears to be the issue befalling A3 Audio. So, the developers have done the next best thing, made the project open source, and are actively looking for more people to pitch in. So what is it? The project is centered around the idea of spatial audio or 3D audio. The system allows ‘audio motion’ to be captured, mixed and replayed, all the while synchronized to the music. At least that’s as much as we can figure out from the documentation!

The system is made up of three main pieces of hardware. The first part is the core (or server), which is essentially a Linux PC running an OSC (Open Sound Control) server. The second part is a ‘motion sampler’, which inputs motion into the server. Lastly, there is a Mixer, which communicates using the OSC protocol (over Ethernet) to allow pre-mixing of spatial samples and deployment of samples onto the audio outputs. In addition to its core duties, the ‘core’ also manages effects and speaker handling.

The motion module is based around a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Teensy microcontroller, with a 7-inch touchscreen display for user input and oodles of NeoPixels for blinky feedback on the button matrix. The mixer module seems simpler, using just a Teensy for interfacing the UI components.

We don’t see many 3D audio projects, but this neat implementation of a beam-forming microphone phased array sure looks interesting.