Terminal DAW Does It In Style

April 30, 2025 by Fenix Guthrie 30 Comments

As any Linux chat room or forum will tell you, the most powerful tool to any Linux user is a terminal emulator. Just about every program under the sun has a command line alternative, be it CAD, note taking, or web browsing. Likewise, the digital audio workstation (DAW) is the single most important tool to anyone making music. Therefore, [unspeaker] decided the two should, at last, be combined with a terminal based DAW called Tek.

Tek functions similarly to other DAWs, albeit with keyboard only input. For anyone used to working in Vim or Emacs (we ask you keep the inevitable text editor comment war civil), Tek will be very intuitive. Currently, the feature set is fairly spartan, but plans exist to add keybinds for save/load, help, and more. The program features several modes including a multi-track sequencer/sampler called the “arranger.” Each track in the arranger is color coded with a gradient of colors generated randomly at start for a fresh look every time.

Modern audio workflows often span across numerous programs, and Tek was built with this in mind. It can take MIDI input and output from the JACK Audio Connection Kit, and plans also exist to create a plugin server so Tek could be used with other DAWs like Ardor or Zrythm. Moreover, being a terminal program opens possibilities for complicated shell scripting and other such Linux-fu.

Maybe a terminal DAW is not your thing, so make sure to check out this physical one instead!

Retrotechtacular: Point-of-Sale Through The Years

February 8, 2025 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

In days gone by, a common retail hack used by some of the less honorable of our peers was the price tag switcheroo. You’d find some item that you wanted from a store but couldn’t afford, search around a bit for another item with a more reasonable price, and carefully swap the little paper price tags. As long as you didn’t get greedy or have the bad luck of getting a cashier who knew the correct prices, you could get away with it — at least up until the storekeeper wised up and switched to anti-tamper price tags.

For better or for worse, those days are over. The retail point-of-sale (POS) experience has changed dramatically since the time when cashiers punched away at giant cash registers and clerks applied labels to the top of every can of lima beans in a box with a spiffy little gun. The growth and development of POS systems is the subject of [TanRu Nomad]’s expansive video history, and even if you remember the days when a cashier kerchunked your credit card through a machine to take an impression of your card in triplicate, you’ll probably learn something.

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Tldr-pages Keeps It Short, Wherever You Need It

December 14, 2024 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

Let’s face it, even the most accomplished console cowboy can’t keep everything memorized. Sure, you might know all the important arguments for a daily-use tool like tar or ls, but what about the commands you don’t use that often? For that matter, even if you do use tar every day, we bet you don’t know all of the options it supports.

Built-in documentation or the man pages are of course a huge help, but they are dense resources. Sometimes what you really need is to see just a few key examples. When that happens, check out the tldr-pages project and its array of front-ends. Whether you’re working remotely on an embedded gadget, or have the luxury of a full desktop OS and browser, the project offers a way to get the help you need as quickly as possible.

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A black device with a monochrome LCD sits on a wooden table. It's keyboard extends below the frame. On the screen is the "Level 29" BBS service login.

Internet Appliance To Portable Terminal

August 8, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 3 Comments

Few processors have found themselves in so many different devices as the venerable Z80. While it isn’t powerful by modern standards, you can still use devices like this Cidco MailStation as a terminal.

The MailStation was originally designed as an email machine for people who weren’t onboard with this whole computer fad, keeping things simple with just an adjustable monchrome LCD, a keyboard, and a few basic applications. [Joshua Stein] developed a terminal application, msTERM, for the MailStation thanks to work previously done on decoding this device and the wealth of documentation for Z80 assembly.

While [Stein] designed his program to access BBSes, we wonder if it might be a good way to do some distraction-free writing. If that wasn’t enough, he also designed the WiFiStation dongle which lets you communicate over a network without all that tedious mucking about with parallel ports.

If you’d like something designed specifically for writing, how about an AlphaSmart? Wanting to build your own Z80-based project? Why not start with an Altoids-sized Z80 SBC, but don’t wait forever since Z80 production finally ended in June.

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Homebrew Reader Brings Paper Tape Programs Back To Life

June 15, 2024 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

We may be a bit biased, but the storage media of yesteryear has so much more personality than that of today. Yes, it’s a blessing to have terabyte SD cards smaller than your pinky nail and be able to access its data with mind-boggling speed. But there’s a certain charm to a mass storage device that can potentially slice off your finger.

We’re overstating the dangers of the venerable paper tape reader, of course, a mass storage device that [David Hansel] recreated a few years back but we only just became aware of. That seems a bit strange since we’ve featured his Arduino-based Altair 8800 simulator, which is what this tape reader is connected to. Mechanically, the reader is pretty simple — just a wooden frame to hold the LEGO Technic wheels used as tape reels, and some rollers to guide the tape through a read head. That bit is custom-made and uses a pair of PCBs, one for LEDs and one for phototransistors. There are nine of each — eight data bits plus the index hole — and the boards are sandwiched together to guide the paper tape.

The main board has an ATmega328 which reads the parallel input from the read head and controls the tape motor. That part is important thanks to Altair Basic’s requirement for a 100- to 200-ms delay at the end of each typed line. The tape reader, which is just being used as sort of a keyboard wedge, can “type” a lot faster than that, so the motor speed is varied using PWM control as line length changes.

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Home Automation Terminal Has Great Post-Apocalyptic Look

May 21, 2024 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

If you use home automation these days, you’re probably used to using smart speakers, your smartphone, or those tabletop touchscreen devices. If you wanted something cooler and more personal, you could try building something like [Rick] did.

A Raspberry Pi 400 is the basis for the machine, and it still uses the original keyboard. It’s paired with a 3D-printed shell with a 7″ Waveshare HDMI touch display in it. The LCD is placed behind a Fresnel lens which provides some magnification. It displays a glowing blue command line which accepts text commands. It’s hooked up to the OpenAI API, so it’s a little smarter than just any old regular terminal. It’s hooked up to [Rick’s] home automation system, so he can use natural language queries to control lighting, music, and all the rest. Think Alexa or Siri, but in text form.

The design of the case, with its rounded edges, vents, and thick bezels gives it a strong retro-futuristic look, reminiscent of something out of Fallout. [Rick’s] neat application of weathering techniques helped a lot, too.

It reminds us of some of the cooler Pip Boy builds we’ve seen. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own creative terminal build in the works, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

Driving An OLED Screen With A 6502 Single-Board Computer

October 24, 2023 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Twenty years ago, if you wanted an LCD for a project, you’d probably end up with something salvaged from a mobile phone or an HD44780 character display. These days, little OLEDs can be had for a few bucks and they’ve taken the maker world by storm. [Anders Nielsen] has recently been experimenting with driving these displays from the vintage 6502 CPU, and he’s even got scrolling operation down pat.

The best part is that [Nielsen] is doing all this on a single-board computer running his own assembly code. That’s right – there’s no compilers here. It’s bare metal coding at it’s best. The build uses a 6507 chip running at 1 MHz, paired with a 6532 RIOT and just 128 bytes of RAM—a similar setup to the Atari 2600.

The video explains how the code stacks up and drives the display, achieving the scrolling effect. It makes a huge difference to usability, especially compared to chunking pages at a time to the postage stamp-sized screen. He demonstrates a legitimate usage case too, using the setup as a serial terminal for a Raspberry Pi.

The 6502 architecture still looms large in the collective consciousness; we’ve been talking about programming it in assembly for years. Video after the break.

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