Controlling the power with bluetooth

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Mike] dropped us a tip to show off a system he has built to control some power sockets based on his proximity.  Initially the project started as a parallel port controlled box to switch the mains power.  Then he got the idea of turning this into a little more interactive of an automation tool. He is utilizing the bluetooth from his cell phone as a locator. When the box senses that he’s in the room, the power is on. When he leaves the area, the power is off.  You can see his ruby code on his web site if you wanted to give it a try or offer improvements.

Filed Under: classic hacks, home hacks Tagged With: , ,

Building the mind of a robot overlord

April 19, 2012 By 8 Comments

The folks at the Louisville hackerspace LVL1 now have a fabulous piece of wall art that is also a speech synthesizer. The speech synthesizer is over two feet long and is made of nine panels of stripboard connected with right angle headers. An awesome piece of art if there ever was one.

This speech synthesizer is actually 30 years in the making. In the early 1980s, one of the members of LVL1 across a few text-to-speech ICs in a bin in Radio Shack. These ICs sat in a drawer while college got in the way, and in 1990, the project was resurrected. The speech synth chips sat in a drawer for another decade, and it was finally decided to build a wall-mounted speech synth for LVL1.

This speech synthesizer is intended to be the voice box for FATHER, LVL1’s second hackerspace AI. Already the first AI – MOTHER – is already telling people to take out the trash and generally trying to become the AI-gone-amok we all deserve. FATHER will be implemented in a robotic monkey, so right now the only question we have is who has been messing with the Louisville water supply.

Filed Under: classic hacks Tagged With:

Controlling blinkenlights with modern computers

April 19, 2012 By 4 Comments

A few old timers may remember that once, long ago, computers didn’t require keyboards. The earliest personal computers such as the Altair 8800 and the server rack-sized minicomputers like the PDP-11 could be controlled with a panel filled with switches and lights, giving us the term blinkenlights. Today, most of these machines have been thrown away or locked up in museums and private collections; even if you were to get your hands on one of these control panels, you’ll have a heck of a time doing something useful with one.

Fear not, because [Jörg] has come up with a great way to control these blinkenlights and simulate the computers of yesteryear. He calls his build BlinkenBone, and it’s able to control the blinkenlight panels from dozens of historical computers and simulate every thrown switch and tiny light bulb.

BlinkenBone is a BeagleBone single board Linux computer running the SimH simulator for antique computers. Right now the BlinkenBone is able to simulate the PDP-1, PDP-8, PDP-11, a lot of old IBM machines, the Altair 8800, and even some HP boxes.

Without a BlinkenBone or similar simulation device, the still-surviving control panels for these computers are just pieces of art to hang on a wall. When they’re running a simulation of their original hardware that was long-lost to the scrap yard, they become the useful devices they once were. Also, it’s much easier to appreciate how far technology has come in the last 40 years.

You can check out a short demo of [Jörg] using his BlinkenBone on a PDP-11/40 after the break. Look at those lights go.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: classic hacks Tagged With: , ,

Original Prince of Persia game source code released

April 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The game that launched a multi-billion dollar franchise is now laid bare for your hacking pleasure. [Jordan Mechner] just posted the once-lost source code for Prince of Persia. This game was ground-breaking for its use of rotoscoping to mimic the movements of an actor (in this case it was his younger brother). Oh, and it’s a ton of fun to play.

This comes at an appropriate time since yesterday was the the 35th anniversary of the Apple II release. PoP was written for that platform but should be easy to get running on an emulator if you’re just interested in cloning the repository so that you can play it through once again. Interestingly enough, the source code went missing for many years. [Jordan’s] been looking for the original source code for a decade. Turns out his Dad came across a cardboard box with some original copies of the game in it and shipped it off for [Jordan] to take care of. Inside was a set of 3.5″ disks that are pure retro gold.

So here’s your chance to inject yourself into the game. The question is, will you be the Prince or will you be Jaffar?

Filed Under: classic hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Neosporin…the Retrobright for bench equipment?

April 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

polishing-knobs

[linux-works] picked up an old power supply from eBay, and as it was built back in the 60’s or 70’s, it was in need of a little TLC. One thing that immediately caught his eye was the condition of the knobs, dials, and banana plug receptacles – they were dull and faded, showing off 40+ years of heavy usage.

He started off by simply removing the knobs from the power supply, giving them a thorough cleaning with soapy water before leaving them to air dry. They didn’t look any better afterward, so he decided to take a different approach and apply some triple antibiotic ointment to the knobs. As it turns out, letting the ointment sit for a few minutes then wiping the knobs with a soft cloth really made them shine, as you can see in the image above. [linux-works] attributes the effect to the white petrolatum base of the product rather than the antibiotics, likely making a wide array of products equally suitable for the job.

We know how well Retr0bright has worked for the vintage computer folks, so we’ll be interested to see how long the effects of the triple antibiotic treatment last. It certainly can’t hurt those readers who spend their time perusing flea markets in search of classic electronic equipment.

Filed Under: chemistry hacks, classic hacks, news Tagged With: , , , , ,

Giving an old Atari computer a much needed upgrade

April 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

As a kid, [Boisy] cut his teeth on the TRS-80 Color Computer. It was a wonderful machine for its day, featuring a relatively powerful Motorola 6809 CPU. Although his CoCo was theoretically more powerful than its Commodore and Apple contemporaries, the graphics and sound capabilities of [Boisy]’s first love paled in comparison to his friends 6502-based machines. A little jealously and thirty years go a long way, because now [Boisy] is adding a 6809 microprocessor to the 6502-based machines Atari put out.

[Boisy]’s goal for his Liber809 project was simple: Put a 6809 CPU in an Atari XEGS and get NitrOS-9, the Unix-like OS for the TRS-80 CoCo running on his Frankenputer. After a few months of work, [Boisy] completed his goal and more so: the Liber809 also works on the Atari 1200XL.

To put [Boisy]’s work in perspective, it’s like he took a Macintosh from 1993 and made it run on an Intel 486. While that’s not a terribly accurate analogy, we hope our readers will understand the fortitude needed to make a computer run on a completely different processor.

After the break, you can check out a neat demo app written by [SLOR] from the AtariAge forums showcasing a 6809 running in a machine designed for a 6502. Awesome work for all involved

[Read more…]

Filed Under: classic hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »