Portrait of a Digital Weapon

Over the years, artists have been creating art depicting weapons of mass destruction, war and human conflict. But the weapons of war, and the theatres of operation are changing in …read more Continue reading Portrait of a Digital Weapon

Tune Into the Bonnaroo That No One Gets to Go To

Just like everything else in 2020, the four-day, multi-stage festival of music and art known as Bonnaroo has been cancelled. This would have been [Guy Dupont]’s fifth year making the journey to Tennessee with his friend. Since they couldn’t go, [Guy] decided to build an interactive Bonnaroo mix tape into …read more

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Launch Console Delivers Enjoyment To Software Deployment

Sometimes it feels as though all the good physical interactions with machines have disappeared. Given our current germ warfare situation, that is probably a good thing. But if fewer than ten people ever will be touching something, it’s probably okay to have a little fun and make your own interfaces …read more

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Word Clock Five Minutes At A Time

As this clock’s creator admits, it took far more than five minutes to put together, but it does display the time in five minute increments.

After acquiring five 4-character, 16 segment display modules that were too good to pass up, they were promptly deposited in the parts pile until [JF] was cajoled into building something by a friend. Given that each display’s pins were in parallel, there was a lot of soldering to connect these displays to the clock’s ATMega328P brain. On the back of the clock’s perfboard skeleton, a DS1307 real-time clock and coin cell keep things ticking along …read more

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When a CRT Isn’t Retro Enough: LEDs

When we think of an old-style computer terminal, it has a CRT screen: either one of the big 1970s VDUs with integrated keyboard, or maybe one from a later decade with more svelte styling. You would have found other displays in use in previous decades though, and one of them came our way that we think it worthy of sharing.

[Dan Julio] was given several tubes of Siemens DL1416B 4-digit 17-segment LED displays by a friend, and decided to use them as an unusual retro display for his terminal project. These devices are an alphanumeric display with a parallel interface …read more

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