Collaborate Disseminate
There was even a day not too long ago when printers appeared to be going the way of the dodo; remember the “paperless office” craze? But then, printer manufacturers invented …read more Continue reading A Look Inside the Space Shuttle’s First Printer
CATS is a new communication and telemetry standard intended to surpass the current Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) standard by leveraging modern, super-cheap Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) transceivers rather than …read more Continue reading CATS: A New Communication and Telemetry System
In the three or four decades since storing programs on audio cassettes has been relevant, a lot of irreplaceable personal computing history has been lost to the ravages of time …read more Continue reading Persistence Pays in TI-99/4A Cassette Tape Data Recovery
If there’s one thing that ties together all the media coming out of the Apollo era, it’s probably the iconic Quindar tones. These quarter-second beeps served as control tones for …read more Continue reading Add a Little Quindar to Your Comms for that Apollo-Era Sound
It’s been a long time since computer hobbyists stored their programs and data on cassette tapes. But because floppy drives were expensive peripherals and hard drives were still a long …read more Continue reading A Cassette Interface for a 6502 Breadboard Computer, Kansas City-Style
[Larry Wall], inventor of Perl, once famously said that programmers have three key virtues: sloth, hubris, and impatience. It’s safe to say that these personality quirks are also present in …read more Continue reading Impatience is a Virtue When Testing This Old Maritime Teleprinter
When you’re looking to add some wireless functionality to a project, there are no shortage of options. You really don’t need to know much of the technical details to make use of the more well-documented modules, especially if you just need to get something working quickly. On the other hand, …read more
Those who were around for the pre-floppy days of computer mass storage were likely to have made the mistake of slipping a cassette tape containing data into a stereo tape deck. Instead of hearing the expected Awesome Mix, the speakers gave off an annoying bleat, warbling between two discordant tones and no doubt spoiling the mood.
What you likely heard was the Kansas City standard, an early attempt to provide the budding microcomputer industry with a mass-storage standard. It was successful enough that you can still find KCS tapes in need of decoding to this day. That job would be …read more
Many of the hacks featured here are complex feats of ingenuity that you might expect to have emerged from a space-age laboratory rather than a hacker’s bench. Impressive stuff, but on the other side of the coin the essence of a good hack is often just a simple and elegant way of solving a technical problem using clever lateral thinking.
Take this project from [drtune], he needed to synchronize some lighting to an audio stream from an MP3 player and wanted to store his lighting control on the same SD card as his MP3 file. Sadly his serial-controlled MP3 player …read more
Continue reading Synchronize Data With Audio From A $2 MP3 Player