Amstrad Portable Gets A Modern LCD Transplant

Playing classic games on the real hardware is an experience many of us enjoy, but sometimes the hardware is just a bit too retro for modern sensibilities. A case in point is the miserable monochrome LCD that was originally installed in the Amstrad PPC640 portable 8086 PC that [Drygol] recently …read more

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Multimeter Display Perked Up With Nixies, LEDs, And Neon Tubes

Just because something is newer than something else doesn’t automatically make it better. Of course the opposite is also true, but when it comes to displays on bench multimeters, a fancy LCD display is no guarantee of legibility. Take the Hewlett Packard HP 3478A multimeter; the stock transflective display with …read more

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The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear LCDs

Whether it was rays from the Sun that made a 150 million kilometer trip just to ruin your day or somebody’s unreasonably bright aftermarket headlights, at some point or another we’ve all experienced the discomfort of bright spots in our eyes. But short of wearing welder’s goggles all the time, …read more

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[Ben Krasnow] Looks Inside Film Camera Date Stamping

Honestly, we never wondered how those old film cameras used to put the date stamp in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. Luckily, [Ben Krasnow] does not suffer from this deplorable lack of curiosity, and his video teardown of a date-stamping film camera back (embedded below) not only answers …read more

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Hackaday Links: October 6, 2019

“If you or someone you love has been exposed to questionable quality electrolytic capacitors, you could be entitled to financial compensation.” Perhaps that’s not exactly the pitch behind this class action lawsuit against capacitor manufacturers, but it might as well be. The suit claims that the defendants, a group of …read more

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Monochrome CRT and Liquid Crystal Shutter Team Up for Color Video

If you were tasked with designing a color video monitor, it’s pretty clear how you’d go about it. But what if you’d been asked to do so 20 years ago? Would it have been a cut and dried from an engineering standpoint? Apparently not, as this hybrid LCD-CRT video monitor …read more

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Resin Printers are Now Cheaper, Still Kind of a Hassle

Your run-of-the-mill desktop 3D printer is based on a technology known as Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), where the machine squirts out layers of hot plastic that stick to each other. But that’s not the only way to print a Benchy. One of the more exotic alternative techniques uses a photosensitive …read more

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The Bluetooth LCD Sniffer You Didn’t Know You Needed

At one time or another, we’ve all suffered through working with a piece of equipment that didn’t feature a way to export its data to another device. Whether it was just too old to offer such niceties, or the manufacturer locked the capability behind some upgrade, the pain of staring …read more

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Prusa Printer Gets an LCD-ectomy, Gains a VFD

What’s wrong with the OEM display on a Prusa I3 Mk3? Nothing at all. Then why replace the stock LCD with a vacuum fluorescent display? Because VFDs are much, much cooler than LCDs.

(Pedantic Editor’s Note: VFDs actually run a little warm.)

At least that’s the reasoning [Scott M. Baker] …read more

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