Collaborate Disseminate
There’s nothing quite like going to a museum and being given a tour by a docent who really knows their way around the exhibits. When that docent has first hand …read more Continue reading Taking a Walk Down [Computer] Memory Lane
We’re not quite sure what drove the development of this project, but [shapoco] has put together an intriguing device that reads I2C signals (Japanese Twitter link) which have been printed …read more Continue reading I2C Paper Tape Reader is Not What You Think
Meme investing is all the rage these days, and what better way to get in on the loss fun than with your very own old-timey mechanical stock ticker? Unfortunately, they’re …read more Continue reading Build an ESP32 Stock Ticker To Watch Your GME Gains
Computer gaming has come a very long way since the 1960s. While computers of that era may not run Doom or anything even close to it, many of us had our first exposure to computers playing Hunt the Wumpus, Adventure, or Star Trek over a clackety old TeleType machine. If …read more
Continue reading 60’s Natural Gas Pipeline Computer Retires to Play Games
The recent Cyphercon badge featured a very clever integrated paper tape reader, and had the hidden feature of a party mode in which all its lights would flash. When [Gigawatts] discovered this after the conference had ended, it was too late to find the tape to activate it. The solution? …read more
Continue reading Emulate A Paper Tape, To Be Life And Soul Of The Cyphercon Party
We often think that not enough people are building things with FPGAs. We also love the retrotechtacular posts on old computer hardware. So it was hard to pass up [karlwoodward’s] post about the Chip Hack EDSAC Challenge — part of the 2017 Wuthering Bytes festival.
You might recognize EDSAC as what was arguably the first operational computer if you define a computer as what we think of today as a computer. [Maurice Wilkes] and his team invented a lot of things we take for granted today including subroutines (Wheeler jumps named after a graduate student).
The point to the EDSAC …read more
Fair warning: when you post a video of you doing an incredibly tedious process like manually punching holes in a paper tape to transfer a MIDI file to a music box, don’t be surprised when a bunch of hackers automates the process in less than a week.
The back story on this should be familiar to even casual Hackaday readers. [Martin] from the Swedish group “Wintergatan” is a prolific maker of unusual musical instruments. You’ll no doubt recall his magnificent marble music machine, a second version of which is currently in the works. But he’s also got a thing for …read more
Continue reading Ad Hoc MIDI to Music Box Project Shows Power of Hacker Community
Music is a mystery to some of us. Sure, we know what we like when we hear it, but the idea of actually being able to make it baffles us. And the idea of being able to build new instruments to create it, like this paper-tape programmable music box (YouTube, embedded below), is beyond impressive.
You’ll no doubt remember [Martin Molin] of the group “Wintergatan” and his astounding marble madness music machine. This instrument is on a much more modest scale and is centered around an off-the-shelf paper tape music box. But the cheap plastic drive gears kept failing under …read more
Continue reading Paper Tape Drive for a Live Performance Music Box
