Collaborate Disseminate
Soldering is one of those jobs that are conceptually simple enough, but there’s quite a bit of devil in the detail and having precisely the right tool for the job …read more Continue reading A 3-tool selector box for a JBC soldering station
We’ve all been there. Someone will say something like, “I remember when we had to put our programs on a floppy disk…” Then someone will interrupt: “Floppy disk? We would …read more Continue reading If You Aren’t Making Your Own Relays…
Have you ever looked at a derelict electric wheelchair and thought “I bet I could make something great with that!” Of course you have- this is Hackaday, after all! And …read more Continue reading Electric Wheelchair Dump Truck Hack Really Hauls
There are a few words in the electrical engineering lexicon that will perk any hardware hacker’s ears. The first of course is “Nixie tubes” with their warm cold war era …read more Continue reading Relay Logic Nixie Tube Clock Checks All The Boxes
If you thought your home-brew project was taking a long time, [Jeroen Brinkman]’s MERCIA Relay Computer project probably has you beat. He began working on this impressive computer back in 2014, and has been at it ever since. In fact, the ongoing nature of the project is embedded into the …read more
Continue reading Relay Computer Consumes Six Years and 4.5 Suitcases
When it comes to understanding computers, sometimes it’s best to get a good understanding of the basics. How is data stored? How does the machine process this information? In order to answer these questions a bit more and start learning programming, [Nakazoto] built a 10-bit binary adder with relays.
The …read more
Imagine having to program your computer by rewiring it. For a brief period of time around the mid-1940s, the first general-purpose electronic computers worked that way. Computers like ENIAC initially had no internal storage for code. Programming it involved manipulating thousands of switches and cables. The positions of those switches and cables were the program.
Kathleen Booth began working on computers just as the idea of storing the program internally was starting to permeate through the small set of people building computers. As a result, she was one of the first programmers to work on software and is credited with …read more
Continue reading Kathleen Booth: Assembling Early Computers While Inventing Assembly
The humble car alarm has been around almost as long as the car itself, first being developed by an unknown prisoner in Denver, circa 1913. To the security-conscious motorist, they make a lot of sense. The noise of a car alarm draws attention which is the last thing a would-be thief wants, and the in-built immobilizers generally stop the car being moved at all without a time-consuming workaround. Both are a great deterrent to theft.
It may then surprise you to know that I, dear readers, consider the aftermarket car alarm to be one of the most heinous devices ever …read more
Recently, [Manuel] did a post on making logic gates out of anything. He mentioned a site about relay logic. While it is true that you can build logic gates using switch logic (that is, two switches in series are an AND gate and two in parallel are an OR gate), it isn’t the only way. If you are wiring a large circuit, there’s some benefit to having regular modules. A lot of computers based on discrete switching elements worked this way: you had a PCB that contained some number of a basic gate (say, a two input NAND gate) and …read more
[Mark Gibson] probably has nothing against silicon. He just knows that a lot that can be done with simple switches, relays, and solenoids and wants to share that knowledge with the world. This was made abundantly clear to me during repeat visits to his expansive booth at Denver Mini Maker Faire last weekend.
In the sunlight-filled atrium of the Museum of Nature and Science, [Mark] sat behind several long tables covered with his creations made from mid-century pinball machines. There are about two dozen pieces in his interactive exhibit, which made its debut at the first-ever Northern Colorado Maker Faire …read more
