Collaborate Disseminate
We have seen a fair share of unusual items being turned into musical instruments. Luckily, with a little bit of hacking it is possible to turn almost anything into a MIDI controller. [William Sun Petrus] just converted a 1920s typewriter into a drum machine and delivers a hell of a …read more
Continue reading Drumming a Beat on a Hundred-Year-Old Typewriter
No matter how clicky your keyboard is, nothing compares to the sensory experience of using a typewriter. The sounds that a typewriter makes, from the deep clunk of hitting the spacebar to the staccato of keys striking paper to the ratchety kerchunk of returning the carriage, are a delight compared …read more
You may find yourself living in interesting times. The world we knew two months ago is gone, and there is time enough at last, to finally go through those projects we’ve been putting off for one reason or another. Today, I wanted to explore and possibly repair an old unidentified …read more
Continue reading Time Enough At Last: Reviving an Heirloom Typewriter
One of the strangest things about human nature is our tendency toward inertia. We take so much uncontrollable change in stride, but when our man-made constructs stop making sense, we’re suddenly stuck in our ways — for instance, the way we measure things in the US, or define daytime throughout …read more
The IBM Selectric changed typewriters as we knew them. Their distinctive ball element replaced the clunky row of typebars and made most people faster typists. When [Steve Malifoff] thought about 3D printing a type ball — colloquially known as a golf ball — it seemed like a great idea.
The …read more
There’s a certain charm to old technologies that have been supplanted by newer versions. And we’re not just talking about aesthetic nostalgia this time. With older versions of current technology, you are still connected to the underlying process, and that’s a nice feeling.
Part of the typewriter’s charm is in …read more
It may come as little surprise to find that Hackaday does not often play host to typewriter projects. While these iconic machines have their own particular charm, they generally don’t allow for much in the way of hardware modification. But then the IBM Wheelwriter 1000 isn’t exactly a traditional typewriter, …read more
Continue reading Upgrade Board Turns Typewriter into a Teletype
How do you get the kids interested in old technology? By connecting it to a phone, obviously. Those kids and their phones. When [Marek] got his hands on an old-school teletype, he hooked it up to a GSM network, with all the bells and whistles including a 40mA current loop …read more
It’s pretty hard to use the internet to complete a task without being frequently distracted. For better or worse, there are rabbit holes at every turn and whilst exploring them can be a delight, sometimes you just need to focus on a task at hand. The solution could be in the form of distraction-blocking software, razor-sharp willpower, or a beautifully crafted modern “typewriter”. The constraint and restriction of a traditional typewriter appealed to [NinjaTrappeur], but the inability to correct typos and share content online was a dealbreaker. A hybrid was the answer, with a mechanical keyboard commanding an E-ink display …read more
Are you an angry programmer? Do you get the frequent urge to smash the return key or space bar after finishing every single line of code? Well then [Konstantin Schauwecker]’s typewriter keyboard is just the thing for you. In his project, [Konstantin] hacked a German Olympia Monica typewriter into a USB keyboard.
The project uses no less than 50 photo interrupters mounted on a custom PCB that mounts directly under the typewriter itself. The circuit board is so designed that the hammer arms take a position in obstructing the opto-interrupters. Every time a key is pressed, the corresponding device sends …read more
Continue reading Make Some Noise with the Typewriter Keyboard