Normally, mechanical devices like record players move smoothly, with well-greased contact surfaces enabling the tone arm to automatically move, the multi-record mechanism to drop down a fresh disc, and the listener to have a generally good time. Unfortunately, the 1972-era ITT KP821 record player that [Mark] got recently handed by a friend wasn’t doing a […]
Long before electricity was a common household utility, humanity had been building machines to do many tasks that we’d now just strap a motor or set of batteries onto and think nothing of it. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and essentially everything had non-electric analogs, and perhaps surprisingly, there were mechanical computers as well. Electronics-based computers are […]
In the auto world, there are lots of overarching standards that all automakers comply with. There are also lots of proprietary technologies that each automaker creates and uses for its own benefit. [Shehriyar Qureshi] has recently been diving into Suzuki’s Serial Data Line standard, and has created a digital dash using the data gained. The […]
Here’s a fun project. Over on their YouTube page [Urban Circles] introduces Project Scribe. The idea behind this project is that you can print out little life “receipts”. Notes, jokes, thoughts, anecdotes, memories. These little paper mementos have a physical reality that goes beyond their informational content. You can cut them up, organize them, scribble […]
The human eye’s color perception is notoriously variable (see, for example, the famous dress), which makes it difficult to standardize colours. This is where spectrophotometers come in: they measure colours reliably and repeatably, and can match them against a library of standard colors. Unfortunately, they tend to be expensive, so when Hackaday’s own [Adam Zeloof] […]
Here’s something fun from our hacker [Piers]: Software Defined ROMs. In this series of three videos, [Piers] runs us through what a software defined ROM is, how to make them, and then how to use them. As [Piers] explains, one frustration a retro technician will face is a failed ROM chip. In the era he’s […]
The Z80 might be decades obsolete and a few years out of production, but it’s absolutely a case of “gone but not forgotten” in the hacker world. Case in point is SymbOS, a multitasking OS for Z80 machines by Amstrad, Sinclair, and the MSX2 family of computers that updated to version 4.0 earlier this year. […]
Everything fails eventually, but moving parts fail fastest of all– and optical drives seemingly more than others, at least in our experience. Even when they work, vintage drives often have trouble with CD-R, and original media isn’t always easy to find. That’s why it’s so wonderful that [polpo]’s RP2040 ISA card, the PicoGUS 2.0, now […]