Overhauling an IC Programmer

[NeXT] needed an EPROM programmer to work with chips from vintage computers. Starting with a low cost programmer, he built this custom IC programmer to handle all of his programming needs. The device is based on the Willem 5.0e programmer. [NeXT] was not satisfied with the device, noting that it had to...
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Acoustic Delay Line Memory

Back in the olden days  when computers were both analog and digital, making RAM was actually very hard. Without transistors, the only purely electronic means of building a memory system was vacuum tubes; It could have been done, but for any appreciable amount of RAM means an insane amount of tubes, power,...
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[Fran]‘s LEDs, Nixies, and VFDs.

With a love of blinky and glowey things, [Fran] has collected a lot of electronic display devices over the years. Now she’s doing a few teardowns and tutorials on some of her (and our) favorite parts: LEDs and VFD and Nixie tubes Perhaps it’s unsurprising that someone with hardware from a Saturn V flight...
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Build an Audio Spectrum Analyzer the Analog Way

[Ryan] wanted a spectrum analyzer for his audio equipment. Rather than grab a micro, he did it the analog way. [Ryan] designed  a 10 band audio spectrum analyzer. This means that he needs 10 band-pass filters. As the name implies, a band-pass filter will only allow signals with frequency of a selected band...
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Apple And Raspberry Pis

Deep in the bowels of the Internet there are some crazy people who have a wish list for what the next Apple II should look like. The capabilities of this dream machine of 80s retrocomputing is generally said to be something with a 32-bit CPU, a UNIX OS, modern graphics, and networking. This sounds a lot like...
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Further Teardown of the Saturn V Flight Computer

[Fran] has been working on tearing down and reverse engineering the Saturn V Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC). In her finale, she’s succeeded in depotting the legacy components while keeping them intact. She accomplished this by carefully removing the silicone compound using a gum brush. This was...
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Reverse Engineering an LCD Display

The current marketplace allows hobbyists to easily find inexpensive, well-documented displays, but what if you wanted to interface with something more complicated, such as the screen on an iPod Nano 6? [Mike] has given us a detailed and insightful video showing his process for reverse engineering a device...
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Reverse Engineering Serial Ports

Can you spot the serial port in the pic above? You can probably see the potential pads, but how do you figure out which ones to connect to? [Craig] over at devttys0 put together an excellent tutorial on how to find serial ports. Using some extreme close-ups, [Craig] guides us through his thought process as...
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Veronica Gets A Pair Of Gamepads And A Bugged Chip

[Quinn Dunki]‘s awesome 6502-based computer is coming right along, and she decided it’s time to add one of the most important features found in the 80s microcomputers she’s inspired by – gamepads. There were two ways of implementing gamepads back in the 80s. The Apple II analog joysticks used a potentiometer...
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Internet-Enabling a Lamp with the Raspberry Pi

[Jack] sent in his writeup for internet enabling a home lamp. While we will certainly have some comments saying this is too simple, it does a great job of breaking things down to the basics. For those that aren’t confident in their electronic skills, this is an easy hack to a commercial device that greatly...
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VFD And Nixie Clock Twofer

Sometimes the stars align and we get two somewhat similar builds hitting the Hackaday tip line at the same time. Recently, the build of note was clocks using some sort of display tube, so here we go. First up is [Pyrofer]‘s VFD network time clock (pic, above). The build started as a vacuum flourescent...
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Logic Analyzers And X11

[Andrew] recently scored an awesome HP 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer, lucky dog. Even though this machine was built in 1992, it was a top of the line device back in the day and had a few very interesting features. This logic analyzer also had a few networking ports implementing FTP, NFS, TCP/IP, and...
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A 555-Based, Two-Channel Remote Control Circuit

[fahadshihab], a young tinkerer, shared his circuit design for a simple remote control using 555 timers.  Using a 555 calculator, he designed a clock circuit that would run at 11.99 Hz. Two transistors are connected to inputs (presumably button switches). One sends the plain clock signal, and one...
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Tearing Down an Ultrasound Machine From 1963

Vintage electronics are awesome, and old medical devices doubly so. When [Murtaugh] got his hands on an old ultrasound machine, he knew he had to tear it apart. Even if he wasn’t able to bring it back to a functional state, the components inside make for great history lesson fifty years after being manufactured.This...
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Hacking Coin Collection

Devices that collect coins for payment typically use standardized coin acceptors like the one shown here. These devices use a protocol called ccTalk to let the system know what coins were inserted. [Balda] has built tools for implementing the ccTalk protocol to let you play around with the devices. He...
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Crafting A Liquid Crystal Display

Throughout the 1960s, the management at RCA thought LCD displays were too difficult to commercialize and sent their engineers and researchers involved in LCDs off into the hinterlands. After watching [Ben Krasnow]‘s efforts to build a liquid crystal display, we can easily see why the suits thought what they...
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The Atari Jaguar That Should Have Been

Released in 1993, the Atari Jaguar suffered from a number of problems – it was difficult to program, had hardware idiosyncrasies, and with the CD drive was vastly overpriced compared to the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation released one year later. Nevertheless, the Jaguar still has a rabid fanbase that counts...
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Amateur Radio Transmits 1000 Miles On Voice Power

Many of us tried the old “Two tin cans connected by a string” experiment as kids. [Michael Rainey, AA1TJ] never quite forgot it.  Back in 2009, he built “El Silbo”, a ham radio transmitter powered entirely by his voice. El Silbo is a Double Side Band (DSB) transmitter for 75 meters. While voice is...
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Mini Supergun PCB

A few decades ago, Japanese manufacturers of arcade games realized they should make a connector for all their boards that provides the power, controller, video, and audio I/O. This became the JAMMA standard and it make arcade owner’s lives awesome. Because you can buy arcade boards off the Internet, arcade...
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The Nibbler: a 4-bit CPU built with 7400 logic

Maybe we shouldn’t say “built” since [Steve Chamberlin] hasn’t actually heated up his iron yet. From the finished schematic above that is puzzling at first, until you realize the scope of the project. His Nibbler implements a 4-bit CPU using 7400 logic chips. Because he’s come up with the architecture himself...
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