[Ames]‘s father has had an old stock ticker sitting on a shelf for some time. He may have become quite listless over his spring break, because he decided connect a century-old stock ticker to his laptop. When stock tickers were in use, they were all connected to a stock ticker circuit that would broadcast stock prices [...]

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We try to stick to the 0805 parts because they’re still big enough to solder by hand. But [Scott] shows us that it doesn’t take too many special tools to reflow fine-pitch components at home. In this case he’s using 0402 resistors, a footprint that we consider functionally impossible to solder using an iron. The two parts [...]

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Next time you’re making yourself a tunafish sandwich, try to figure out how to build a Stirling engine from the leftovers (translated). If you can pull it off as well as [Killerlot] did we’d say you’ve earned your hacker badge. The can used in this project was actually sardines in tomato sauce, but the former contents are moot. [...]

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A while back, [Matt] bought a few 8051 MCUs and tucked them away for a future project. He just found these fabulous little chips in a component drawer and decided it was time to figure these guys out. Eventually, [Matt] stumbled across this awesome resource for 8051 programming. The 8051 featured a still reasonably respectable 4k of [...]

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We’d guess that you don’t have a TRS-80 Model 100 computer sitting around. But we’ve heard that the decades-old hardware is built like a tank so if you search around you can probably get your hands on a working unit. The Model 100 boasted some nice features, one of which was a 300 baud modem [...]

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Some of the pinball machines which [Jeri Ellsworth] has restored have ended up in the break room at her work. We’re sure her coworkers are thankful for this, but sometimes they forget to turn off the power to the machines, and letting them run constantly means more frequent servicing will be necessary. She set out [...]

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[John Philip’s] brother has a sizable room set aside for his model railroad setup, and he was looking for something interesting to add to his brother’s collection. Rather than construct something for the railroad itself, he decided that an early 1900’s-style semaphore railroad signal would make a great novelty item for the room. The project [...]

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We’re so glad to have run across this video where [Rear Admiral Grace Hopper] explains how to visualize a nanosecond. Now we had never heard of [Grace Hopper] before, but once you watch the clip (also embedded after the break) you’ll want to know who this person is. We work with divisions of seconds all [...]

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Cruising estate sales can be a total crapshoot – sometimes you find a goldmine, other times nothing but junk. [John Ownby] recently found a sleek-looking old blender at such a sale and decided to take it home. The chrome plated base and fluted glass immediately caught his eye, but he didn’t buy the blender so [...]

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Remember those old wireless controllers made for the consoles of our youth like the NES and Super Nintendo? They didn’t work well, mostly owing to the fact they were built using the same infrared technology that is found in a remote control. Now that all the modern consoles are wireless, [micro] over at the nftgames [...]

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We all love the Arduino, but does the Arduino love us back? There used to be a time when the Arduino couldn’t express it’s deepest emotions, but now that [Nick] hooked up a speech synthesis chip from a Speak & Spell, it can finally whisper sweet robotic nothings to us. The original 1980s Speak & [...]

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Tesla Coils are always a blast to see and are relativity simple to build. While there are plenty of sites on the subject, [Michael's] newest instructable breaks building a solid state Tesla Coil down to 12 easy steps. Items that should be familiar to anyone who has even looked at a Tesla Coil include PVC [...]

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If you’ve ever wanted your own self-driving car, this is your chance. [Sebastian Thrun], co-lecturer (along with the great [Peter Norvig]) of the Stanford AI class is opening up a new class that will teach everyone who enrolls how to program a self-driving car in seven weeks. The robotic car class is being taught alongside a [...]

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Retro is in the air today as [John] has tipped us off about a new game he has written for the Tandy Color Computer (CoCo), The game, inspired by the homebrew game DOWNFALL for the Atari Jaguar, features what looks like snappy game play, lots of bright colorful animation and has just entered the Alpha [...]

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[XVortex] pulled off a pretty incredible firmware hack. He managed to get a firmware upgrade for Synology running on a QNAP machine. These are both Network Attached Storage devices, but apparently the Synology firmware is better than what QNAP supplies with their offerings. The nice thing is that this is not a one-off hack. You [...]

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[Andrea] built this LED chaser using one logic chip. It illuminates all but one of the six LEDs, with the dim bit moving back and forth along the row in a chase sequence. This is something like an inverse Larson Scanner without the fading tail. But doing it with a logic chip instead of a [...]

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Confronted with the issue of finding a use for his mounting pile of junk electronics, [Rue] set out to build a persistence of vision device using a hardware state machine. We have a suspicion that his original link may go down if there’s too much traffic so here’s a cached link just in case. Any [...]

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You probably know that if you spin a motor (mechanically) it generates electricity on what would normally be the inputs. This can be a problem when you shut off a spinning motor and is the reason that protection diodes are built into motor driver circuits. But [Dino] isn’t interested in driving a motor, he wanted [...]

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[Tim Hunkin], builder extraordinaire and host of The Secret Life of Machines is a bit frustrated with the current economic climate and decided to take out his frustrations with a game of Whac-A-Banker. [Tim]‘s version of the classic Whac-A-Mole game uses tiny air cylinders to actuate five banker figurines up and down. The figures were cast with [...]

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Any self-identified geek that spent some time in the 80s will tell you how they used to type out programs into their ‘microcomputer’ with BASIC. It was a simpler time when a computer’s raison d’etre was simply being a BASIC interpreter. These days are long past us now; you can’t simply turn on a computer and [...]

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Any self-identified geek that spent some time in the 80s will tell you how they used to type out programs into their ‘microcomputer’ with BASIC. It was a simpler time when a computer’s raison d’etre was simply being a BASIC interpreter. These days are long past us now; you can’t simply turn on a computer and [...]

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Here’s something we thought we would never see: computing with just pipes, /dev/zero, and /dev/null. As a thought experiment, [Linus] imagined a null byte represented an electron. /dev/zero would have an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null would make a wonderful positive power supply. With a very short program (named mosfet.c), [Linus] can use Linux pipes [...]

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[George] is a Neo Geo aficionado, and among his collection of paraphernalia, he has a MVS-Mini game console. His mini “Multi Video System” is a 2-slot model, meaning that it can hold two game cartridges at a time, which are indicated by plastic cards inserted in the cabinet’s face plate. Instead of swapping those cards [...]

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For a computer that debuted in the early 80s the MSX was a very respectable machine. Of course  these were the days that superimposing graphics over a video was an amazing feat, but  [Danjovic] and [Igor] are still having fun with their boxen. They designed a software interface for the Wii Nunchuck (translation) on their trusty MSX computer. [...]

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Who wouldn’t want to build a computer out of relays? We do, but we’ve got too many projects on our plate already. It looks like [rory] has his priorities in order because his build is one of the most amazing we’ve ever seen. We’ve seen [Harry Porter]‘s amazing relay computer and we’re familiar with [Konrad Zuse]‘s WWII era endeavours. [...]

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As a life long lover of his venerable Commodore 64, [Frank] was looking for a way to speed up the development time when writing C64 demos. His solution is a universal C64 cartridge that will connect to a PC over a USB port. The board is powered by a CLPD and a microcontroller loaded with code [...]

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[Chris Fenton] needs your help. After constructing a 1/10th scale, cycle accurate Cray-1 supercomputer and finding a disk with Cray software on it, he’s ready to start loading the OS. There’s a small problem, though: no one knows how to boot the thing. [Chris] posted a disk image for a Cray-1/X-MP with the help of the people at [...]

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[John Zitterkopf] is in the middle of restoring a vintage Sega Star Trek Captain’s Chair arcade game for the upcoming 2012 Texas Pinball festival, though one prerequisite for the show is that the game supports some sort of free play mode. At this point he doesn’t have the option of tracking down a freeplay ROM [...]

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For a young geek in the 80s, the it computer was the IBM PCjr. On paper, it was a truly remarkable leap in technology. With a wireless keyboard, light pen, and optical mouse it was an impressive, if maligned, piece of hardware. There was a small problem with the optical mouse, though; it required a special [...]

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Building your first circuit is empowering, but make sure it’s not too empowering. [Jon] sent in a great tutorial of power protection circuits to make sure you don’t release the mystical blue smoke that make electronics work. There’s an in-depth tutorial of the classic series diode that’s the simplest of all power protection circuits. There’s not much to [...]

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