Tag: classic hacks
Converting a Polaroid SX70 Camera To Use 600 Film
These days, it’s possible to buy a number of different Polaroid instant cameras new off the shelf. That’s largely thanks to the retro resurgence that has buoyed [more…]
Electrostatic Generator Project Starts With Molten Sulfur
Although the basic concept of electrostatic attraction has been known since ancient times, it was only in the 17th century that scientists began to systematically investigate electrostatics. [more…]
Spooky Noise Box Plays War Drums
What do you have cooked up to scare trick-or-treaters this Halloween? We humbly suggest adding in some type of noise box, especially one like this offering from [more…]
Replicating Faraday’s 200-Year-Old Electric Motor
Although new electric motor types are still being invented, the basic principle of an electric motor has changed little in the past century-and-a-half: a stator and a [more…]
Ceiling-Mounted Orrery is an Excercise in Simplicity
Ever since humans figured out that planets move along predetermined paths in the heavens, they have tried to make models that can accurately predict their motion. Watchmakers [more…]
The Neo6502 is a Credit-Card Sized Retro Computer
The venerable MOS Technology 6502 turned up in all kinds of computers and other digital equipment over the years. Typically, it was clocked fairly slow and had [more…]
Wooden Wide-Angle Wonder Wows World
An old-fashioned film camera can be an extremely simple device to make, in that as little as a cardboard box with a pin hole in it will [more…]
A Modern Replacement for the ZX Spectrum’s Odd Tape Storage System
Unless you were lucky enough to be able to afford a floppy disk drive, you probably used cassette tapes to store programs and data if you used [more…]
Sniffing Passwords, Rickrolling Toothbrushes
If you could dump the flash from your smart toothbrush and reverse engineer it, enabling you to play whatever you wanted on the vibrating motor, what would [more…]
The Chess Computer from 1912
Who was [Leonardo Torres Quevedo]? Not exactly a household name, but as [IEEE Spectrum] points out, he invented a chess automaton in 1920 that would foreshadow the [more…]
3D Printed Machine Shows How Braiding is Done
If there’s something more fascinating than watching cleverly engineered industrial machines do their work, we don’t know what it could be. And at the top of that [more…]
Crafting Ribbon Cables for Retro Hardware
Building a modern computer is something plenty of us have done, and with various tools available to ensure that essentially the only thing required of the end [more…]
Here’s How To Build a Tiny Compiler From Scratch
Believe it or not, building a tiny compiler from scratch can be as fun as it is accessible. [James Smith] demonstrates by making a tiny compiler for [more…]
A Look Inside a Vintage Aircraft Altimeter
There’s a strange synchronicity in the projects we see here at Hackaday, where different people come up with strikingly similar stuff at nearly the same time. We’re [more…]
USB Meets Core Memory In A Vintage ‘Scope
It’s normal today for even relatively modest instruments to have some form of computer control capability over Ethernet or USB. But five decades ago this was by [more…]
IBM PC Runs BASIC With Motorola 68000 CPU Upgrade
Although ARM CPUs have been making headway in several areas of computing over the last decade or so, the vast majority of desktop, laptop and server CPUs [more…]
Half Crystal Radio, Half Regenerative Radio
A rite of passage in decades past for the electronics experimenter was the crystal radio. Using very few components and a long wire antenna, such a radio [more…]
The Eyes Have It with This Solid State Magic Eye
The classic “Magic Eye” tuning indicator was a fantastic piece of vacuum tube technology that graced all kinds of electronic gear for a fair fraction of the [more…]
Mechanical GIF Animates with the Power of Magnets
It doesn’t matter how you pronounce it, because whichever way you choose to say “GIF” is guaranteed to cheese off about half the people listening. Such is [more…]
Two-Tube Spy Transmitter Fits in the Palm of Your Hand
It’s been a long time since vacuum tubes were cutting-edge technology, but that doesn’t mean they don’t show up around here once in a while. And when [more…]
A Close Look at How Flip-Dot Displays Really Work
[Mike Harrison] has an upcoming project which will combine a large number of flip-dot displays salvaged from buses. [Mike] thought he knew how these things worked, and [more…]