Category: Hobbies

The November 1966 issue of Electronics Illustrated has a feature article, “Build This Space-Age Decimal Computer. I was inspired to make one of my own.

I’m building a homebrew CPU based on microcode. I made a microcode compiler in Google Sheets. It can easily adapted for other people’s microcoding needs.

I made a modern replacement for the Wang 300 series calculator Electronic Package. Not only does it emulate the original Wang calculator’s behavior, but it can operate as a nixie clock.

I had the famous Utah teapot engraved in crystal.

I’ve been re-creating Robert Tinney’s Byte magazine paintings as photographs. My latest work is “Software”. There are a few interesting stories to go with this one.

I wrote a KiCad plugin to generate Verilog code from a schematic.

I’ve been re-creating Robert Tinney’s Byte magazine paintings as photographs. My latest work is “CPU Architectures”.

If you’ve used computers from the 70s and early 80s, you’re probably familiar with the classic Star Trek game. What very few people know, is that there was another, very different Star Trek game at the same time. It was script-based, and it gave you a feeling of actually being in an episode of Star Trek. I’ve been looking for this game for over 40 years, and it appeared as if had ceased to exist. Until now. A copy – possibly the only one in the world – has been found. So let’s take a look … at the other…

I’ve published my first app on the Google Play Store – a dashboard for personal watercraft, like Jet Skis.

‘Tis the season for using my boat trailer. But first, I need to test whether the lights work.

  I re-created the classic Star Trek game for the VT52. And it demonstrated how much I’ve changed as a programmer in 42 years.

The Internet doesn’t need another description of a Nixie clock. So, as with my previous Nixie clock, I’ll just talk about what’s unique.

If you have one of the SYM-1 Expansion Boards I’ve made, here’s some useful information I’ve gathered for it.

With tech from the 2020s, I dragged a SYM-1 kicking and screaming into the 1980s so that it could play a game from the 1970s.

I just got an e-mail from someone saying that my homegrown CAPTCHA was “stupid”. On the contrary, it’s far more effective than Google’s.

There’s a guy on Etsy with a working ASR-33 Teletype, and he’ll make printouts and punched paper tape strips for you. (In Soviet Union, paper tape punches you!)

I’ve been re-creating Robert Tinney’s Byte magazine paintings as photographs. My latest work is “Inside IBM”.

I brought a Wang 360 calculator console back to life with a modern “Electronic Package”. Not only does it emulate the original Wang calculator’s behavior, but it can operate as a nixie clock or as a Reverse Polish Notation calculator.

Over the last year, my wife and I have left our gas stove on twice. Once, the burner was not lit, so we woke up to a kitchen full of gas. Not good.

The Albany Covered Bridge is a much-photographed attraction along the beautiful Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire.

My daughter and I went to a class in making fused glass art. I made an IMSAI 8080. Everyone else was making landscapes and animals. Are they weird or what?

We had some guests from out of town, and while showing them around, I discovered the Nubble Lighthouse in York, Maine.

There are zillions of nixie clocks on the web, so I’ll just discuss the atypical features and problems I encountered.

What if the beautiful, surreal paintings that graced the covers of Byte magazine were not merely figments of Robert Tinney’s imagination, but existed in real life? And what if someone photographed them?

This is not a Hewlett-Packard logic analyzer. It’s a Core i5 Windows PC.

The cover of the July 1977 issue of Byte magazine showed a train chugging around a printed circuit board (PCB). When I started making PCBs as part of my electronics hobby, I got the idea of re-creating this image as a photograph of a real circuit board with a model train on it. This was a challenging project that involved several different photographic techniques, attention to geometry, model-building, wiring, and more.

I’m not the first person to turn a Kindle e-reader into a weather display, but I believe I’ve found an easier way to do it.

It was so easy to add a inclinometer to my bike using off-the-shelf hardware that I’m almost embarrassed to post about it here.

One way of debugging microcontroller-based projects is to send messages out the UART serial port. Then, a UART-to-USB interface can feed the messages into your PC for display. But I wanted a small, portable device for viewing serial data without a PC, and I wanted it to use my cell phone or tablet for its display.

I built a triple-sensor mailbox alert to tell me when there is mail in my mailbox for me.

40 years ago, everyone hated “IBM cards”. I remember folding, spindling, and mutilating them out of spite. Now, they’re an object of nostalgia. When I got my hands on one of the actual printing plates that was used to print the cards, I had to treat it with the respect and dignity it deserved. So I made it into a pencil holder. And I have some extras so I’m selling them.

My brother, a longtime math enthusiast (I’ve even seen him calculate logarithms in his head) has created an interesting math calendar for 2015 and is selling it on Amazon.

  I was excited when I saw that Mouser was coming out with an apparently unlimited PCB CAD program. I’m not excited anymore. Check out my review at my other site, PCBShopper.

I’ve built a website, PCBShopper.com, that lets you quickly and easily compare prices from several different printed circuit board manufacturers.

My wife and I have a heating pad on our bed. In the winter, we turn it on an hour before we go to bed. When we get into bed, we leave it on until we warm up. But if we fall asleep before we turn it down, we’ll wake up a couple of hours later, overheated. Clearly, we need a technological solution.

I use a Heathkit ET-3300 powered breadboard for my prototyping. But setting it up has always been a chore in itself. I need to run wires from the power supplies to the power buses, which is messy (though admittedly not nearly as messy as the rest of the circuit will be) and often add voltage regulators, since the Heathkit’s power supplies of +12V, -12V and +5V are more appropriate to the 1970s than the 2010s. So I made a power distribution board that addresses these problems.

One of my most precious possessions is a Heathkit GC-1107 clock I assembled as a kid. But it has some shortcomings: it loses the time and alarm setting if the power is interrupted, and adjusting it for Daylight Saving Time is a pain. So I decided to retrofit it with a GPS receiver to get the correct time.

Many people are turning old hard disks into clocks. They disassemble old disk drives and put a clock mechanism behind the mirrored disc platter. They’re using 3½” disks, so they end up with itty bitty little clocks. I wanted something big enough to hang on the wall and retro enough to satisfy my nostalgia for the computers of my youth.

A sous vide cooker allows you to cook a perfect steak every time. You can buy one in the stores, but I wanted to make my own.

I wanted to switch to a microcontroller that I could program in C++, prototype with on a breadboard, had every peripheral I would ever need (including USB), would cost less than $10, and would keep working even after I hacked it to pieces. The result is the Black Knight board.

I needed more room at my desk. A pizza restaurant gave me the inspiration I needed.

My neighbor put a working Heathkit oscilloscope out in his trash. Naturally, I rescued it. Time to make another clock!

It’s that time of year again: time to make a calender that appeals to geeks as nothing in the stores can!

My mother is selling my childhood home. I knew the one souvenir I wanted to keep. The only problem was, it could kill me.

I built an alphanumeric LED display that connects via USB to my PC and can display RSS feeds, the weather (like wind chill, above), the time, or just about anything.

See that little rectangle the size of Lincoln’s nose? That’s an electronic component – a smaller version of the big red thing in the picture. I have a congenital tremor in my hands, so I assumed that I would never be able to work with components that small. Turns out I was wrong.

So where’s the art? Why is Galactic Studios a studio? Here’s the movie that (re-)started it all.

According to Google, the search term “sexy calendar” frequently resulted in hits for galacticstudios.org. So to satisfy all you vintage computer pr0n fiends out there, here’s 12 more lovelies for 2011. And you can print them out to make your own calendar!

Every year I make a calendar with pictures of my daughter. None of the available programs or services had the features I wanted so, as with my envelope program, I wrote my own. In the spirit of the season (New Year’s, not Christmas) I’m making it available free for downloading.

Scientists use spectroscopes to identify chemicals – even in stars billions of light years away. They also use spectroscopes to find planets orbiting other stars. With about an hour of effort, I was able to build my own and show my daughter how scientists do it.

Grandma needed a really easy envelope printing program. I wrote one, and it’s so convenient, I use it myself. Download it here and try it yourself.

The bird house launched a brood of babies on their way. Now’s the time to catch up on what happened.

Three years ago, I put a web cam in a birdhouse and filmed wrens building a nest, laying eggs, and feeding the young. This year, I’m doing again. Except now I have two web cams in the birdhouse, set up to give me a 3D view. Watch out, James Cameron!

When I was a teenager, I wanted to get an Altair 8800 computer, but I couldn’t afford it. Now, I can. But I wanted something smaller, quieter, and about a million times faster. So I made it. I consider this the crowning achievement of my mid-life crisis nostalgia kick.

It’s a cross between a workbench and a wheelbarrow, and it’s a great place for a drill press and router table in a cramped workspace.

I needed a new calendar for work. The store had calendars with pictures of seascapes and mountain ranges, Elvis and Marilyn, doggies and dragons, airplanes and starships. Isn’t there anything for software engineers?

Captain Kirk once told Mr. Spock that he should be squatting on a mushroom. If it’s good enough for Spock, it’s good enough for mighty Dungeons and Dragons warriors. So my daughter and I used fungus to make these shelves for her D&D figurines.

I wanted to design a clock from scratch. I ended up with a expensive, over-engineered, multiprocessing monstrosity. But it was fun.

  Perhaps I’m a luddite, but I just don’t care for the modern video games. Gimme Lunar Lander or Zaxxon and you can keep your fancy graphics. I built an arcade so I can play the classic games anytime I want.

I never really liked my old lamp. I really love the new one I built.

When my old Radio Shack logic probe broke, I built a new Super Probe – and enclosed it in exotic wood.

I put a webcam in a birdhouse. See my videos of birds building a nest, laying eggs, and feeding their young.

Here’s how I built a birdhouse with a webcam inside.