news
Retro/Open Hardware/Modding: Pioreactor, Amiga With PAL, and More
-
Raspberry Pi ☛ Pioreactor: An automated Raspberry Pi bioreactor
The talk is excellent, and it’s available on YouTube. In it, you can see and hear a lot of information about the Pioreactor: a tiny automated bioreactor that allows complex science to take place on your desk. It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi, and is the go-to tool for many professional, amateur, and hobbyist biologists and chemists; it’s also used by a fascinating research community called AMYBO.
-
Hackaday ☛ A Working Intercom From Antique Telephones
These phones date well before the rotary phone that some of us may be familiar with, to a time where landline phones had batteries installed in them to provide current to the analog voice circuit. A transformer isolated the DC out of the line and amplified the voice signal. A generator was included in parallel which, when operated by hand, could ring the other phones on the line. The challenge to this build was keeping everything period-appropriate, with a few compromises made for the batteries which are D-cell batteries with a recreation case. [Attoparsec] even found cloth wiring meant for guitars to keep the insides looking like they’re still 100 years old. Beyond that, a few plastic parts needed to be fabricated to make sure the circuit was working properly, but for a relatively simple machine the repairs were relatively straightforward.
-
Andrew Hutchings ☛ When PAL Goes Wrong: Repairing an Amiga CD32
What should have been a straightforward CD32 recap turned into something far more interesting. The CD32 belongs to Tony Warriner, known for Broken Sword and Beneath a Steel Sky, and more recently UrbX Warriors. It turned out to be a bit more work than expected so, of course, I am blogging about it.
-
Arduino ☛ A weather station built specifically for model rocket launches
A single Bosch BME280 sensor collects the temperature, humidity, air pressure, and altitude measurements. An ultrasonic anemometer measures wind speed and direction. The weather station has a physical compass attached so Bindhammer can orient the anemometer and get an accurate wind direction reading.