Thermal camera macro
Monday, May 29, 2023 in Tools
What is it? 3D-printable adapter, which fits into commercial thermal cameras and adds a 18mm ZnSe CO2 laser lens to the optical path. This greatly improves the imaging quality on small electronics / SMD parts. Before / After Sample photos of PCB …
LPT printer emulator
Wednesday, April 26, 2023 in Retrocomputing
Warning: While this project does work and has been tested against a number of devices, the firmware is very quick & dirty with hardcoded parameters and missing error handling. Use in production environments is discouraged. What is it? Old …
PC104 ISA adapter
Sunday, February 19, 2023 in Retrocomputing
What is it? These mechanical adapter PCBs allow the use of PC104 and Vortex86DX X-ISA single board computers on an ISA backplane. Such adapters are available commercially for industrial use at extreme prices (100$+), for simple passive adapters. …
Palm IIIc USB-C
Monday, February 13, 2023 in USB-C mods
What is it? A USB-C sync and charging adapter for the Palm serial dock connector. Problems with other adapters A common problem with other adapters is that they often require a hardware RS-232 serial port, making use of an additional adapter with …
Gigaset DECT debug adapter
Friday, December 23, 2022 in Tools
What is it? Gigaset-Debug-Adapter can be used with many Gigaset DECT phone models to access the internal UART. It’s basically a 1.8V USB->UART converter, with switchable strapping logic and 3V step-down converter. The device fits into the …
M.2 NVMe -> miniPCIe
Saturday, November 19, 2022 in Computing
What is it? This mechanical adapter allows older devices (like the popular apu2 SBCs) to use modern M.2 NVMe storage. Usage 2 adapters installed in a PC Engines apu2 with Samsung PM991 NVMe SSDs: Links Hardware: KiCAD design files
Analog floppy synthesizer
Saturday, October 29, 2022 in Art
Your browser does not support the video tag. What is it? 3.5" floppy disks hold information by storing them magnetically on 80 different tracks (effectively circles) across the media. A stepper motor moves a read/write head across the media and …
Typewriter Teletype
Sunday, August 07, 2022 in Hacks
What is it? Samsung / Commodore SQ-1000 electronic typewriters can be modified to work as a teletype terminal. They use a simple 8bit microcontroller to scan the keyboard matrix and do the printing itself. The keyboard was originally attached using …
SolarCamPi
Thursday, July 14, 2022 in IoT / Home automation
What is it? SolarCamPi is an off-grid webcam solution, that can take a picture using a Raspberry Pi Camera or a USB webcam every 5 minutes and send the image over a long-distance WiFi link. Using a very specialised Linux image on the Raspberry Pis …