Category: Featured

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.

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?

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 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.

Last night, I had a dream that I had the latest Starfleet-issue phaser – and it was integrated with my smartphone. The result was truly a nightmare.

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

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.

The latest Star Trek movie wasn’t as monumentally stupid as the last one, but it was still pretty bad.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.