Tag: microcontroller

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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