The Teletype Corporation Model 15 “typebar page printer” is a beautiful piece of equipment from the 1930’s. While the interface has much in common with modern serial communication standards – start bits and stop bits, asynchronous clocking, idle-high conditions —…
It’s a little known fact that during the 1940’s the premier Twitter client was a cathode ray oscillograph vector display, such as this DuMont Labs 208B. The 15×12 character resolution was perfect for a 140 character tweet. This one has…
Some technologies are so direct and intuitive that they feel classic even when they’re new. Some technologies are so ahead of their time that they only find their true purpose years after they’ve been put out to pasture. In the…
Do you enjoy playing Space Team, but find that you want tactile controls? Or like the Artemis Bridge Simulator, but think it is too serious? Do you love pushing buttons, turning knobs and shouting at each other? Then you’ll really…
Coming June 15th to NYC Resistor, the 2013 Interactive Show. We’re still soliciting for a few more projects, but we’ve already got a great menagerie of really interesting & fun work lined up. This year’s theme is Digital Archeology. Expect…
As a followup to our reverse engineering and configuration of 6DOF PUMA robot arms, we’ve updated our controller source code to have full closed form inverse kinematics support. The math is based on A Geometric Approach in Solving the Inverse…
Rapid prototyping tools are great for quick hacks, but their real power lies in their ability to allow you to quickly iterate and refine a design. Earlier this week I hacked together a primitive nine-channel punched paper tape reader, but…
Ever wanted to trick your nails out with a paint-job worthy of notice? This is how… and no need to pay a salon $50 for the glory. We’ll teach you how on Saturday (5:30-8:30pm) after our Laser Class, using templates…
Trammell came across a cache of punched paper tape recently. My immediate impulse was to create the most primitive tape reader possible. Thusly: The rig is composed of a Teensy++ 2.0, eighteen red LEDs, eighteen resistors, and a few bits…
Some of you may remember the last installment in our on-going series on computational necromancy, where I made a call out to the internet to help revive my bit-rotted copy of the once-lost Cray Operating System. An amazing programmer named…