Building A 3D Printed Scanning Tunneling Microscope

YouTuber [MechPanda] has recreated a DIY STM hack we covered about ten years ago, updating it to be primarily 3D-printed, using modern electronics, making it much more accessible to many folks. Thi…

Lathe Outfitted With Electronic Gearbox

Running a metal lathe is not for the faint of heart. Without proper knowledge and preparation, these machines can quickly cause injury or destroy expensive stock, tools, or parts. The other major p…

Modern In-Circuit Emulator For The 6809

The Motorola 6809, released in 1978, was the follow-up to their 6800 from four years earlier. It’s a powerful little chip with many 16-bit features, although it’s an 8-bit micro at hear…

Harmonic Table Keyboard Brings Old Idea Back To Life

If you missed the introduction of the Axis-49 and Axis-64 keyboards by C-Thru Music, you’re definitely not alone. At the time it was a new musical instrument that was based on the harmonic ta…

Backyard UFO Is Out Of This World

Halloween may be over for another year, but UFOs in your yard are cool year-round. This one might take the cake. [frydom.john]’s excellent UFO is fully programmable and contains about 2000 ad…

Teensy Stands In For The Motorola 68k

While it might not seem like it today, there was a time in the not-too-distant past where Motorola was the processor manufacturer. They made chips for everything, but the most popular was arguably …

Apple III Slows Down To Smell The Roses

The most collectible items in the realm of vintage computers often weren’t the most popular of their era. Quite the opposite, in fact. Generally the more desireable systems were market failur…

Game Boy-Style Camera For Playdate

The Game Boy Camera, while perhaps not the most technologically advanced piece of equipment, left a huge mark on video game and electronics culture. The grayscale photographs are still highly prize…

Transform An Original Xbox Controller To A 360 Controller

If you’re looking for a controller for your computer or mobile device, you could certainly do worse than one of the latest iterations of the Xbox pad. They might not be perfect, but they&#821…

IBM PC Runs BASIC With Motorola 68000 CPU Upgrade

Although ARM CPUs have been making headway in several areas of computing over the last decade or so, the vast majority of desktop, laptop and server CPUs are still based on the x86 architecture. Ho…

Breadboarding A Game Boy From Scratch

The original Nintendo Game Boy is a stout piece of hardware in a solid plastic enclosure. [Raphael Stäbler] recreated the popular handheld on a breadboard instead, in a fully-functional way, to boo…

Teensy Becomes Tiny Handheld Computer, Plays Emulators

Science fiction predicted that we would one day all carry around tiny computers of great power. While smartphones are great, those predictions were more based on cuter systems that more closely app…

Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: Chorded Keyset Recreates Engelbart’s Vision

Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of all Demos” introduced the world to a whole range of technologies we take for granted today, the most prominent being his great invention, the c…

LMN-3: Putting The ‘OP’ In Open Source Synthesizers

Some projects you come across simply leave you in awe when you look at the thought and the resulting amount of work that went into it, not only for the actual implementation, but everything around …

Eight RS232 Ports, One Ethernet Port

When it comes to impromptu enclosures, [Paul Wallace] is a man after our own hearts, for his serial-to-Ethernet converters allowing him to control older test equipment were housed in takeaway curry…

Teensy 4 Pushed To The Limit With 1 GHz Overclock

Do you need a microcontroller that runs at 1 GHz? No, probably not. But that didn’t stop [Visual Micro] from trying, and the results are pretty interesting. Not only did the plucky little chi…

Vintage Computers With A Real Turbo

In prior centuries, it was common practice to tie the operation of a program to a computer’s clock speed. As computers got faster and faster, the programs tied to that slower clock speed some…