Pointless but fun (14)

  • Slow Badger Movie Player

    A couple of years ago I saw that somebody on the internet had made a Slow Movie Player, and that piqued my interest. The basic idea is that your favourite film is displayed on a screen at a really slow framerate. Eink displays are ideal for this as they use no power except for when updating the image. Their refresh rate is pretty poor compared to OLED displays, but if you're only updating once a minute, that's fine. A decent size eink display is pretty expensive though, so this idea went on the back burner.

    Earlier this year, Pimoroni released the Badger. A small eink display with a built in RP2040 (Raspbrry Pi Pico) which was ideal as a programmable name badge - hence the name. This was really cool, although I didn't have a need for a name badge. This also went on the back burner.

  • The Unknown Pleasures of CP1919

    During the 2021 lockdown I started a laser cutting project I'd wanted to do for a while. It turned out that the research on this went much much deeper than I first expected.

    You probably recognise this image, and think you know where it comes from. But what if I told you the story goes back further than you think.

  • Happy New Year. Again. And Again. And Again...

    A recent discussion started with the simple question "When is it New Year?".  Well, 1st January, right?  The stroke of midnight on 31st December?  Depends where you are on the planet?  [depends what planet [if any] you are on].  It depends on which timezone you are in.

    So, we settled on it being at the stroke of midnight for each of the timezones around the world.  Which, surprisingly, is 30.  Less surprisingly, they cover a full 24 hours.

    Timezones

  • Printing Xmas Tags Like It Was 1983

    Yesterday this tweet appeared on my Twitter timeline

    [embedTweet url="538666941335236610"]

    Now, being the geeky retro Sinclair fanboy I am, I read it, understood it, and retweeted it.  Obviously.

  • The Future I AM IN YOU

    As a child growing up in the 1970s, I had no idea of what the future held.  I didn't know if Mr Benn would be able to get back from his adventures, or if Scooby Doo could catch the Evil Swamp Monster, or even if we were going through the round or square window in PlaySchool.  But there were some things about the future that was pretty certain.  We would all have robot butlers, go on holiday to the moon and drive electric cars!

    2014-07-13 13.31.18

    So, as I drove to work this morning in my electric car, wondering when my moon tickets would drop through the letterbox, I realised that maybe, just maybe, I am already in the future

  • Retro Challenge - Day Off

    So, having had a few fairly intensive days working on PCB design for my RC2014 computer, today was pretty much a day off.  Apart from daily household chores, all I got done today was this;

    Screenshot from 2014-07-06 22:41:19

    Now, to the untrained eye, that may look like a schematic layout for 4 8x8 LED matrix displayed connected to a Z80 bus via some 74LS374s.

    But it's not.

  • Pre-RetroChallenge - The story so far

    Ok, so tomorrow the Summer RetroChallenge 2014 starts, so I thought it would be a good idea to bring you up to speed with what I've got so far so that you know where I'm starting from. I will also outline where I'll be taking things for the RetroChallenge as well as where this project may go in the future.

    So, in December 2013 I started poking around the internets for some ZX80 info, and I stumbled upon Grant Searles website. More specifically, he had the schematics for a Z80 based computer and a ROM with Microsoft BASIC on it. So, over Christmas I got out my breadboards and built it up pretty much as per the schematic.

    2013-12-23 17.22.09

  • Retro Challenge 2014

    I have always wanted to enter Retro Challenge, ever since I first heard of it nearly 24 hours ago. I followed a link that took me to http://retrochallenge.net/ and I read up on what it was all about, scrutinised the rules and checked out what others were doing. I quickly came to the conclusion that I could give this a thing a go.

    All I needed to do* was come up with a suitable challenge for myself.

    I have decided to make my name appear in LED lights.

    So an email was sent to the competition organisers;

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