Spencer Owen
A while ago, YouTube started recommending some ASMR videos of leatherwork being done. Handbags, laptop cases, wallets etc. It was fascinating to watch a leather hide being turned in to wonderful objects through the skills, craftsmanship and obscure processes. Over time I began to recognise the individual steps involved and wondered how hard can this […]
Like many people, I had seen wild crazy looking mechanical keyboards, and had been both fascinated and confused by them. How could you get by with so few keys? What does each key actually do? They looked like some kind of wild alien input device, but, at the same time, must work well otherwise the […]
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 […]
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 […]
This is one of those little projects that didn’t need to be done, or could have been done very simply. Despite a lot of feature creep, everything just came together at the right time, and I’m really pleased with the results. Firstly, a bit of background. My mum celebrated her birthday a couple of months […]
Ok, firstly, apologies for the lateness of this post. The stuff below was actually done a couple of weeks ago, but time has just got away from me. Hence this is being written up 2 days past the closing date for RC2017/4. Sorry Anyway, this part of my challenge involves investigating a rack that came as […]
After a visual check of the keyboards (see this post), I had a couple of questions, which were do the keyboards work? and how do the keyboards work? On the basis that neither of the Alphameric had their EPROM windows covered, and that one of the Cherry keyboards had already been modified, I chose the […]
Next up on the things to investigate is the 4 keyboards Judging by the connectors, it was obvious that these aren’t modern (PS2, USB or even 5 pin DIN) keyboards. Likely either a raw matrix or maybe parallel ASCII. Lets open them up and have a poke around! First off the block was this dusty […]
I decided the easiest thing to tackle first would be the three ICE (In-Circuit Emulators) as they’re quite bulky things to get out of the way early. There are two non-identical versions of the same model Adtek ICE Engine BX and a Zax ICD278 – all with manuals! Although they all have PAT stickers on […]
So, once again Retro Challenge is upon us, and, yes, the timing is offset , but an April challenge should mean that more people are able to participate. To try and stay ahead of the curve this time, I thought I’d get in early and give my excuses for why I failed to complete the […]