Retro Thing

Build An Organ - Radio Shack Style

It's interesting when you thumb through a family's photos from the 60's and 70's, and find an inordinate number depicting the folks gathered around the organ. That's outside my own family experience, but I've seen it often enough that it's not an uncommon image. I guess before there was a TV in every room, you might spend an evening around the electronic organ having a sing-along.

I'm surprised at how long the organ store stayed open in my local mall. I remember a vast shag carpeted showroom that steadfastly sold organs into the early 80s. Who was buying these relics back then? Of course when much more versatile synthesizers and low-priced Casio type keyboards hit the market, there just wasn't a place anymore for the ol' Kimball Swingster, was there? Maybe that's where the family sing-along went too...

If you want to recapture that retro organ spirit, but don't want to give up the floor space or your back muscles, maybe you can find one of these old Radio Shack Electronic Organ Kits. It's from their Science Fair Line from the 70s or so, so this organ is a sort of cousin to the 150-in-1 kits so many of us grew up with. Sharp eyed Retro Thingers may notice that the "keys" in this kit are the same morse code levers that Radio Shack has been packing into kits since forever. A dedicated evening of squinting at instructions and looping some wiring will get you a weedy sounding monophonic organ with built-in speaker.

I hope you're not interested in playing any sharps or flats - unless you're a Radio Shack Science Fair modder! I also hope you don't expect much more than a vague buzzing sound - though with all the circuitry right there out in the open, maybe you can add in a few bits and bobs of your own to get the much favored Hammond B3 sound. Uh huh... Or get really crazy and add MIDI - use it as a controller for your MeeBLIP synth! Don't forget that the kit builds into a nice wooden case that you can stain and finish to add that classy touch. Imagine this organ kit as the centerpiece of your living room when your family crowds around the little guy to sing hits like "Camptown Races" and "On Top Of Old Smokey" from the included booklet.

related:
Those 60's living rooms had chord organs too
An organ made of clear Lucite
Another Radio Shack classic - the Minimus speaker

Celebrate 48 Years Of Being Exterminated By The Daleks

This last weekend marks the 48th anniversary of Doctor Who. Eventhe show was rested for a number of years after it's 26 year long run, the blockbuster six year success of the rebooted series shows us there's still life in the old beast yet.

Speaking of beasts, the good Doctor's main beast is just a few weeks from celebrating a birthday. The Daleks premiered in the show's second multi-part story on December 21st, 1963. To be fair, all we got that night was a POV glimpse of it's infamous sink plunger arm. It may sound like a cheap move, but it made for one of the most terrifying cliffhangers in the series' history. Our first proper look at a Dalek would have been December 28th in '63.

When fans first heard of the show's return in 2005, one of he first questions was whether the Daleks were coming back. Behind the scenes the production team was having diffuculty getting the rights to use the classic bad guy. Eventually resolved, the Dalek's comeback was shrouded in secrecy. Despite a leaked cellphone picture of the new prop, seeing the updated Dalek design on TV was no less exciting. At last it looked as badass as we had always imagined it to be.

In recent years, the prop has undergone a more radical design change. The "new paradigm" Daleks are much larger, and come in a whole range of candy colors (inspired perhaps by the gaudy 60's movies?) denoting rank. We still haven't really seen these new guys in action, so I'll reserve judgement for the new Lego look-alikes until we do.

Instead let's consider the little Dalek sculpture made of scrap metal at the start of this post. I always imagined Daleks to be heavy and metallic, and this guy is - even though he's only about 8" tall. I got him off of Ebay years ago from an artist who did a lot of similar sculptures of sci-fi gear and motorcycles. The price was right, but shipping was murder coming from halfway around the world. Still, I've had him guarding my front door for years now. He does make for a dangerous nemesis even at this reduced size. First, you're looking at pretty severe lacerations if it so much as falls on your foot. Second, the sculpture included a stern warning about washing your hands after every handling of it. The "real" Daleks would be proud.

related:
classic chrome remote control dalek
genuine dalek prop found in swamp
scrap metal robot for $20

Wood + Tech = The Ultimate Neo Geo Controller

Chris Taber just sent me a link to his brand new $199 Analogue Arcade Stick. This stunning wooden work of art is compatible with all Neo Geo home consoles and features the same joystick and buttons that were built into the original Neo Geo arcade units.

It weighs in at 3.9 lbs and comes in ebonized ash or walnut. The heart of the controller is a Seimitsu LS-40 joystick topped by a 35mm black balltop, along with four 30mm game buttons laid out exactly where you'd expect to find them (and I do mean exactly). An additional pair of 24mm Start and Select buttons are hidden conveniently on the rear. The unit includes a 6 foot removable controller cord, too.

The only problem I can see is that there's currently a 5-7 week backlog of orders.

Analogue Interactive Analogue Arcade Stick

40 Years of Intel Microprocessors

It's been 40 years since Intel shipped the world's first single chip microprocessor.

Intel was formed by a handful of ex-Fairchild employees in the late 1960s. Japanese electronics manufacturer Busicom approached them in 1969 to develop a chipset for their new 141-PF electronic printing calculator, leading to the release of the Intel 4004 in late 1971. Busicom went on to sell over 100,000 Intel-based calculators, but they eventually found themselves in financial trouble. Intel used this to their advantage and was able to buy back the rights to the chip for non-calculator applications.

The 4004 was a tiny 4-bit processor with an 8-bit wide instruction set. It was capable of running at speeds up to 740 kHz and could address up to 4K of ROM and 1280 x 4bits of RAM, although the accompanying MCS-4 chipset included a tiny 256 byte mask-programmable ROM and 340 byte RAM chip. It seems laughable by todays standards, but those meager specifications were enough to open up a brand new world of programmable logic capable of replacing extremely complicated and expensive electromechanical systems.

Intel followed the success of this little 16 pin chip with the 8008, a 3,300 transistor 8-bit chip that was introduced in late 1972. The company went on the have a string of successes throughout the 1970s, but it was the incorporation of their processors into the IBM-PC lineup in the 1980s that enabled them to become the largest processor manufacturer in the world.

Incidentally, original 4004 chips are now highly collectible and a rare gold-white-grey chip like the one shown here can change hands for well over $1000. That said, I'd much rather have been given $1000 of Intel stock in the early 1970s - it'd be worth over $500,000 today -- enough for a massive stack of vintage chips.

More about the Intel 4004 at CPU-Zone

It Goes To 11... And Beyond...

It’s 11/11/11, and like so many other quasi-journalists, I’ve found it irresistible to think about the classic film Spinal Tap today. I was never part of that rock scene, but the earnest wrongheadedness of what constantly happens to the band is something we can all identify with. It’s still a comedy staple decades later with innumerable quotable moments, but is any part of the film more "celebrated" than Nigel Tuffnel’s amp that goes to 11?

Shortly after the movie came out, I saw other rockers chasing the dream by scrawling “11” onto their amp’s volume controls too, but it didn’t stop there. This “goes to 11” thing has been a meme for such a long time, it’s easy to gloss over mainstream appearances of the gag. Here are a few examples off the top of my head: the amazing MeeBlip synthesizer’s volume goes up to 11, the BBC’s online video player goes to 11, Guitar Hero’s sound effects settings top off at 11, in Doctor Who we see the sonic screwdriver used to crank a church organ “up to 11”… Though the best might be from the early 90’s. Marshall released an amp featuring a photo of Nigel pointing to the volume knob saying “now it goes to 20!” 

You don’t have to be a musician to join in the fun. There’s a special release of the movie on Blu-Ray in the UK that includes a mini replica Marshall amplifier stack. You can use it with your iPod, and yes… the volume does go there. If you haven’t seen the film in a while, it’s still awesome. I’ve got a DVD release of the film that includes more than an hour of improvised material that didn’t make it into the movie. It’s fun if you’re a fan, but it’s also easy to see why the material was left on the cutting room floor.

The many artists in the film have gone on to make more mockumentary style films, but I haven’t liked any of them a fraction as much as Spinal Tap. I think that Tap really was a singular comedy moment whith everyone's talent was cranked up to just the right level. It remains one of the few comedy movies that I love watching again and again – turned up to 11 of course.

Links:

Help out Retro Thing when you pick up Spinal Tap on Blu-Ray
The Criterion DVD has some exclusive features not on the Blu-Ray

100 Atari Classics Come To Android Handhelds

Atari's Greatest Hits package for the iPhone has scored over 3.5 million downloads to date. In response, the company has unveiled the same package for Android users. The core app is available for free download and includes Missile Command. If you like what you see, you can purchase all 100 Atari 2600 and arcade titles for $9.99, or mix and match from 25 4-game packs at 99 cents each.

My only complaint (apart from the obvious lack of physical game buttons) is that there's quite a lot of padding in the collection. For example, the Centipede pack includes the arcade versions of Centipede and Millipede along with their not-quite-so-fun Atari 2600 home equivalents.

Still, this looks like tons of fun for Android aficionados with a strong retro gaming streak and the price is more than fair.

Atari's Greatest Hits (Android) [via Android and Me]

Build An Insanely Complicated Transistor Clock

Brandon Schader writes, "As an electronics hobbyist, I gravitate toward endlessly cool yet hopelessly commercially impractical projects. This company's offerings definitely qualify.

Stumbled upon this site about a year ago based upon a 'Nuts and Volts' write-up. The coolest project at that time was the Transistor Clock. This is simply a digital clock built entirely with discrete transistors and diodes-no ICs anywhere! Display consists of six 7-segment LED displays. I've built one, and although it's not cheap, it's simply transcendentally awesome.

Now I see he has outdone himself. He now features a "Transistor Clock" kit as described above which uses Nixies rather than LEDs as the displays. This meets the definition of retro in every possible way because it genuinely could have been built as is with no mods in the 60s."

I like soldering electronics, sometimes for an hour or two at a stretch. It's a great way to clear the mind and focus on creating a physical thing. However, the $239 KABtronics Nixie Transistor Clock Kit might be taking things a bit too far. Instead of using logic ICs or microcontrollers, it features 215 discrete transistors, 518 diodes, 472 resistors and 101 capacitors on a massive 10" x 14" printed circuit board. 

KABtronics also offers a $199 version with a 7-segment LED display, along with smaller and less expensive models that incorporate newfangled integrated circuits. And if the idea of solid state electronics is too much for you, there's apparently a mechanical relay clock in the works, too.

KABtronics Timepiece Kits

An $80 Hand-Cranked 35mm Movie Camera

The LomoKino is a hand-cranked 35mm movie camera that shoots up to 144 frames on a roll of 35mm film. Once you've shot your footage, just get a film lab to process it without cutting it into shorter strips. The resulting movie can be viewed on the accompanying LomoKinoscope viewer -- just point it at a light source and you can watch your film on the tiny opaque screen at the rear.

The real fun comes when you scan the film and share it digitally (oh, the irony...). However, that could be a tricky task because standard desktop film scanners aren't set up to capture and align widescreen movie frames. Still, I'm sure someone will figure out a reasonable work flow and post details on the web in no time.

The secret to this device is that each incredibly skinny film frame measures 24mm wide x 8.5mm tall, allowing far more shots to be captured on a roll than usually possible. It's capable of shooting at 3-5 frames a second, so don't expect realistic motion. That said, there's a flash hot shoe mount that would make this camera ideal as part of a low budget animation rig.

The 25mm lens has an adjustable aperture of f/5.6 to f/11, giving you the rough ability to control the amount of light that hits the film. It has two focusing modes - Close-Up (60cm) and Normal (1m to infinity). The top-mounted inverse Galileo viewfinder will give you a rough idea of what you're capturing, although shooting from the hip is probably far more appropriate with this quirky movie camera.

Learn more at the LomoKino microsite.

Steampunk Robot On A Budget

The worldwide retailer Crate & Barrel got its start here in Chicago in the 60's. For many people it was their introduction to reasonably priced furniture and imported design sensibility & materials. The barrel has burst all over the world, even spawning a youth-oriented store called CB2... though they've mostly lost the "reasonably priced" aspect of the store's origin.

There are notable exceptions, like this scrap metal robot. He's a handsomly assembled melange of brassy castoffs and cute details, such as dainty metallic cuffs and a big gauge in his tummy. The robot is normally a thrifty $20, but right now is on sale for a nifty $14.95 - a price that clearly doees not compute. Heck... the scrap metal value may be more than that these days. You can find cheapo robo at your local CB2 or via their website.

One note. The website makes mention each being "unique". I thought that meant there were different robot styles, but they're referring to the natural differences in the finish of the metals they're using, as well as different markings on the gauges. So you completists don't need to be compelled to buy more than one.

Oh, and for you cynics out there... no, this post isn't buzz marketing for either store. The only benefit we get out of this post is knowing that our brother robots can find homes with Retro Thing readers.

link:

Get your $20 scrap metal robot for $14.95