Have you ever ever seen a toy and mentioned “That wishes to be a deck”? [Attoparsec] did, when his eyes fell upon the Little Speaking Scholar, a punch card pushed toy from the Nineteen Eighties. It’s now a punch card pushed cyberdeck.
The punch card interface on the toy is barely six bits, however sixty-four utility playing cards are in all probability greater than dad and mom would have needed to maintain monitor of in 1989. Initially, they cued up easy matching video games on an nameless epoxy-coated microprocessor; after [Attoparsec]’s surgical procedure, they do the identical factor, cuing up customized Python functions on the Raspberry Pi Zero he’s implanted into this factor.
The sq. show comes courtesy of HyperPixel. It’s designed for a Pi, however each the show and the case wanted a little bit of surgical procedure to get it to suit. First, a little bit of milling was required on the plastic case to make room for the printed bracket to carry the show. That left depth, as the unique toy had no show, which implies the lid of this faux-laptop is sort of skinny. (The punch playing cards had been printed with all you wanted to play the video games and had been seen by way of the opening that now exhibits the LCD.) By eradicating the headers and soldering on to the board, [Attoparsec] was capable of get the show to suit, however area was then too tight for punch playing cards to slip in simply. Some washers added the additional area required.
A battery lives inside the unique battery compartment, however as a result of the lithium cell he’s utilizing is thicker than the AA’s this toy was designed for, just a little bit extra milling was required. A pair extra holes gave a charging button and an influence port.
The buttons and the punch card contacts are linked to the Pi through MCP23017 I2C port expanders, because the sq. show offers a helpful I2C pass-through. A pleasant element was placing the MCP23017s onto a customized PCB that sat straight on the contacts of the unique button board. We’d have used these eight buttons for a chording keyboard, however [Attoparsec] isn’t a fan of cording. As an alternative, the buttons are context-dependent primarily based on the appliance. For textual content enter in his note-taking utility [Attoparsec] fell again on Morse, with two keys performing as paddles. We’ve seen Morse keyboards earlier than, and whereas they appear like nice HAM coaching, they can be assistive units.
The entire video is totally price a watch, for all the main points and the enjoyable tangents [Attoparsec] goes off on. We’re grateful to [smellsofbikes] for tipping us off to this mission. The information line is all the time hungry for cyber decks, so tell us if you happen to discover one— or anything fascinating.
