Hackers Delight - The Write-Up
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Friday Evening
The first project to get underway was the Laser Asteroids and it wasn't long before Charlie and Andy had the Asteroids cab apart and were scoping the X & Y outputs to see what kind of signals they were. The event features had already been set-up during the week and a few of us spent time chatting in the 80's Chillout Bedroom. There was an Amstrad Stack System, 80's posters on the wall, 21" Logik TV with Ferguson Videostar VHS video, Commodore VIC-20 computer and Intellivision games console complete with Space Spartens and the all important speech box! Even the bed had an authentic 80's Playboy duvet cover!! :-) In the hallway was an Atari 600XL, Sony Playstation, two arcade cabinets, a Sord M5 (with a pre-release multicart!), Commodore A600, ZX81, Atari 2600, BBC Micro, Commodore 64 and more ... Plenty to keep you occupied for that important down time between hardcore hack sessions! Not all hackers arrived on the Friday, but the ones that did took full advantage of the evening getting a head start on projects, playing with the retro gaming machines and setting up for the day ahead. It was about 1:15am when we finally decided to call it a day ...
Saturday
Those of us that stayed at the hotel on the Friday night skulked down from our rooms one by one, whilst fresh faced hackers arrived at reception carrying yet more techno toys to play with. With breakfast served and consumed a brief introduction was given. The message was clear - whatever your chosen project, success or failure was irrelevant. Just enjoy the experience ... And with that in mind, hacking commenced .... There were many projects on the go, some software, some hardware, some creative, some pointless :-) but regardless of the project the enthusiasm was the same. So much so that sometimes the concentration left the room of over 40 people almost silent with just the sound of keyboard tapping and wire stripping filling the air, often punctuated with the sound of success or occassionally the fizzing of capacitors frying! The atmosphere was relaxed but productive. Often breaks were taken to take a look at other projects and chat with other hackers - obviously with a cup of coffee in hand ...  Come 7pm dinner was served and hacking stopped. A chance for more discussions regarding the projects at hand and even a raffle as a small thank you to those who attended. Top prize was an Amazon Kindle very kindly supplied by Red Gate software. Thanks to Chippy's for the lovely and much appreciated grub ...The rest of the evening consisted more hacking, top old school tunes and a considerable amount of beer! It wasn't until 3am before we decided to call it a day, and even then, one hacker decided to continue into the night to get his C64 FM Synth hack working! Sunday After a (little) bit of kip, Sunday morning arrived and it was time to start day 2 with a good breakfast a large coffee and a couple of asprin. Again, no time was lost and some of us had even started hacking before breakfast! The format for the day was the same with as much tea a coffee as required and lunch at 1pm. Sadly at 3pm we had to draw to a close but not before a round-up and chance for all of us to go round and hear the successes (and failures) of each project ... Laser Asteroids Sadly this was a #fail - but not due to the incredible hardware hacking skills of Charlie, Richard and Andy. Connecting the output of the Asteroids cab to the input of Laser turned out to be quite straight forward. However, sadly the galvenometers that move the laser beam were simply not fast enouh to draw the complex display. However, much fun was had playing Asteroids on the oscilloscopes display! Charlie and Andy moved onto other projects including a sound card for the ZX81 and the Binary Demo Box project. Commodore 64 FM Synth Richard was a late booking Fignition - Noughts and Crosses Julian spent a lot of time demonstrating his excellent Forth based micro to other interested hackers, whilst his lovely wife, Helen, soldered her very first circuit board with great success! Julian then demonstrated an impressive and mostly working implementation of Noughts and Crosses. It'll be great to have on display at the museum when it's finished. PDP-11 Restoration So as it turns out, the PDP-11 we brought to the event turned out not to be a PDP-11 at all but instead a 68000 based CAD system in a PDP-11 case!! Fortunately we brought a big box full of DEC cards that the guys could use to restore the machine back to it's original personality! Not knowing if any of the boards actually worked it proved a tricky challenge. This wasn't helped by the X2 capacitor bursting into smoke and stink either! But after a huge amount of perseverence and foul language Conny, Andy and Graham managed to get a machine together and booting to the ODT prompt. Maybe the next event will see a MUD game running on it? ... Multicarts Andy and Phill had accepted the challenge of building multicarts. They had succesfully constructed a VIC-20 cart and had got most of a DTV 64 board connected up ready for hiding inside a Commodore 64 case! Andy has taken the gear home to finish the project off. These will be a great additon to the museums display collection. Robot Arm Simon, Julian, Paul, Ollie and Lawrence were working with our 'Alfred' robot arm. Sadly, the arm was getting old and although the mechanism and electronics were in good health, the servos were poorly. However, the guys very kindly offered to club together and purchase new servos to get the arm swinging again! Thank you! In the meantime the guys coded up some routines on the BBC Micro to control the arm and even disassembled the existing servos to try and breath some new life into them. By the end of the event the arm was moving around under the control of the BBC so some great progress was made ... BBC Micros for Schools Lewis, Matt & Tom were testing and repairing some of our BBC Microcomputers ready to take out to schools for our interactive programming courses. They did a fantastic job getting many of the machines working and even installing MMC filing systems allowing kids to save their work. There was a small incidence of magic smoke escaping from one of the power supplies causing some minor excitement, but to be honest I expected to see much more! An excellent job guys ... M-Bed Project Using an ARM based M-bed microcontroller, Tim and Matthew set about constructing a 5 x 6 large scale display. The intention is to allow people to go online and post messages to the display in real time! The display was created using Christmas tree LED lights that were individually addressable. By the end of the event the guys were bit blasting data to the lights which were mounted in a piece of carpet! A bit more code is required but they're getting there ... Website Coding Paul, assisted by Robert, Kathryn and Ross set about coding up a new search facility for the Computing History website. After a bit 'unpicking' of our database schema our intrepid hackers had a great new search facilty up and running. You can now filter the search results by type and even display images making the searches that much more helpful. A brilliant job ... Binary Demo Unit Nick started this project all on his own :-( but carried on regardless and had 8 switches and LEDs wired up in no time! Charlie got involved halfway through and started coding up a PIC chip that will later make the Binary Demo Unit interactive. The unit was built into an old unused CNC box! There wasn't quite enough time to get the unit fully constructed at the event but Nick has kindly taken the unit to finish at home ... Thanks Nick! Domesday System Tim, Alastair and Ben had a whole pile of Acorn BBC Domesday hardware to test out! By the end of the event we knew we had at least 5 working Laserdisc players and 3 BBC Master AIV systems! They went on to continue developing the online version of the domesday discs and worked with Ben who developed a 3D model of the gallery and Haydn who is looking at a unique user interface. Amazing stuff ... Photography Lesley, Steve, Ben and quite a few others were snapping away throughout the event but Lesley and Ben also spent a good deal of time taking reference pictures of many of our exhibits from the Jupiter ACE and Acorn Communicator to an unusual Sinclair Spectrum built into a carry case! These pictures will be uploaded to the relevant pages on the website making the information presented that much better. Video Angela and Saphron spent much of the event capturing footage of us all working on our selected hacks and you can see it towards the top of this page. On Sunday Angela also did a quick fire interview with a number of the hackers. This is online now. Gallery Thank you The Centre for Computing Hsitory would like to thank Donna, Simon and the rest of the team at the Days Inn Haverhill. They did a fantastic job of looking after us and created an atmosphere that was relaxed and accommodating. Another big thank you to Glenn and Chippy's fish and chip shop who supplied copius amounts of food for the Saturday evening! Obviously a big thank you to our sponsors : Red Gate, ARM and Microsoft Research who supplied the excellent swag for the goodie bags. An extra thank you to Red Gate and Pure Energy Multimedia who supplied the raffle prizes. Finally, to the people who helped make the event happen. Saphron, Angela and Steve worked hard shifting equipment, handling bookings and printing posters. Thanks :-) On a personal note ... I'd just like to finish with a personal thank you to everyone that attended the event. It was our first and I know many of you didn't know what to expect but booked anyway. It was a real pleasure 'working' with all of you. In the words of one attendee : "there wasn't a single ar**hole amoungst us" which I think was articulately put... don't you? I hope we all keep in touch and I look forward to seeing you again at a future event. Jason Story By: Jason Fitzpatrick Date : 20-08-2011 |
Even though the Friday evening was supposed to be a soft-start hacking started practically immediately. Gear was unloaded from cars, components were set out, circuit diagrams were unfolded and inspiration juice was purchased fom the bar!
