I picked up an old Roku at a garage sale recently. I was interested in it because it has composite video out on it in addition to the HDMI, so I would be able to hook it up to some of my older TVs that I have around the house. The owners had lost the remote, but since there’s what appears to be an IR window on the front, I figured I could probably use one of the numerous universal remotes I have. Unfortunately none of my remotes have built-in codes for the Roku. Since at least one of my...

As I continue working on digitizing old VHS tapes , I decided I wanted to at least partially automate the VCR control so I set about building a computer controlled universal remote with an old Arduino Duemilanove with an ATmega168. It didn’t take much to start running up against the 1k RAM limit. I purchased a ton of ATmega328s for cheap without a bootloader several years ago since I knew I could use another Arduino and a bunch of parts on a breadboard to burn the bootloader, but I...

A while ago I stumbled into a conversation between Eric Nelson and Rod Hull on twitter. Eric was mentioning that for a long time he has wanted to get a ZX Spectrum to add to his retro gaming collection, but living in the US they weren't exactly easy to come by and he also wasn't sure how hard it would be to make one work in the US. I jumped in and somewhat jokingly said that when he gets one I'll have it shipped to my house so he has to come over and play some air hockey. A...

A cassette adapter works, but is less convenient It’s been a while since I last made a PCB  but I finally had need to make another circuit board. The board I needed to make this time was a simple circuit that would be installed in a ZX Spectrum +2B which would bring the record and playback lines out to standard headphone jacks so an external source like a smartphone could be patched in instead of having to use one of those cassette adapters. It came about because when the...

Yesterday I went to cut out some new stickers in preparation for the next theme week on RetroBattlestations . I loaded the design into the program, repeated it a few times on the page, and told it to cut. After it was done I cut the stickers apart and started to weed them but found it hadn't cut all the way through. And there were also a lot of scrape marks on the vinyl where the knife moved from one path to another. It only took a moment to realize what had happened, the cutter head...