I suppose you could use a raspberry pi to do all that but there is a geeky kind of beauty in making an old piece of equipment do what you want. There is also the energy savings of recycling as you did not expend the energy to create the device. Solar cells and windmills have a huge energy footprint during their creation. A nice thorium reactor excited by a Farnsworth Hirsch fusor would be my choice of heat and electrical power. Every bat cave needs one. 8-)
Nice one Kyle, excellent mix of the old and new. I particularly like the PDP on a shelf in your front room. BTW I did the other PDP8 flashing Christmas lights.
Thanks! You have a much more impressive setup. Someday I hope to have an RK05 (and controller), but for now I'm making due with my Raspberry Pi emulating a disk over a serial port. The parents were not thrilled with its location (as you know, the fans are quite noisy), so I did end up moving it to another room and ran some coax and ladder line (the only long wire I had laying around) to pass the SPI from the PDP-8 to the light strings. Despite the long run, it still ran without any issue.
Well done, Kyle! I never would have thought about trying to drive those from a PDP-8.
Nostalgia computing, also an esoteric electric heater.
David Zimmerman Sharing this link started a long thread decrying the power usage...
I suppose you could use a raspberry pi to do all that but there is a geeky kind of beauty in making an old piece of equipment do what you want. There is also the energy savings of recycling as you did not expend the energy to create the device. Solar cells and windmills have a huge energy footprint during their creation. A nice thorium reactor excited by a Farnsworth Hirsch fusor would be my choice of heat and electrical power. Every bat cave needs one. 8-)
Nice one Kyle, excellent mix of the old and new. I particularly like the PDP on a shelf in your front room. BTW I did the other PDP8 flashing Christmas lights.
Thanks! You have a much more impressive setup. Someday I hope to have an RK05 (and controller), but for now I'm making due with my Raspberry Pi emulating a disk over a serial port. The parents were not thrilled with its location (as you know, the fans are quite noisy), so I did end up moving it to another room and ran some coax and ladder line (the only long wire I had laying around) to pass the SPI from the PDP-8 to the light strings. Despite the long run, it still ran without any issue.
Masterfully done! Job well done.
Nice!
Kyle, you are such a nerd :-)
Think of controlling 12 SPI channels at once! And throw away the Raspberry Pi.