A page about retro electronics, from the introduction of electricity until 1970-something. We refit old gadgets with new tech, and wonder at the makers who came before us.
My father gave me his trains before he passed away. These Lionel trains and tracks from the 50’s are a bit of a family heirloom. Last year I got the non-functioning locomotive refurbished by The Motor Doctor who did good work…
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Aloha Retro Future Friends. This is maybe more just future future. We recently installed 10 kilowatts (kW) of photovoltaic solar panels on our house on the island of Oahu, in Hawaii. Hawaii is ideally suited for solar power, being in…
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The Raspberry Pi, Beagle-bone, and the countless other Single Board Computers (SBCs) out there are making their way into everyday life. When you see a digital menu board at a fast food restaurant it’s likely a SBC behind it, when…
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We recently moved to Hawaii from Okinawa, in an pandemic, with a dog. That’s crazy you may say, and you’d be right! Our work was having none of it and we had to move. I drove a regular Prius before…
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Like most of the rest of the world, here at RFE HQ we are spending a little more time at home due to the threat of COVID-19. This has given me some time to take a few photos and videos,…
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It’s the start of new decade by most peoples figuring. What will the 20’s bring? Besides way too many references to 100 years ago and the roaring twenties. Here are my personal predictions for 2030 on a few tech trends….
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Intro UPDATE 1 July 2020: So after about 6 months with this setup I can’t recommend it. There were a lot of little strange errors. I ended up to buy the ifixit imac opening kit, put in a 4TB SSD…
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It’s Christmastime 2019 and I want to decorate up my Mac and Linus machines with a little Christmas cheer. Computer desktops haven’t been around all that long, but back in the 90’s there were a lot of desktop customizations for…
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Introduction The ISS is humankind’s only (current) permanent home in space. Many of the engineers and astronauts that live and work on and with the ISS are into all sort of geeky hobbies, including Amateur (Ham) Radio. As such there…
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Here at retrofuture HQ we’ve been using a trusty 27” iMac for over 5 years. This is the longest I’ve ever used a single computer as my “main” computer, but as desktop advances have slowed it hasn’t made sense to…
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After refurbishing my dad’s old Lionel train track switches (see post here), the next step was to get them reliably working with a Raspberry Pi (or Arduino, but the Pi is quicker for me to get set up and running)….
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This is a sub article from my main Lionel raspberry pi controller project. The switches I have were originally purchased for my father in the 1950s. They have been carelessly stored in attics, a rain forest, and garages for the…
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Hi All, I’ve had an old Super Famicon (Super NES in America) cartridge laying around. I purchased it from a local thrift store for 100 yen, a little less than US$1 at the time. I meant to put a single…
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About 2 years ago I started running out of ports on my 8 port switch fairly regularly. It has connections for my main desktop computer, a hookup to the downstairs switch, phillips hue hub, ooma VoIP service, and any number…
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Here at RFE central, we live in a 2,000 SqFt (185SqM) house made from steel reinforced concrete. It’s not the friendliest to Wi-Fi, and darn near impossible (especially as a rental) to run Ethernet cables everywhere we’d like. We had…
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Engineers love their tools, in the 60’s an engineer may love a slide-rule, the 70s to 80s a PC or perhaps an LED calculator, to most engineers of my era (college in the early 90’s) the graphing calculator is the…
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I came across this great site recently and it has a spectacular collection of vacation photos from the 1950’s shot on Kodak’s Kodachrome. Not exactly retro future, but maybe just retro. A lot were taken of Florida’s space coast around…
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What is conformal coating? In simplest terms, it’s a plastic or urethane that you paint (usually via spray can, but also by brush) over a circuit board to protect it from harm. For example if you have a circuit that…
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As my favorite TV cook, Alton Brown, has said: “the only unitasker in the kitchen is the fire extinguisher”. In my kitchen I had a slow cooker, and a rice cooker, and no pressure cooker. Always short on space in…
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For a long time I’ve wanted to make a information station for the house. I had a Sony Dash Clock that filled most of these needs, but the servers for it are gone forever as of July 2017. This points…
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Most of us are well versed in SSH, used for general terminal access, port forwarding, inter-computer communication and more. SSH supports compression, but the man page has had this line in it as long as I can recall (at least…
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It’s been a while here at RFE, but the next item on the retro future project list is this flipclock. A little newer than my normal projects, I thought it would be fun. So lets have a look at it…
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Buckminster Fuller, the undisputed king of retro-future architecture. We can only imagine what the world would have been like if not for the depression and WW2 stoping his dreams. Probably we would all live in Bucky-balls and long for square…
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This guys blog did an awesome photo exhibit on the early computers at the computer Museum at Bletchley Park (Famous for it’s WW2 crypto action). Amazing to think that while I’m comparing the Raspberry Pi 2 to the Pin64 , either one…
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In 1967 the Philco-Ford corporation released this ~25 minute film on what life would be like in 1999. The absolute definition of Retro-Future Electrics. It’s chocked full of retro-future awesomeness. Some things they get right: Computer learning Computer menu planning…
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Here are RFE, we also like all things Retro, even if they aren’t about the future or electronics. Today this book arrived in the RFE mailbox: The Complete Barbecue Book by John and Marie Roberson. (Available from Amazon for US$4…
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I ordered this cool pine64 case from Amazon for $15, almost the cost of the computer itself! It went together easily, came with all the hardware and spacers needed. And it looks pretty cool. Here are the pics! The last one…
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Many folks have hacked the Amazon Dash Buttons into internet of things workhorses, apparently so many that Amazon has made it available as a device to buy on it’s own for $20! You can configure this button for 3…
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I think there is probably a fair assumption that many makers use both the raspberry pi and Arduino. Until now the easy “apt-get install arduino” method only got you Aruidino version 1.0.1, which was quite old, and missing a lot…
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UPDATE: The orange pi kernel has a backdoor in it as described on Ars Technica . If you are using this board, don’t place it on the public internet! Orange Pi PC was a Chinese Raspberry Pi ripoff that promised cheaper prices and…
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