A little less than a year...
...since I stopped updating this religiously, and in that time, we have done quite a few projects! So here is the quasi semi annual update, with hopefully ambitious plans to start blogging again!
Project 1: The time machine!
Probably one of the most significant projects we tackled was changing our house’s phone lines to an internal paging system. This required tracking down all of the different pairs of wires involved in the phone system and seeing how they connected to each other. The following are some of the instructables that came out of that.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Cheap-and-Easy-Guide-to-Building-a-Private-Telepho/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Retrofit-a-PBX-to-Existing-Phone-Lines/
The reason we wanted to do this, besides being able to call each other from any floor of the house, was to work on our “Time Machine” - a system that could get onto the internet but using mostly old school technology.
As seen here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Telecom-Time-Machine/ and it involved the following pieces:
Antique Telephone (G type handset)
300 Baud Acoustic Coupler Modem
Green Phosphor Cathode Ray Tube Monitor
Model M (buckling-spring, clicky) Keyboard
AT to PS2 Keyboard Adapter
PS2 to USB Keyboard Converter
Raspberry Pi Dial Up Server
Raspberry Pi Dumb Terminal
Project 2: House renovations!
After taking apart the phone system, we wanted to update the upper floor of our house with bamboo floors instead of the old carpet and linoleum. Here is the during:
And here is the after (but still before cleaning things up):
Things have since been cleaned up quite a bit, which leads us to our next project of the year!
Project 3: Cyphercon 2016 Badges
@Goetzman brought us onto the Cyphercon team to make their badges and it was a pretty fun experience, and definitely one where we learned a lot more about the manufacturing process:
275 of them were hand soldered! It was pretty much nonstop solder pasting for me. Each board was then individually reflowed and tested. And finally switches were soldered on. When I get more close up pictures, I’ll be sure to show you all.
The green ones are those who paid for the Friday portion of the conference. The white ones are the normal con goers. The blue was the speakers, black were the vip, and the red were the life-timers. There’s more information on them on http://hackthebadge.com/
And if you’d like to continue checking our projects, I created a reddit that I treat like our forums. Our previous forums decided to get too much bot traffic and that didn’t make our server provider happy :p Woops.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tymkrs
If you would like to join and see what all is going on!
