Remembering Tandy’s loss-leading “battery club” from the 1980s – giving away 1 free battery every month to get people in the store
Author Archives: zedstarr
Yanko Design tiny Bluetooth speaker inside a cassette case
A tiny Bluetooth speaker built into a compact-cassette housing. Super cute, super retro.
Psion Series 5 USB keyboard
My take on the old “re-purposing a dead Psion 5’s keyboard as USB keyboard” 😉 Using parts from dead Psion Series 5 and 5mx PDAs and an Arduino micro-controller.
A box of “Psion Organisers”
Aquiring some late 1990s PDA keyboards to revive with USB and Bluetooth connections… The Psion Series 5 (like all the Psion PDAs!) was renowned for its excellent mechanical design and the keyboard of the Series 5 was peak!
Clockwork uConsole – a ready made CyberDeck?
My experiences when my Clockworkpi.com uConsole arrived earlier this month – assembling the ready-made cyberdeck and some tweaks & challenges to work around some shortcomings…
PSION MC400 emulated – at last!
A few years after initially posing the question, an answer…. YES, the MC400 is emulated (in MAME 0.273 and later).
Is it Regs?
Asking the question: does it meet BS 7671 – the 18th Edition IET Wiring Regulations?
Latest Raspberry Pi – Psion MC400 Sidecar update
Super-cute Raspberry Pi Zero 2W based Psion-sidecar in a flirc case with 4 port USB hub underneath and an e-ink display on top 😀
Raspberry Pi count in the Home-Office: 10+
Counting up the Raspberry Pis in use in my home office… A top ten that goes up to 11 😉
“Electronic Sound” magazine cites 1981 as a pivotal year
How come we’re still feeling the musical & cultural aftershocks from the pivotal times of the early 1980s? “Electronic Sound” magazine’s latest two issues feature Steve Strange & Rusty Egan’s “Blitz Club” and the pop music highlights of 1981.
ASUS zenbook ux303 still limping on…
9 years after I first used my trusty ASUS zenbook ux303 it’s still just about going; the keyboard’s getting flaky-er (lots of keys on the keyboard work intermittently) and of course the hinge repair (drill-through-the-lid™️) has kept the case mechanically alive since 2019…
UTC-traceable flashing Xmas Tree Lights
Using a GPS’s UTC-synchronised 1PPS signal to drive a relay to flash some LED Xmas tree lights…
Setting a 1990s PDA clock via GPS
Setting the time on my 1990s Psion Series 3a PDA via an attached GPS and some OPL code to grab UTC time from the $GPRMC sentence…
PsiWin & MCLINK USB-RS232 adapter compatibility issues
Explaining compatibility issues between USB and retro Psion computers that use RS232 when using USB-RS232 adapters like FTDI & Prolific
“These aren’t the ROMs you’re looking for…”
The latest MAME release (0.253) is the first to support some of Psion’s 16-bit (SIBO) architecture platforms. Series 3a/3c/3mx, Siena and Workabout/mx are now partially supported.
Back to the source: Taking an emulated MC200 back to Psion’s old HQ in Harcourt St
Taking an emulated Psion computer back to its spiritual home – the MC400 emulation goes to Harcourt Street, London.
More retro Psion: The HC120 “corporate handheld”
Re-visiting the “corporate handheld” computer that is the Psion HC120,
Room 7609 