computoman

The PCinoPi available from many junk closets is not faster than a speeding bullet and  not faster than a speeding train but it can easily introduce you to computers and electronics. Will run Pitus Linux, Atomic Linux, Freedos (with Qbasic), among other operating systems right from the floppy drive. (Pictured is an i486 laptop) You can easily do digital control with it's legacy parallel port. Lighting led's is a cinch. Controlling  rocket launchers is another benefit.  Need to do analog input? With a few discrete parts you can even get analog values too. Say grabbing the temperature. If the vga port is new enough, you can even use I2C   Extra cable and interfacing not included but can be built with off the shelf parts. Vga ( http://www.instructables.com/id/Vga-breakout-cable/ )   Rs232 ( http://www.instructables.com/id/DB9-serial-break-out-cable/ ) Parallel ( http://www.instructables.com/id/No-solder-parallel-port...

No  longer spend time burning #linux cd's. Do not need to do that anymore. You can even do the same thing with bsd. By the time you spend downloading the cd image and burn the cd, and then do the install, I can do an ipxeboot from floppy and have the job done. Though to save time sometimes I will do a minimal install and then later add whatever is needed. Done this even with a Pentium 1 to install Slackware 14.1. Pentium 2's or better get Debian. Bought a Sony double speed usb floppy drive from a local office retailer for 5 dollars. Been a good investment.There is a rare instance when I can not install linux on a system, Floppies are not dead.... You can even use the virtual floppy images to load linux into a virtual machine. Search ipxe in this blog for more details.. Floppies can also load terminal programs or modem programs as we used to know them. Terminal programs will easily work on older equipment where the old fashioned rs232 ports (or an adapter f...

Last article I talked about using a dos disk to access some terminal software. Here is a disk that is allegedly pure linux to act as a terminal. It seemed to work on the old 486 laptop connected to the arch linux based pogoplug, though I did not check it out completely. About: PiTuX is a floppy based Linux distro that turns an old, low-RAM, machine in a very useful serial terminal running minicom. Think about your old laptop as a pure VT102 . Features: PiTuX boots from a floppy and runs completely in ram so you can even have a diskless PC. New: persistent configuration! Configure minicom as you need and if you want you can have config files stored and saved over reboots. It works from 386, without math coprocessor, up and NEEDS ONLY 4 MB RAM . It doesn't have any kind of support for hard disks so it will not mess up data on them Most 386 and 486 can run even without a fan so you can have a ...

If you set up your serial port for communications and have a serial terminal (some systems may require a usb adapter), you will never worry about not having a monitor for emergencies. (Connecting in this case to an nslu2 running linux.)   Notes from an earlier article to set up serial communication, Your system may vary. Now to get the Pda working with the unit. The Palm pda will not work as is as a dumb terminal, so I had to install a program on to it from another computer called ptelnet.prc using a usb to serial interface. The Palm has an interface cable that will plug directly into the 9 pin serial port on the back of the computer. HP Journa has a standard rs232 port. $  pilot-xfer -p /dev/ttyUSB0 -i ptelnet.prc That should be easy. First to test the port. Strange the serial port on what is commonly known as com2:. (com1: =ttyS0) $ sudo /sbin/getty -h -L /dev/ttyS1 9600 vt100 & $ sudo chmod 666 /dev/ttyS1 A prompt did not show up on the Palm pda. ...

Old hardware can be used for doing electronics just like the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and etc. Parallel port can be used for digital interfacing. You can use the joystick port for analog input just like the Arduino. (less accurate though). The serial port allows you to do communication.   Some vga cards even have i2c interfaces http://www.instructables.com/id/Electronic-Guides/