[GreenKeys] Teletypes at the Maker Faire

Fri Apr 20 01:03:37 EDT 2018

Hi all,

Thanks for the encouragement and kind words. Showing the teletypes off at
the Maker Faire was a success. John Whitney brought his Model 35 and had it
connected to a Linux terminal, and I had my 19 printing out SMS and email
people sent it whilst my 15 was printing out art the whole day.

I have never been to the Maker Faire here in Salt Lake City before, but
there were I believe 80-90 total groups showing off various projects of
every kind in the State Fairpark Grand Building. I think it's safe to say
that the teletypes were one of the more popular exhibits there. I had a
pretty good crowd most of the time, and most adults and kids were
enthralled with the machines and had a lot of questions. One probably 11
year old girl said she just got a new room, and she said a piece of art I
printed out at her request depicting Charle's Shulz' "Lucy" from the
Peanuts cartoons would be the perfect thing for her wall. John's machine,
which was set up just across the way from mine, seemed to attract a lot of
people, too.

I enjoyed explaining the history of the machines and how they worked
electrically and mechanically to people interested in them, which were
many. I had a mechanical engineer and an electrical engineer both exclaim
that they'd never seen anything so amazingly engineered.

There were maybe three or four people who came up with big smiles on their
faces and talked about the old days when they or their parents used to work
with teleprinter machines back in the 70s. It was fun to see those memories
reawakened.

A lot of people thought I had retrofitted typewriters. They were excited to
hear that the teletypes were completely original designs dating from 1930,
operating exactly as they did back then.

I was invited to bring the machines to the Thanksgiving Point Maker Faire
in September (that's around 20-30 miles south of Salt Lake City), and there
were some other groups that wanted me to bring them by.

It was a fun day and one I'd love repeating again.

I was up until 6:00 AM before the faire with a long night of polishing up
some finishing touches, printing out extra art to give away, testing, and
fixing a couple of bugs in both the software and the machines that I
discovered. There was a heart-stopping moment when I thought I had somehow
destroyed my last remaining optoisolators on the two boards and thought I'd
be completely unable to operate since I couldn't get any replacement
components in time. Luckily it turned out to be a really weird hardware bug
I have not had time to fully trace that was simply solved by reversing the
loop polarity (the boards are supposed to be polarity insensitive and were
working fine in the opposite polarity until that moment). I had a few
moments like this where I grumbled things like, "Why can't I just be like
everyone else and do something easy like play video games?!" However, the
end result is well worth the moments of frustration.

The machines ran incredibly well and are a monument to how well the last
person who owned them took care of them. He became silent key in the 70s,
and the machines sat idle in his basement for about 40 years until I had
them shipped across the country to me last year. I had oiled and greased
the major parts, replaced a couple of missing parts, tightened some nuts
and bolts, and did some modest cleaning, but there is still plenty I want
to do to clean and restore them. Despite that, both machines ran incredibly
well for hours and brought enjoyment and wonder to hundreds of visitors.

Attached are some photos. I meant to have more, but I forgot to bring my
camera. My phone was plugged into the Raspberry Pi to supply the internet
connection, so I couldn't take it more than a couple feet away for
pictures. Most pictures were taken by my wife.
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