Traditional Macintosh will get a large ePaper show

The unique Apple Macintosh pc, launched in 1984, was elementary for ushering in GUIs (graphical person interfaces). It wasn’t the primary private pc to function a GUI working system and the concurrent Apple II nonetheless retained a extra conventional command line interface for years, however we largely have the Macintosh to thank for contemporary GUIs. So it’s acceptable that Dave Luna selected to make use of an Apple Macintosh Traditional II to retrofit with a contemporary ePaper show.

The Macintosh Traditional II hit the market in 1991 as a low-cost mannequin, nevertheless it retained the design aesthetic of the unique Macintosh. It was additionally the final Macintosh pc with a black-and-white display. Luna changed that CRT (cathode-ray tube) with a 9.7” Waveshare ePaper show. He additionally eliminated the entire unique PCBs and changed them with a Raspberry Pi 3 Mannequin B single-board pc. Curiously, Luna added an adapter to feed the output from a Chromecast machine to the Raspberry Pi’s digital camera enter with a purpose to present household footage saved in Google Pictures.

However there have been two parts that Luna couldn’t exchange with out ruining the look of the system: the keyboard and mouse. They utilized proprietary connection protocols and will not be appropriate with in the present day’s computer systems. To make them work with the Raspberry Pi, Luna turned to Arduino. He  used an Arduino Micro to create an adapter for the keyboard and mouse. That runs TMK’s ADB (Apple Knowledge Bus) to USB Keyboard Converter Arduino library, which deciphers the indicators coming from the keyboard and mouse after which connects to a pc as a contemporary USB HID. Lastly, Luna programmed a customized Python script to show a Macintosh-styled GUI for the Raspberry Pi.