estimated reading time: 1 min

Like many of us of a certain vintage, [Dillan Stock] at The Stock Pot is nostalgic for VHS tapes. It’s not so much the fuzzy picture or the tracking issues we miss, but the physical experience the physical medium brought to movie night. To recreate that magic, [Dillan] made a Modern VHS with NFC and ESPHome.

NFC tags are contained in handsomely designed 3D printed cartridges. You can tell [Dillan] put quite a bit of thought into the industrial design of these: there’s something delightfully Atari-like about them, but they have the correct aspect ratio to hold a miniaturized movie poster as a label. They’re designed to print in two pieces (no plastic wasted on supports) and snap together without glue. The printed reader is equally well thought out, with print-in-place springs for that all important analog clunk.

Electronically, the reader is almost as simple as the cartridge: it holds the NFC reader board and an ESP32. This is very similar to NFC-based audio players we’ve featured before, but it differs in the programming. Here, the ESP32 does nothing related directly to playing media: it is simply programmed to forward the NFC tag id to ESPHome. Based on that tag ID, ESPHome can turn on the TV, cue the appropriate media from a Plex server (or elsewhere), or do… well, literally anything. It’s ESPHome; if you wanted to make this and have a cartridge to start your coffee maker, you could.

If this tickles your nostalgia bone, [Dillan] has links to all the code, 3D files and even the label templates on his site. If you’re not sold yet, check out the video below and you might just change your mind. We’ve seen hacks from The Stock Pot before, everything from a rebuilt lamp to an elegant downspout and a universal remote.

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estimated reading time: 1 min

By now most floppy disks have been relegated to the dustbin of history, with a few exceptions for obscure industrial applications using legacy hardware and, of course, much of the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals. In fact, they’re so rare to see in the world anymore that many below a certain age don’t recognize the “save” symbol commonly used in application user interfaces. Without a use case, and with plenty of old floppies still laying around, [Rob] took a pile of them and built this Whack-a-Mole-style game.

The game has a number of floppy-disk-specific features compared to the arcade classic, though. First, there’s no mallet, so the player must push the floppy disks into the drive manually. Second, [Rob] went to somewhat exceptional lengths to customize the drives to that sometimes the disks jump out of the drive, forcing the player to grab them and put them back in to score points in the game. He did this without needing to install high-powered solenoids in the drives too. As for the game software itself, it all runs on an Amiga 600 and even includes a custom-made soundtrack for the 30-second game.

Getting the drives just right did take a number of prototypes, but after a few versions [Rob] has a working game that looks fun to play and is a clever use of aging hardware, not to mention the fact that it runs on a retro computer as well. Of course, for the true retro feel, you’ll want to make sure you find a CRT for the display somewhere, even though they’re getting harder to find now than old floppy disk drives.

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