In the middle of the 20th century, the atom was all the rage. Radiation was the shiny new solution to everything while being similarly poorly understood by the general public and a great deal of those working with it.

Against this backdrop, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company decided to sprinkle some radioactive magic into spark plugs. There was some science behind the silliness, but it turns out there are a number of good reasons we’re not using nuke plugs under the hood of cars to this day.

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The Firestone Polonium spark plug represented a fascinating intersection of Cold War-era nuclear optimism and automotive engineering. These weren’t your garden-variety spark plugs – they contained small amounts of polonium-210. The theory behind radioactive spark plugs was quite simple from an engineering perspective. As the radioactive polonium decayed into lead, it would release alpha particles supposed to ionize the air-fuel mixture in the combustion chamber, making an easier path for the spark to ignite and reducing the likelihood of misfires. Thus, the polonium-210 spark plugs would theoretically create a better, stronger spark and improve combustion efficiency.

These plugs hit the market sometime around 1940, though the idea dates back at least a full 11 years earlier. In 1924, Albert Hubbard applied for a patent (US 1,723,422), which was granted five years later. His patent concerned the use of radium to create an ionized path through the gas inside an engine’s cylinder to improve spark plug performance.

Firestone’s patent (US 2,254,169) came much later, granted in 1941. The company decided that polonium-210 was a more viable radioactive source. Radium was considered “too expensive and dangerous”, while uranium and thorium isotopes were found to be “ineffective.” Polonium, though, was the bee’s knees. From the patent filing:

Frequently, conditions will be so unfavorable that a spark will not occur at all, and it will be necessary to turn the engine over a number of times before a spark occurs. However, if the alpha rays of polonium are passing through the gap, a large number of extra ions are formed by each alpha ray (10,000 ions per-alpha ray) and the gap breaks down promptly after the voltage begins to rise and at a lower voltage value than that required by standard spark plugs. Thus, it might be said that polonium creates favorable conditions for gap breakdown under all circumstances. Many tests have been run which substantiate the above explanations. The most conclusive test of this type consisted in comparing the starting characteristics of many  polonium-containing spark plugs with ordinary spark plugs, all plugs having had more than a year of hard service, in several engines at -15° F. It was found that thirty per cent fewer revolutions of an engine were required for starting when the polonium plugs were used.

As per the patent, the radioactive material was incorporated into the electrodes by adding it to the nickel alloy used to produce them. This would put it in prime position to ionize the air charge in the spark gap where it mattered most.

The science seems to check out on paper, but polonium spark plugs were only on the market for a short period of time, with the last known advertisements being published sometime around 1953. If the radioactive spark plugs had serious performance benefits, one suspects they might have stuck around. However, physics tells us they may not have been that special in reality.

In particular, polonium-210 has a relatively short half-life of just 138 days. In a year, 84% of the initial polonium-210 would have already decayed. Thus, between manufacturing, shipping, purchase, and installation, it’s hard to say how much “heat” would have been left in the plugs by the time they even reached the consumer. These plugs would quickly lose their magic simply sitting on the shelf. Beyond that, there are some questions of their performance in a real working engine. Firestone’s patent claimed improved performance over time, but a more sceptical view would be that deposits left on the spark plug electrodes over time would easily block any alpha particles that would otherwise be emitted to help cause ionization.

Ultimately, while the plugs may have had some small benefit when new, any additional performance was minor enough that they never really found a market. Couple this with ugly problems around dispersal, storage, and disposal of radioactive material, and it’s perhaps quite a good thing that these plugs didn’t really catch on.

Despite the lack of market success, however, it’s still possible to find these spark plugs in the wild today. A simple search on online auction sites will turn up dozens of examples, though don’t expect them to show up glowing. The radioactive material within will long have decayed to the point where they’re not going to significantly exceed typical background radiation. Still, they’re an interesting call back to an era when radioactivity was the hottest new thing on the block.

Enlarge (credit: Robert J. Sawyer)

WordStar's most recent claim to fame might be that it's the word processing application on which George R.R. Martin is still not finishing A Song of Ice and Fire.

But many writers loved and still love WordStar, a word processor notably good for actual writing. As computers moved on from DOS to Windows, and word programs grew to encompass features that strayed far from organizing words on a page, WordStar hung back, whether in DOS emulation or in the hearts of its die-hard fans.

One of those fans is Robert J. Sawyer, an award-winning science fiction author still using the program last updated in 1992. Deciding that the app is now "abandonware," Sawyer recently put together as complete a version of WordStar 7 as might exist. He bundled together over 1,000 pages of scanned manuals that came with WordStar, related utilities, his own README guidance, ready-to-run versions of DOSBox-X and VDosPlus, and WordStar 7 Rev. D and posted them on his website as the "Complete WordStar 7.0 Archive."

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A love letter to your thumbs

8BitDo, the purveyor of fine third-party controllers, has revealed the design for their next controller. This one is more than just a slight nod to the Neo Geo CD’s legendary mash-up between arcade stick and joypad.

By “more than just a slight nod,” I mean it’s pretty much exact. In fact, the company themselves say it is “a perfect recreation of the original SNK NEOGEO controller.” That’s sort of inaccurate since they added shoulder and extra function buttons, but I think they’re referring more to the design of the stick. NEOGEO gamepads had a special digital stick that had a unique “click” to it as you hit all the directional inputs. This was first used with the NEOGEO CD console, but the click wheel would also make its way to the NEOGEO pocket.

If you’ve ever felt a click stick, it’s easy to see the appeal. The tactile feedback is something else. The downside is that they were reportedly rather fragile. It’s important to note that 8bitdo is trying to recreate the stick right down to being digital, which will be a big relief to anyone who used the analog recreations that came included with the NEOGEO console reproductions and the NEOGEO Mini arcade units.

[caption id="attachment_390353" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via 8BitDo[/caption]

The world is a tire fire

To add to this, I kind of love 8BitDo as far as controller manufacturers go. My most used gamepad is an 8BitDo SF30 Pro, which is modeled after a Super Famicom controller. I also own their arcade stick, and in terms of compatibility, quality, and price, it’s hard to beat them. They’re also built rather traditionally, so I’ve modified most of my 8BitDo controllers to fit my preferences more. They’re really neat.

On the other hand, SNK gives me pause. Since 2022, it has been almost entirely owned by a company controlled by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman. Just thinking about it makes the blood run from my face, so if you want to know why this is a problem, just Google it, I guess.

Anyway, the 8BitDo NEOGEO controller should be hitting retailers very soon. It’s compatible with Bluetooth (apparently Android only) and a 2.4GHz USB adapter. The listing states it works with Android, Windows, and the NEOGEO Mini.

The post 8BitDo’s next controller is modeled after the NEOGEO CD’s gamepad appeared first on Destructoid.

[Sebastian] had a tricky problem to solve. Competitors in a Tetris tournament needed to stream video of their Game Boy screens, but no solution readily existed. For reasons of fairness, emulators were right out, and no modifications could be made to the Game Boys, either. Thus, [Sebastian] created the GB Interceptor, a Game Boy capture cartridge.

Thanks to the design of the Game Boy, there’s plenty of access to useful signals via the cartridge port itself. [Sebastian] realized that a non-invasive capture device could be built to sit in-between the Game Boy and a cart, and send video to a computer. Unfortunately, there’s no direct access to the video RAM via this port, but [Sebastian] figured out a nifty workaround.

The build uses a Raspberry Pi Pico. The chip’s two cores emulate the Game Boy’s CPU and Picture Processing Unit, respectively. Doing this, while having the chips keep up with what’s going on in the Game Boy, required overclocking the Pico to 225 MHz. The system works by capturing data from the cartridge’s memory bus, and follows along with the instructions being run by the Game Boy. By doing this, the Pico is able to populate its own copy of the video RAM. It then spits this out over USB, where it can be displayed and streamed online as desired.

There are some edge-case limitations, but for its intended purpose, the system works great. Currently, the hardware is usable on Linux and Windows, though it does require some fiddling in the latter case. Files are on Github for those eager to build their own. If you simply want to dump carts rather than stream from your Game Boy, we can help there, too. Video after the break.

With Linux and the serial port there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that Linux has great support for serial hardware of all sorts and a host of tools for accessing the serial port. That’s important when you use a lot of serial-like devices like Arduinos with USB ports and the like. The bad news is that most of the terminal software is made to accommodate the days when a computer had real serial terminals and modems with people interacting with them. We bet that’s why [lundmar] developed tio, a serial device I/O tool for people like us.

Honestly, how many times have you needed Zmodem file transfers and recognition of the DCD signal to detect an incoming connection? Sure there are many other programs that will do the job, but tio brings a clean simplicity along with functionality that embedded developers need.

The software will support arbitrary devices, show statistics, and give you control of the RS232 lines. There’s support for delayed characters and lines, useful if you are dealing with a super simple device with no handshaking. There’s also hex support and many ways to log data and statistics. We especially like that it can automatically reconnect which is a great feature.

Of course, you want some terminal features and tio includes those. For example, you can elect to have local echo turned on or map characters so that, for example, a carriage return turns into a carriage return and a line feed. You can use command line options to set up most items including features like redirecting to a network socket. Other commands inside the program — by default, triggered by Control+T — let you do things like send a break, toggle handshaking lines, and more.

You might think the serial port is dead, but it really just transformed into a USB port.  Of course, like everything else these days, you can also get your terminal in the browser.

The Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest wrapped up last week, and our judges have been hard at work sifting through their favorite projects. And this was no easy task – we had 75 entries and so many of them were cool in their own right that all we can say is go check them all out. Really.

But we had to pick winners, not the least because Digi-Key put up three $150 gift certificates. So without further ado, here are the top three projects and as many honorable mentions as you have fingers and toes – if you don’t count your thumbs.

The Prize Winners

Keybon should be a mainstream commercial product. It’s a macro keypad with an OLED screen per key. It talks to an application on your desktop that detects the program that you currently have focused, and adapts the keypress action and the OLED labels to match. It’s a super-slick 3D-printed design to boot. It’s the dream of the Optimus Maximus, but made both DIY and significantly more reasonable as a macro pad. It’s the coolest thing to have on your desk, and it’s a big winner!

On the ridiculous side of keyboards, meet the Cree-board. [Matt] says he got the idea of using beefy COB LEDs as keycaps from the bad pun in the name, but we love the effect when you press down on the otherwise blinding light – they’re so bright that they use your entire meaty finger as a diffuser. Plus, it really does look like a keypad of sunny-side up eggs. It’s wacky, unique, and what’s not to love about that in a macropad?

Finally, [Josh EJ] turned an exercise bike into a wireless gamepad, obliterating the choice between getting fit and getting high scores by enabling both at the same time. An ESP32-turned-Bluetooth-gamepad is the brains, and he documents in detail how he hooked up a homebrew cadence sensor, used the heart-rate pads as buttons, and even added some extra controls on top. Watching clips of him pedaling his heart out in order to push the virtual pedal to the metal in GRID Autosport, we only wish we were screaming “vroooom”.

Strange Topographies

If you type for a living, a bespoke keyboard personalizes the routine. Dichotomy takes the two standards of the desktop, mouse and keyboard, and fuses them together so that you don’t have to move your hand off to the side all the darn time. Nice. [Peter Lyons]’ Squeezebox is the further evolution of his ultra-low-travel design. If you didn’t see our coverage of a previous iteration, you’ve never seen anything like this before. And finally, we just have to tip our fedora to [Matthew Sparks] and his conversion of a museum-piece Morse code key into an HID-compliant USB keyboard. Dit-dah-dit!

Better Mouse(trap)

Pointers. If there’s one complaint we have about GUIs, it’s pointers. Always pointing and clicking. If only there were a way to make this more fun… Try the Magic Stick, which uses a similar IR camera to the Wii remote as a rodent substitute. Or [Maciej Witkowiak]’s Lightpen to HID that brings an older lightpen to his RetroPie setup. Or maybe there’s nothing wrong with the classic mouse after all, and what you really need is a custom-shaped wooden one? You’ll need to make your own, of course, but follow along with the Dwergmuis.

Press the Any Key

Custom peripherals are all about fitting a particular niche, and sometimes that niche is something small and simple. Like a single-button keypad? Or a gimbal joystick with a few keys? Check out [Yannick]’s collection of simple peripherals. [Sven]’s Tiny Mute Button has just one job, if you don’t count glowing, while [Rich T]’s 12-key pad with Encoder does a lot, with style. [Wing-Sum Law]’s keyboard looks suspiciously like an NES controller, but there’s no mistaking [John Loeffler]’s Vo-LUM Control for anything but a literally concrete volume knob. Or maybe you need to type math all day? [Magne]’s custom keypad has all the squiggly symbols.

Cyborg

Wearables take personal inputs to the next level, and [Peter Walsh]’s Wearable Haptic Sensor is a lovely entry. It’s an output rather than an input, and lets you feel what the computer is saying. [Nait]’s Glovraille braille keyboard glove is still in the early stages, but it’s a cool idea that’s worth watching.

VR

Gaming is better with better peripherals, and we saw two stellar cockpit builds: KSP Gegi for Kerbal Space Program (of course) and Mechwarrior 4 Simulator Cockpit Panel for, well you know that already. What we didn’t expect were two (2!) custom Arkanoid controllers. One uses a slidepot to better physically match the game, and the other a more traditional knob, but both support the MSX computer architecture, which we suppose has the best Arkanoid version?

And these were just the choices that our judges could agree on. There are many more projects that tickled exactly one judge’s fancy, which is kinda what you expect with ultra-personal hacks like these. So check them all out, and let us know which additional projects you wish made the list!

And thanks again to Digi-Key for sponsoring the contest.