Two Vintage Typewriters Become Steampunk Teletype
Daniel Ross built a Victorian-styled eight-bit computer, then combined a pair of old typewriters into a sort of steampunk teletype terminal.
The average user tends to think of a computer as the whole package, including the keyboard and monitor. But the computer is really just that dusty box that sits under the desk and it can operate all on its own. Many early computers didn't even include the hardware for video output and users were expected to use a separate device (a terminal) for interaction. Daniel Ross built a Victorian-styled computer similar to those vintage examples and needed a way to work with it, so he combined a pair of old typewriters into a sort of steampunk teletype terminal.
Ross used two different typewriters for this project. The first was a Remington No.7 from around 1903, which was in very rough shape and had no hope of being restored for its original purpose. The second was a Sharp PA-3000 electronic typewriter from the '80s. By combining the two, Ross was able to create a device that retained the Victorian beauty of the older machine with the electronic functionality of the newer machine. Because the Sharp typewriter is electronic, it is much easier to trigger "virtual" key presses and that was important for this project.
This is a teletype terminal, which means that it needs to work in both directions. It needs to be able to receive and display text from the computer, and it needs to be able to send text to the computer. In a typical use case, one would type commands on the terminal and then use that to see the return messages. In this case, it prints the returns using the Sharp's mechanism and can also display them on a 12-digit, 14-segment VFD (vacuum fluorescent display). Users can enter commands using the typewriter keyboard or with an external PS/2 keyboard.
A massive amount of work went into this project and we can't even begin to cover everything. But on the electronics side, Ross used a handful of Microchip ATmega328 microcontrollers programmed with the Arduino IDE to act as intermediaries between the systems. One of them controls the VFD and another controls LEDs in the Remington keys. Every key has an LED and they can light up to indicate incoming characters. Ross also added a voice synthesis module so it can speak those characters out loud.
All of that was dressed up in vintage appliances that reinforce the steampunk aesthetic. As you would expect, there is a whole bunch of brass.