Leading up to our 24-hour fundraiser in support of the Mother Teresa High School robotics team and the MakerBus, we are previewing some of the projects you’ll see during the Make-a-thon. Today we’re previewing James and Fred’s amazing tweeting teletype machine.

James and Fred are tinkers who love to hack old technology to do new things. After finding a WWII-era teletype machine, an electromechanical typewriter that can be used to send and receive typed messages from point to point, they decided to see if they could retrofit this amazing machine to type tweets. Using a Raspberry Pi micro-computer and a lot of patience, James and Fred having been working extremely hard for the past two months trying to breath life back into the machine.

Not only is the original machine itself an engineering marvel, their work highlights the ingenuity of the modern maker movement – hacking machines to do things that their original creators could never have dreamed of.

If you’d like to cheer James and Fred on in their quest to get the teletype machine up and tweeting, participate in the Make-a-thon. The Make-a-thon will run from 9 am November 30th to 9 am December 1st at 355 Clarence St. We’ll be streaming the event on Youtube, but if you’d like to join us to work on a creative project of your own, send us an email.

Also think about donating to the Make-a-thon. Proceeds go towards sending a high school robotics team to the FIRST Robotics Regional Competition and to supporting the 2015 programming on the MakerBus.

-MakerBus

Twitter: @DHMakerBus

Facebook: /dhmakerbus