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Quest for the Whistler Button

79 points| josecastillo | 5 years ago |newscrewdriver.com

21 comments

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hughes|5 years ago

As someone who has never seen Sneakers, I would have loved a clip of the button press that spawned this journey. What did it sound like?

UI_at_80x24|5 years ago

Do yourself a favour and go watch that movie. There is a huge Hollywood sized grain of salt needed any time you deal with: Hacking, Computers, Internet, etc.. but this movie is EXCELLENT at showing 'Red Team' activities, social engineering, physical bypasses, and true historical hacking (debugging an IC to see what it does).

There is great comedy, action, and intrigue in this film and should be in the top 3 of any nerd movie list.

isoprophlex|5 years ago

Where I did my phd, we had nmr spectrometers that had to be shimmed using a console with these exact switches. I loved interacting with that console..: It was at the same futuristic and absurdly old fashioned. Futuretro.

Edit: oh sweet lord they're listed on ebay. Imagine gutting this things' innards and turning it into a usb input device...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Bruker-BSMS-Boss-Keyboard-Z012706-1...

fit2rule|5 years ago

.. or bury a rpi-zero in it, and turn the thing into a battle station ..

jdmoreira|5 years ago

I recognized the buttons immediately as they are fairly common in vintage synths of Roland, Korg and Sequential among many others.

And at least in my Mono/Poly the button is clearly not a single component but a combination of a tactile switch with a led and the cap.

mbostleman|5 years ago

At around the same time, 1990 - 1992, a partner and I made a rack mounted utility unit that included a tuner, a metronome, surge protected outlets and rack lights. We used buttons almost identical to these from Digi-Key. Mouser was also a big vendor of ours.

culopatin|5 years ago

This post makes me think that I could have a blog if I could avoid going straight to the point and I could build a story around my digikey investigations

JoeAltmaier|5 years ago

Ha! The buttons in the movie were braille-labelled and had a red led when active. Why the LED? It reminds me of the braille on drive-thru ATMs.

mbrubeck|5 years ago

Devices can have multiple users. A blind passenger in the rear seat can use a drive-through ATM.

codezero|5 years ago

People with "disabilities" often have to buy off the shelf equipment made for the mass population, and then adapt it for their needs since most products aren't designed with them in mind.

dafoex|5 years ago

People who are blind don't necessarily lack vision - that's why the bobbled paving slabs at the edge of crossings and train platforms are bright yellow. [1] Admittedly the LED wouldn't do anything a tactile or audible click wouldn't do here, but a blind user most likely would be able to see that an LED was lit somewhere.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPymLgfXSY

Avshalom|5 years ago

aside from it being embossed tape added after market:

blind covers a lot of ground. the ability to discern a red led against a black background when you're a couple feet away is well within the realm of blind