Macintosh Classic Restoration

[hiki]

Just wanted to show off my finished Classic restoration. When I first bought this machine, the case, keyboard, and mouse were really dirty and scuffed. It turned on, but if you shut it down, it wouldn't boot for a couple hours.

I cleaned it up, recapped the logic board, replaced the 3.6v lithium battery, and finally retrobrited the case, keyboard, and mouse. It's also got 4MB of ram now, compared to the 2MB it came with.

The keyboard was a pain to completely disassemble.... :-/

Before and after pics, I'm really happy with the results!

 

[hiki]

My next little project is getting internet working on this thing...

I've got serial communication working with a raspberry pi, but I still need to configure the settings.

 

[Crutch]

There is something very satisfying about seeing a really nice restoration before-and-after.  Looks great, thanks for sharing!

 

[PotatoFi]

Gorgeous! Nice work, all around! What specific retrobrite method did you use?

 

[Budokai]

Clean setup. Interested to know more about daisy chaining the Rapsberry Pi in there for connectivity.

 

[hiki]

Gorgeous! Nice work, all around! What specific retrobrite method did you use?

Thanks! I used 40% hair dye developer & saran wrap... I know it's kinda frowned upon, and has the potential to streak, but mine came out looking great. I babysat it for ~1.5 hours out in the sun, making sure to rotate/massage every 10-15 mins. I think the Texas heat had something to do with how quickly it finished! I sure was surprised at how fast the process went.

Clean setup. Interested to know more about daisy chaining the Rapsberry Pi in there for connectivity.

I used a null modem. Basically, I bought an extra mini din 8 cable (the type you'd use for the mac's printer or serial connection), cut it in half, and stripped the wires. Using this excellent guide, I was able to figure out which pins were what (namely TX and RX, the raspberry pi has pins for this). There is a slight problem, however. The Mac Classic uses the RS-422 standard, which specifies the maximum output voltage at 6V, but the pi can only handle ~3.3V (wouldn't wanna fry the pi!). More detailed explanation here. The ELinux wiki seemed a little complicated, so I made a simple voltage divider circuit for the Mac's TX output to halve the 6 volts to down to 3 (as well as adding a cool transmit LED!). The RX should be fine at the 3.3V that the pi spits out, so no need to increase the voltage there (idk if I could even do that tbh).

Here's a pic of my null modem cable
 

And a pic of my notes (including the voltage divider circuit)

I hope this is helpful. I was really surprised that there's so many resources available online.

 

[PotatoFi]

Thanks! I used 40% hair dye developer & saran wrap... I know it's kinda frowned upon, and has the potential to streak, but mine came out looking great. I babysat it for ~1.5 hours out in the sun, making sure to rotate/massage every 10-15 mins. I think the Texas heat had something to do with how quickly it finished! I sure was surprised at how fast the process went.

Awesome, nice work! I think the saran wrap + cream + sun method is totally doable. A bit more risky, but if you babysit it like you did, and massage the cream every 10-15 minutes... you can achieve great results. And heat definitely speeds things up!

Looking forward to seeing your serial setup!