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Title: Protovac Retro Terminal Date: 2025-06-14 Category: Creations Summary: A retro dumb terminal interface at my local makerspace. Image: protovac1.jpg Tags: feed
Protovac is a retro dumb terminal interface that lives at my local makerspace, Protospace. Its main use is printing storage labels and name tags for members and guests when they visit.
An 85-year-old member donated the 1983 Morrow MDT-60 video display terminal that he bought new from London Drugs and kept in his closet. Originally this terminal is supposed to connect to a mainframe computer (perhaps in a different room) and display text over a serial connection.
In this case it connects to a Raspberry Pi computer mounted to the back over 9600 baud serial UART. The Pi has been configured to output a terminal over its UART pins and auto login the protovac user with agetty. The protovac user's shell has been replaced with the Python script that runs the curses-based TUI.
You can find the source code and set up instructions here: https://github.com/Protospace/protovac
In addition to printing labels for members, Protovac:
- can control the train in the Protospace welcome room
- displays stats about Protospace (next meeting, next class, member counts, etc)
- can send a message to our marquee LED sign
- has a chat interface to message ChatGPT
- has an interface to access Wolfram Alpha
- can play the games NetHack, Moria, 2048, Zork, and Hitchhiker's