I’ve been a nerd for a very long time; As a teenager in the 1970’s I drove up to the Western Union office in my hometown of Buffalo, New York and asked if they had any old teletypes they’d like to get rid of; The next thing I knew I was driving my VW bus away, full of Teletype Gear.

I became with familiar with them; Basically they were like remote typewriters; The keyboard on one would control the printer on another. The process could be automated with paper tape punches and readers. These machines were the mains-stay of printed communication until they were supplanted by fax machines in the eighties. Somewhere over the course of several moves during college, I parted with my big, heavy teletypes.

Wind the clock forward to Maker Faire NYC 2013. NYC Resistor had a Model 15 as part of their Future Crew exhibit. We struck up a conversation about teletypes. I told them how I regretted having parted with my teletypes. They were gracious enough to offer me one of their spares. That is how I once again I was reunited with a Teletype Model 15; I promised to reactivate it and show it off at hamfests and makerfaires.

How To Drive A Teletype

Brushing the dust off some seriously aged neurons, I started sketching what I recalled of the Teletypes wiring.. By modern-day gadget standards, it is astoundingly simple:

A synchronous AC motor drives all the mechanics. Then there is a data relay which must be driven on and off at precisely 45 times per second. This relay closes at around 150ma of current. A readily-available 24VDC Wall-wart with a series resistor is capable of supplying this. The orginal standard called for a higher voltage and a lower current, so this is a bit of a cheat from the original standard, but it works.

One Easy Drive Method: A Relay Board

I came upon the following readily-available board which pretty much fit the bill with only slight modification

Kootek® 2-channel 5V Relay Module

An opto-isolated relay board allows you to control a relatively large (line voltage) circuit safely. Here is the overall schematic including the Kootek relay board, slightly modified: There are two independent channels. VCC, typically +5V, and GND are connected from the control source (raspi). The IN lines can then be tied to any GPIO line from the source. I used 7 and 8. When the line is set to logic 0, the relay will close and the K* lines will be connected together. So we can turn the motor on and off with one channel and run the data relay with the other channel. Wonderful.

But wait. There is one minor issue with driving the data relay. We need to drive it fairly fast (45 times per second), which is faster than the Kootek’s relay will go (I know. I tried). So we are going to have to do a small mod. It just entails hijacking the output of the optoisolator. We just need to solder one wire to the correct trace. We then use this to drive the gate pin of our own N-Channel MOSFET and a series resistor, mounted in the wiring harness, which will do the job of turning the Teletype’s data relay on and off (see schematic). We connect +5V and ground of the Raspi to the relay board. We also tie a GPIO (GPIO7) to IN1 of the relay board and GPIO8 to IN2 The K1a and K1b contacts are put in series with the hot side of the 110VAC line voltage and the TTY Motor. +24VDC from the wall wart is tied to one side of the data relay The special tap off of the relay board labelled modification, is then tied to the gate input of our external n-channel mosfet. A 200 ohm, 1 watt resistor is tied from the drain of the mosfet to the other side of the teletype data relay. The source of the mosfet is tied to ground. All other ground connects including the wall wart’s minus side are are tied together to ground.

Here is a picture of the RasPi and the relay board: Here is the bottom side showing location of ‘modification’ on the schematic. The MOSFET and series resistor for the data relay are on the wiring to the teletype inside some heat shrink.

Partial Bill of Materials

KOOTEK 2-CHANNEL RELAY MODULE AMAZON IRFZ24N N-CHANNEL MOSFET JAMECO 24VDC 24VDC WALL WART JAMECO RASPI RASPI, SD CARD, PI CASE, ADAFRUIT MISC F<>F RAINBOW JUMPER WIRING AMAZON MISC 200 OHM 1 WATT RESISTOR JAMECO

On With The Code

I used the Raspbian Wheezy distro, but webiopi should run on other Raspi Linux distros as well. See http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ Follow the usual procedures to create an SD card image for the pi and boot it. I run my raspi’s headless so I only need to supply it with power and ethernet. If you’ve never done this for you might find this article useful: http://www.sudobob.com/finding-your-raspi-using-nmap/ For any pi, after installing wheezy, you should do the updates.. This takes a while

sudo apt-get install rpi-update; sudo rpi-update; sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade; # go get a coffee

I also recommend running sudo raspi-config; and doing these things:

turn off desktop (just command prompt),

advanced->memory split, set GPU to 16 (lowest),

change it’s name to something besides raspi

Installing WebIOPi

https://code.google.com/p/webiopi/ Download their .tgz into /tmp/ on the pi, with curl or wget and follow their installation tutorial, basically:

cd /tmp/ tar zxvf WebioPI.tgz cd WebIoPi sudo ./setup.sh

At this point you should be able to start the stock webiopi with

sudo /etc/init.d/webiopi start

.. and access it from a browser on your PC with http://<raspi-ip-addr>:8000 login webiopi password raspberry. Once you have verified it works, stop it with

sudo /etc/init.d/webiopi stop

Install teletype-pi from github

cd git clone https://github.com/cogwheelcircuitworks/teletype-pi.git

Run teletype-pi

cd teletype-pi python app.py

At this point you can browse to http://<raspi-ip-addr>/ and you will see the basic interface

Make teletype-pi start on boot

Add this to the end of /etc/rc.local

(cd /home/pi/webiopi/teletype; python app.py)

Additional Links

More about the Model 15 http://www.baudot.net/teletype/M15.htm

Another good teletype restoration web site http://45baud.net/

About baudot code http://rabbit.eng.miami.edu/info/baudot.html

National Data Communications Museum http://www.nadcomm.com/

Teletype Mailing List http://www.rtty.com/greenkeys.htm