Star Trekulator (Winter 2025)
My Star Trekulator Reproduction
Manufactured By: MEGO Corporation
Release Date: 1976
In the 70s MEGO was known for making Star Trek toys, including a cassette player that (sorta) looked like a tricorder and communicator styled walkie-talkies. One of these products caught my eye. Released in 1976 the Star Trekulator was a working six function calculator with a Star Trek themed "look".
It doesn't appear to correspond with any actual artifact from the series but to drive the point home it featured a cool still image "screen" featuring Kirk, Spock and Uhura plus some blinken lights for effect.
Even though it was only produced for a limited time and likely in small quantities, I was lucky enough to find a Star Trekulator at a reasonable price on eBay. With this original in hand I set about creating a reproduction. But I didn't want to stop there. I wanted to create a "Next Generation" model, still a calculator, but with a working touch screen and the capability to play Trek themed sound bytes.
In the end I made a Next Generation Trekulator with a nice screen and a bunch of new capabilities. The built-in SD Card reader has a lot of capacity to store sounds and images. The touch screen can be used to implement some cool interfaces. Out of the box the Next Generation Trekulator can:
Of course first and foremost you can just use the calculator functions.
If you touch the images of Spock, Kirk, and Uhura the Trekulator will play a "random" quote from that person. There are collections of quotes stored on the SD Card in the sounds folder with separate folders for spock, kirk, and uhura. You can add your own MP3 files to these folders if you want and they will automatically be included.
The buttons down the left had side do the following: Top - Photon Torpedo, Middle - Slide Show, Bottom - Tricorder Sound. If you want to change the function of a button you will have to modify the sketch. It's not hard.
Images shown in the Slide Show (Middle Button) are stored in the images folder on the SD Card. You can add you own JPG files to have them included in the show.
Build Instructions
Project Logs
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Hackaday