Hacking

Minitel terminals are plentiful and fun to play with.

A great first project is to build a serial interface and connect your Minitel to a PC. Here are some resources to get you started:

• Guidelines for building a serial cable for Minitel
• Build a Minitel "shield" interface for Arduino or Raspberry Pi
• The PAMAL provides several helpful software tools for building new Minitel-compatible videotex services

In the classroom, Julien and I have been using the Minitel to display a teletext-style "slide show." For more info, see our Arduino code repository:

• https://github.com/driscoll/minitel

Another fun project is to use your Minitel as a dedicated Twitter terminal! There are many ways to go about this but here are two great tutorials:

• Eric's Twitter-Minitel tutorial
• Pila's blog - Un minitel comme terminal linux USB

Once you have a working serial connection to your Minitel, there are thousands of fun projects to try out:

• Jelora's Serveur Minitel

Please contact us on Twitter @MinitelResearch with your own hacking projects!