Thanks Ian Wolstenholme for sending these pictures of a BBC that controls the Bradford City Hall clock bells. Thanks to Steve Watson who took the photos and provided the following info:

The story around the Beeb is an interesting one. Back the in 1980s, our clock engineer built an interface for the user port to control 13 bells located in the City Hall clock tower. Using some very rudimentary programming, he managed to play tunes quite successfully. Following his retirement a couple of years ago, I "inherited" the project on the basis that I was one of the remaining bodies who could remember anything about how it all worked, and I have a background in music and electronics. We have been trying to work with the local university to set up a final year electrical engineering project to come up with a replacement for the whole arrangement, but it seems to be proving difficult. In the meantime, I have reverse engineered all the original BBC basic programmes to extract the musical content and created a library of over 300 MIDI files. For the time being, I have installed a modem on the BBC so I can remote control the rig and feed "commands" down the line from a VB6 programme running on a PC that does the hard work of decoding the MIDI files (sorry - not very BBC pure I know). For information, the user port interface controls a series of 50volt ex GPO relays that in turn switch compressed air solenoids that fire pneumatic pistons. These pistons pull steel cables that run via a mass of pullies upwards to the very top of the tower that finally pull a clapper onto each bell. The BBC actually lives in a locked wooden cupboard at the top of the bell tower with little to protect it from the elements, but amazingly it seem to have developed its own micro climate and the mean time between failures is brilliant. We have a few spares (especially PSU components) to keep the thing going, but they really are tough little buggers.

Red Box security. Thanks to Paul Collins for these photos and info. Front and Back (single folded page) of the Red Box home security package. I don't have an original selling price for this kit but it was probably around the £100 mark. Nice to see a self-contained piece of alarm kit that you could place anywhere - wonder if there's still a market? The Warranty.Jpg is interesting in that the original company name, address and telephone # is covered over but holding up to the light, it reads: Electronic Fulfilment Services Ltd Chesterton Mill, French's Road Cambridge CB4 3NP The tele # can still be made out.

Red Leader is the primary device that requires a Beeb, Spectrum or C64 to be connected. The manual does indicate that several other computers (8-bit vintage) can be used but it fails to mention them.

The Beeb connects via the RS423 connector, the Speccy via the Tape In/Out connectors and the C64 via the DataSette port. I don't have either of the above so maybe one of your readers could help here. The Red Leader box has a 7-pin DIN socket and looking at the back of the main board, all seven lines are used.

There's a ROM onboard this unit that downloads itself to the relative micro and places the user in Red Basic which is a front-end for the entire system. Once programmed, the micro is disconnected and the routines/program in Red Leader (battery-backed-up) runs the system unaided - Fantastic idea even 20 years ago!

Two manuals came with Red Leader:

Red Boxes User Guide - Basically a setup guide and basic Red Basic instructions
Red Boxes Project Manual - More on the level of the Advanced User Guide for the Beeb covering the wealth of Basic instructions, FN's, Commands and ideas.

Red One is a simple 13A relay switching device that's told what to do by Red Leader

Red Two is a simple PIR sensor

Red Five was generally bought with a couple of Red Twos and was a stand-alone alarm system.


A simple project would be to install a Red One and a Red Two say at the entrance to your house and program Red Leader to activate Red One (to turn the main hallway light on) if Red Two detected a human presence. Yeah, boring but interesting.

If one looks at the inside images, you'll notice that every device has a reset button for whatever reason and note also that every device also has its own preset unique network Id. This is printed on the back so that Red Leader can talk individually to each unit. Remember also that all communication is done through the ring-mains - 'Look Mum, no wires', well, none that you can see anyway.