So…hardware geeks will find this just too cool.
I love it! Shout out to Mike Sung for sending me the link.
So…hardware geeks will find this just too cool.
I love it! Shout out to Mike Sung for sending me the link.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Ponderings, Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Wow, is that actually a crt/vector scope?
Very, very impressive. I guess it uses a regular sound card with a stereo output to generate the X and Y coordinates; blanking doesn’t appear to be used, and you can tell by seeing the very fine lines connecting the 4 dots in the last screen.
One of these days I might code up something like that for my scope clock (click the link on my name). It looks like a lot of work…
That is one of the coolest things on the planet. There’s just something awesome about making something do something it isn’t supposed to do.
That melting effect is pretty pimp.
They should distribute a .FLAC file to generate that.
Hell this could be a new demoscene competition.
Actually that gives me cool idea for a feature they could add to MAME. On cards that have 5.1 output, they could support using the surround channels for the X-Y output to a vector display for Tempest/Battlezone/etc. while using the normal L/R for regular sound.
The Make magazine page had a link to the flac.
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/08/youscope_oscilloscope_dem.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890
Wow, I’m impressed. Getting that to look right must have been very hard!
I did something like this for the laser portion of the TEP light show many years back. Carl brought in some lasers and galvanometers, and the nifty thing about the galvanometers was that they had 8 ohm impedance. Attach mirrors to the galvos, line them up with the laser, connect to a sound card and, boom, X-Y scanner.
This was great for Lissajous curves, hypotrochoids and epitrochoids, but drawing text didn’t work — everything was skewed towards the origin…. can you guess why?
PC sound cards are not designed to put out DC, so there’s a high-pass filter on the audio outputs. Drawing things without an average voltage of zero just can’t be done.
I wonder how this guy did it? Perhaps he’s found a way around that limitation (I was tinkering with pixel ordering but not getting much of anywhere), or perhaps he’s just removed the filter…
Jeded Re: DC-Offset
With 16 bits on your soundcard you have a lot of dynamic range, so you can just donate -let’s say- 1% of your time to steer the “dot” off-screen to wherever you need to be to restore DC at zero. No problem with a scope, but with a laser-scanner, I think you’d have to design some blanking/limiting circuit for that.
Also your Scope will most likely have a high-impedance input (1 MOhm) while your soundcard is designed to go down to something like 20 Hz on regular headphones (around 32 or so Ohms?) …. That means, you can average over quite a long time without drifting a lot.
Without some intermediate filtering, your 8 Ohm Galvos of course had been high-pass filtered at 80 Hz…
That is just TOOOOOOOO Cool!
But what do I know, I sell Oscilloscopes for a living!