Collaborate Disseminate
[Oli Wright] is back again with another installation of CRT shenanigans. This time, the target is the humble analog oscilloscope, specifically a Farnell DTV12-14 12 MHz dual-channel unit, which features …read more Continue reading Bust Out That Old Analog Scope For Some Velociraster Fun!
We’re going to start this post with a stern warning: building a laser engraver that can fit in your pocket is probably not a wise idea. Without any safety interlocks …read more Continue reading Interesting Optics Make This Laser Engraver Fit in a Pocket
Playing Asteroids now isn’t quite what it used to be when it came out 40 years ago. At the time, the vector-scan display was part of the charm; making do with an emulator running on a traditional raster display just …read more
Continue reading Laser Galvos and an ESP32 Recreate Old-School Asteroids
Nostalgia aside, there are a few things an analog scope can still do better than a digital, with oscilloscope art being a prime example. The blue-green glow of phosphors in a real CRT just add something special to such builds, …read more
Continue reading Oscilloscope Learns How to Speak Japanese, and VGA
A digital camera has an array of sensors that captures light reflected or transmitted onto it. This build is something closer to a reverse camera – a single sensor that makes images on a matrix of LEDs. And we think it’s pretty neat.
We have to admit to being a …read more
Continue reading LED Matrix And A Phototransistor Make A Reverse Camera
We missed [iliasam’s] laser text projector when it first appeared, perhaps because the original article was in Russian. However, he recently reposted in English and it really caught our eye. You can see a short video of it in operation, below.
The projector uses raster scanning where the beam goes over each spot in a grid pattern. The design uses one laser from a cheap laser pointer and a salvaged mirror module from an old laser printer. The laser pointer diode turned out to be a bit weak, so a DVD laser was eventually put into service. A DVD motor …read more
We’ve seen loads of persistence of vision displays before, but this sky-writing POV display seems as though it may be a first. And we have to agree with its creators that it’s pretty cool.
The idea man on this was [Ivan Miranda], who conceived of a flying POV as a twist on his robotic dot-matrix beach printer. But without any experience in RC flight, he turned to fellow YouTuber [Tom Stanton], whose recent aerial builds include this air-powered plane, for a collaboration. [Ivan]’s original concept was a long strip of Neopixels that would be attached to the underside of a …read more
Continue reading Lighting Up The Night Sky With A Flying POV Display
With so many ways to capture images from paper, do we really need another one? Especially one that takes 15 minutes to capture a 128×128 pixel image? Probably not, but building a single-pixel RGB scanner is pretty instructive, and good clean fun to boot.
We have to admit that when [Kerry Wong] scored an ancient Hewlett-Packard X-Y chart recorder a while back, we wondered if it would lead to anything useful. One may quibble with the claim that the Lorenz attractor plotter he built with it is useful, and this single pixel scanner is equally suspect, but we like the …read more
Continue reading Old Chart Recorder becomes Single-Pixel Scanner