An Awesome Oscilloscope Serial Terminal. But Why?

Finally I can use my Giant Wide Screen TV as an oscilloscope while still watching the Simpsons on my circular 5" diameter monochrome screen. I just don't care if Marge Simpson's hair is green for a while, because I'm a geek and I have an imagination.

Now I will finally be able to "wave" at my neighbors across the street yuk yuk yuk oh god I slay me.

Get it? "WAVE"??? As in wave?

This creation has more cultural merit than the current performance activities of the jocks in Vancouver. The individual that built this has the ability to create, modify, hack, and make something that is beyond our pop culture mentality.
This author reflects the current state of our pop culture society and giggles about a display of real skills that matter, yet will get enraged about the performance a sports team.
Perhaps this author needs to write for a pop culture magazine rather than a Popular Science magazine.

Guy is pretty clever, but I think that he did it for a lark. The guts are all built on breadboards, and he's probably a whiz at microprocessor programming.

Good job -- even if it's not utilitarian ( and it certainly is not !)

Wonder if he is at all related to David Sarnoff.

Cathode ray tube... DO AS I COMMAND!

Neat. I assume it's still scanning the screen left to right, rather than top to bottom like a TV. I wonder what the frames per second are. The wife would never know you're watching porn!

Well said "nonsquid"

Funny how many are quick to undermine a very intelligent, skilled individual like this guy. People don't stop and think, it's thanks to people like this "Matthew Sarnoff" guy that today we walk around with 5000 music tracks in our pocket, listen to crystal clear sound at home and watch said TV sports and reality shows in High Definition at home.

I bet this guy needed a serial terminal for some low-level development on a bigger project and just didn't want to shell out the extra bucks for a terminal (if anyone makes them anymore).

Great improvisation!

The most fun I had with a scope was to use it in a true 3D display with the use of a variable focus mirror and three signal generators. The mirror is relatively easy to construct with a 12" woofer speaker and some aluminized mylar stretched over the face of the speaker. A signal to the x-channel of the scope, a signal to the y-channel, and a signal driving the speaker will create a 3D image in space when you look into the mirror at the scope's display.
A variation is to drive only the speaker and to illuminate the room or your face with a strobe light that is fed the same signal as is the speaker, but under phase-control. What you see is the room and yourself zooming in and out as you vary the phase relationship of the strobe to the scope signal. And many other variations and effects!

@nonsquid I'm not clear on how the olympics tie into what's being discussed here. Are you sure we're reading the same article?

The points expressed above are that (a) his project was impressive technically but that (b) What's far more important about it is that, in the era of publishing projects and hacks on the internet to a fairly wide audience of like minded people, we are now all involved in a collective learning process greater and more powerful than working alone or in small groups. And that as such, projects like this which were probably done as something or a lark or for a personal challenge, take on real value as educational materials both for the builder and for the readers.

It strikes a note with me as I think of all the projects I've built over the years which were clearly impractical, but from which I grew as an engineer.

What exactly about this post seems to cut down the builder?

@kurmugn Awesome. You wouldn't happen to have any video of your feat that we can show off, would you?

vinmarshall: there aren't any videos of this effect, but it is easy to re-create yourself. For the greatest depth of the 3D object, the speaker signal should be a low, pure-tone frequency, such as 30-60 hz. This results in a larger speaker cone deflection, which causes a greater difference in the focal point of the concave/convex surface profile of the aluminized mylar (which, by the way is a good first-surface mirror).
The signals to the X & Y channels can be any frequencies, and it is fun to vary not only the frequency but also the waveforms (sine, square, sawtooth, etc).
When you look at the reflection of the scope display in the mirror, there is a depth to the reflection that seems to be about 12-inches long; you can move your head around to see different sides of the 3D object. If you place your finger "into" the object, and illuminate your hand with the phase-controlled strobe light, your finger moves along the axis of the object depending upon the phase displacement of the strobe to the speaker signal.
A very large number of effects ranging from this simple one to ones involving detection of the focal length of the human eye (where is your eye focusing?).

Nice. When I was in the Air Force in the early 80's I used 2 sweep generators with timing synchronized to create a raster scan, then sync'd the raster scan with the video output of a shop video cam, using the signal level to modulate the beam intensity, with the result being that the camera video was displayed on the O'scope screen. My shop chief was amazed. Said that he has seen many people attempt it over the years, but I was the first he ever saw to succeed at it.

@vinmarshall - I am sorry if you took personal offense to the point of my post. As of late, all I hear about is how the athletes are doing in Vancouver. When I saw an article about something of technical merit, it seemed that the technical challenge was viewed as a capricious and arbitrary skill that had no societal merit.

The title of the article, the idea that such activities are “clearly impractical” and are within the realms of geekism strikes a note with me to think that as a society (as reflected by you, the author), we place more emphasis, merit, money, education, wealth, and importance on an athlete’s entertainment ability to manipulate a ball, polish ice for a weight, swim and run.

As a society we have built monuments, created events, offered money and stadiums for athletes, and as a magazine you (authors like you) put “The Science of the Olympics” on the front cover of Popular Science.

Our universities are more interested in producing star athletes than scholars or engineers, and as a society, we are suffering. As a society, we can barely produce a new fighter aircraft, we can’t replace the space shuttle, and we are regressing in all fronts of real engineering, like new nuclear reactor designs, used nuclear fuel reprocessing, space travel, robotics, energy production, and paradigm innovation. Yet nobody seems to care because we giggle about real skills that matter.

We are more interested in what athletes and movie stars are doing and we want to tear down what “geeks” have done like Bill Gates, Don Lancaster, Steve Wozniak, Charles Momsen , Wernher von Braun, J. Oppenheimer and Hyman Rickover.

This societal inability to see “real skills” becomes dangerous when we treat Iran’s recent satellite launch as a joke because it was only “a worm, mouse and a turtle” that went into orbit, but we fail to see that it will be an inter-continental atom bomb landing anywhere in the world.

You are right, I have gotten off track here. This magazine is for those that “can do” with real skills and not about pop culture sports stars.

@nonsquid No personal offense taken. I just get the impression that you're reading more into the article than is there, which is why I clarified my key points.

@kurmugn Yeah - it's a clever hack - pretty simple to implement and it sounds like a great effect. I like it. I've no idea when I might get a chance to do it, but if one of our readers does - be sure to shoot some video and email me - I'll post it here or on Tango Echo. Do you work in visual effects, or is this just horsing around for you?

@malemajority I like that this post is bringing the hackers out of the woodwork. You should touch base with Sarnoff. You guys could adapt this to lasers and have a terrifying, terrifying projection system ala Graffiti Research Lab.