A Cheap, Thin Film Gives Portable Night Vision to Cell Phones and Eyeglasses

I don't know either KH, but I am wondering why the article only explicitly mentions this new method being applied to wholly non-military equipment. It doesn't seem to make much sense.

The article was trying to explain that the tech could hopefully now be applied to non-military applications but is not mutually exclusive. It was not written to talk about military application but inadvertently alludes to it.

The article should really work both angles.

--GTO--

That voltage was "ramped up". A tazer using a 9 volt battery can produce 50,000 volts.

@KH

I agree with you we used a 3v battery and as I recall the NVG's were pretty light and on my way out I seen NVG's that were monocles and maybe weighed a pound...

KH

A transformer can convert a low voltage power source to a high voltage power source.

Some devices require high voltages to work. For instance, the Indiglo feature on some digital watches requires something in the order of 100-200 volts. How do you achieve that with a small power source such as a watch battery? Easy, a 1000:1 transformer.

Excerpt from HowStuffWorks:

In an Indiglo watch, a very thin panel uses high voltage to energize phosphor atoms that produce light. The panel itself is extremely simple. As described in the Timex patent, you take a thin glass or plastic layer, coat it with a clear conductor, coat that with a very thin layer of phosphor, coat the phosphor with a thin plastic and then add another electrode. Essentially, what you have is two conductors (a capacitor) with phosphor in between. When you apply 100 to 200 volts AC (alternating current) to the conductors, the phosphor energizes and begins emitting photons.

Creating the high voltage can be a problem in a wristwatch. The watch has only a small 1.5-volt battery. To produce the 100 to 200 volts, the 1:100 transformer is used. By charging the primary coil of the transformer with a transistor that is switching on and off, the secondary coil rises to 150 volts or so.

Sorry

Meant 100:1 transformer

So can you turn it off in the daytime? Or is your car windshield just stuck with something until the sun goes down?

At least now helicopter pilots won't have to feel like they're looking through toilet paper tubes to see where they're flying.

I believe the author has mixed up his "see in the dark" technologies. While yes, you can use something like a boost or flyback converter to get hundreds of volts out of regular batteries (this is how your camera flash works), such is not needed with infra-red goggles.

What the author is describing as needing "thousands of volts" is light *amplification* goggles. Light amp goggles operate by amplifying ambient light (i.e. moonlight or starlight) 50,000x or so so that we can see it better. These guys need vacuum tubes and high voltage supplies.

What this new technology aims to replace is *infrared goggles*. Infrared goggles take light that is outside of the visible spectrum and makes it visible. This technology is fairly cheap. Those "eyeclops" goggles you see at the toy store are infrared goggles. The disadvantage of IR (and the reason light-amp is still used) is that if you have to bring your own (infrared) light source. Granted, you can't see the light leaving an IR flashlight with the naked eye, but if your opponent has his own goggles, you might as well be using a regular flashlight.

Your cellphone can actually already act as an infrared camera. If you aim a remote control at your cellphone camera and push buttons, you will probably be able to see the IR LEDs in the front of the remote lighting up (some cameras have filters that block IR light. The cheaper the camera (phone), the more likely this is to work).

So, yes, this technology is great, but it's only replacing the easier of the two methods.

The NVG come in a hierarchy called first, second, third generation etc.
The latest ones are fourth or fifth and have true color, since the scene is illuminated by starlight which is full spectrum, with cascade amplification. These are the $10,000 ones. The cheap ones that work on infra-red, can not have true color, bt they can assign a color to different IR frequencies and present a scene in false color, which you can learn to associate to the real world,
Google "night vision goggles" and "starlight scope", this will give you lots to read.

If we really were able to have cheap night vision - especially true night vision and not just IR - we could get rid of most types of night lighting for outdoors. This would not only eliminate the need for streetlights, but also cut down on nighttime light pollution. Imagine a world in which you could clearly see the stars from a city! And, think of how much money we could save not having to power all those street lights at night.

I apologize for not including any technical info of value in my post.

@rpenri:

Transformers requires AC, and are relatively heavy. They would not be used in such applications. For small voltage increases, they would use a dc to dc voltage multiplier (using op-amps), or for large voltage increases, they would create an alternating current and use a cascade voltage multiplier, no transformer required.

great post.. thanks lol
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