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Illusionary LED clock
Graah writes: "A pretty interesting clock which uses a spinning set of diodes to create an illusionary LCD clock. This page includes everything you need to build your own, except the hardware of course. =)" Note that one item on the list of things you'll need is "[a] programmer that will program a PIC16C84 or 16F84 microprocessor." Often you can find these inside broken VCRs.
Do you remember the toy from circa 1982 which was a short hand-held bat with a linear bank of LEDs? You programmed a message into the 'bat', and as you waved it around it would display the message. It worked just like this clock. This toy was a contemporary of the hand-held Coleco football and "Merlin".
PICs are microcontrollers and have nothing to do with VCRs. The only thing you'll get from the VCR is the motor. Read the page and you'll learn that.
Anyone lucky enough to have seen the HipKnowTron at this year's Burning Man knows that it beats out all those other spiny displays.
http://www.skellington.com/bm00/bmh ypn o.html
Sad to say .. this is not new.
I've seen productions ones for sale in South African electronics shops or months already.
This it's pretty nifty that you can build your own
bain
Sanity is a majority vote.
Quick! Somebody patent the "rotating illusionary clock"!- --------------
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I saw this at least a year ago. This is quickie material at most.
-kidlinux.
"What I describe has been done and is VERY OLD (> 20 years). "
Indeed - I still have somewhere a mid-80's Omni with a little piece on this, so it must be a fair bit older than that. Is Omni still going? Whoever imported it into the UK seems to have given up on it, at least. It was like Playboy but with UFOs instead of naked chicks.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
A PIC is genearally a one-shot deal anyway.. you can't 're-program' it.
No. A PIC is usually a reprogrammable device. However, they may use the one-time-programmable version in a VCR due to the high volumes....
Roger..
Yup. I remember the wand (a kid's toy) you could type your own message into and wave it around.
This summer I saw a frisbee with buttons on it so you could program your own message, and it would spell it out as the frisbee spun.
There has been a pendulum version of this clock (the LED's mounted on a pendulum) for sale in novelty stores for at least 4 or 5 years now.
I also remember seeing a clock like this (complete with circuits) in a Popular Electronics back in the mid-70's.
I have personally built pocket gizmos to display signs on moving vertical LED bars, as long as 10 years ago.
Nonetheless, they are a lot of fun to build. This is about the simplest circuit you're ever going to find. If you use a PIC, it hardly even counts as circuitry.
With some way of detecting people on the spinning round bit (obviously not a motion sensor!), and a little extra software, you could have a clock that always pointed the time in the direction that you were. Only good for one person though.
Actually, I remember seeing a very similar novelty device in some gift store. It was a want that you waved to get the time. It activated off of the motion of the wand, and would blink out the time in a short burst.
It's possible, but I seem to remember it being quite expensive for its value. I mean, how do you set that kind of thing?
--
Mike Hollinger
Michael C. Hollinger
dammit! want --> wand.
--
Mike Hollinger
Michael C. Hollinger
This looks like it could be alot of fun to build. Of course, the first thing I will have to do is build the gizmo to program it.
Lots to learn=Lots of fun=Lots of free time taken up:(
If you were tuned into LSD and knew some party kids you would have already seen this. Now it's time for my drunk ass to fall asleep.
Check out http://www.hokeyspokes.com - 3 blades mount between spokes on a standard bicycle wheel and generates several different patterns in different colors.
I built one of these in my Real-Time Systems class. Everyone else in the class used Ada on 386 machines, but the prof said it was OK if I used Borland Pascal and assembler. It was a piece of cake!
the [] are to signify a word or words added to a quotation that were not part of the original quote.
Richard Nixon, in his famous soundbite, "I am not a crook."
"[Richard Nixon was] not a crook," according to his famous soundbite.
"It compiles, SHIP IT!" -Overheard at Microsoft's development lab
You can get the same effect by looking at a common LED clock from across the room while using an electric toothbrush. I have a Braun electric with the little round head, and I can stand 15-20 feet away from the clock, move the toothbrush to the right part of my mouth and a very stong illusion appears of the LED elements sliding back and forth in relation to each other (I guess the toothbrush is vibrating my head at 60Hz!). Very cool!
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I camped near these guys at Burning Man... It marked my way home from the other side of the city! Quite cool technology... a lot of thought went into it and it shows.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Ah, now that explains why so many of these things looked overbuilt when I looked at them. I thought they looked pretty darned sturdy for a whimsical clock. Now I know... Hilarious post.
What's your damage, Heather?
I was thinking exactly the same thing. I made a version of the Nipkow disk (wooden thing with holes in acting like the lenses in Logi Bird's) when I was at school. It worked if you had a good sense of imagination. It also got me beaten up for being a geek - funny how times change isn't it... Anyway, if you start to think seriously about building one of these things, keep us posted...
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
Bob just posted this to the piclist, a mailing list for PIC microcontrollers:
---------
Subject: [OT]: Alright, who told them?
Aargh, my web site has been slashdotted, I certainly hope it wasn't someone
here who told them, or I'll return the (questionable) favor.
---------
Hehe, =)
The coolest thing about the ROPOD is that it's this huge, whirling, rickety contraption that makes bystanders fear for their lives...
Great, it's the Neon Deion of Battle Bots.
--
+&x
Depends on what you considered a mass of ugly colors. Basically, it is an array of leds turning off/on really quickly. But its array'd like a font, where the x-axis is time.
So, lets say you got
red
blue
red
red
yellow
blue
green
You'd have a red line, a blue line, a thick red... So, if you really wanted to, you could make something like the apple logo.
To do a tiedye, you'd have to do something slightly more interesting electronically. A couple of ideas:
1. array of each color, in an assortment:
red,blue,green
red,blue,green
...
And then do the color changing in software (tricky to get it sync'd)
2. like an electric typewriter, you'd have a ring of lights, and rotate to the appropriate color. Tricky mechanically, high in geek skill value
3. You could at least use tricolor leds
4. array and then a focal lens, so you could turn any particular one on and the "spot" would be that color.
5. blended colors could look weird if you oscillated the on-off phase between the two.
On and on
This was the company that made the displays for the virtual boy. (1994-5?) I saw a circular from them which described color versions of these displays as well. Since the VB's had two of these in them and they were selling for $9 or so at the ned of their clearence, I am surprised that there haven't been more people hacking these.
+++ ATH0 +++
yeah, your right, it was redscale... my memory's not very good, but I knew it wasn't colour. I never played one long enough to get a headache, cause I wasn't willing to get crunched up to look at it. The games thing may have been a chicken/egg thing, since no developer's going to make games (other than initial release ones) if no one buys the system...
Intolerant people should be shot.
No one liked it cause it was low-res greyscale, and the damned thing wasn't portable! You had to stick your face to it and sit still. With the short little stand, you had to crouch way down and give yourself a neckache from hell to see it.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Get the Narita express, and they use this trick to display billboards in the tunnel closer to the airport..
they installed vertical strips of LEDs, of several colors, timed to flash such that at the speed of the train, the illusion is of a 5 foot long, 3 foot deep ANIMATED billboard. The amazing thing is that each trip past the window of one of these strips plays the next frame of the bilboard. The distance between the strips means the frame rate is probably 5-10 per second..
The whole show lasts maybe a minute.
Wow, that's just awesome !
Please tell us more about this amazing device ..
RFC1925
I have two broken VCR's in my basement, and neither of them has a programmer inside.
Cool!
So, uh, when do the linux drivers come out for this thing so I can get a command prompt displayed on one of these. :D
Ahhh, timothy. Another quality news posting. I usually enjoy the slashback stories you report on, but to create an entire story for a clock that spins fast with LED's, well, that's impressive. I hope Taco and Hemos are supportive on your concept of "news for nerds, stuff that matters."
In northern europe we have used the PIC16C84 and 16F84 for some time on pirate satellite tv subscription cards. There's plenty of schematics for programmers [hw] out there. If anyone is in need of an actual human to code it I have experience that isn't suitable for my CV ;)
Oh man.... while I was a student we used to manufacture cards and programmers and sell them as kits to earn some doe... those were the days.
"There is no substitute for thinking" - Bjarne Stroustrup
> It was called "The Private Eye", by Reflective Technologies .
:)
Wow, time flies. I remember seeing the ad in PC Mag. (Has it been THAT long already?)
It would be pretty cool to have a full 320x200 resolution off to the side of your glasses.
Is anyone making anything similiar now-a-days?
I've got something similar in my office - a base about 8" wide with a flat paddle sticking up, LEDs near the tip. Pull it to one side and it flips back and forth, "writing" the time in the air. Not very practical as a clock, as the numbers look best when viewed from more than an arm's length away, but never fails to impress visitors.
I decided that behaving ethically was the most nihilistic thing I could do. - Paul Pavel
Anyone try replacing the LED's with Laser diodes to increase the brightness??? H.
Not the first one? I saw this webpage about 4 years ago. And then I couldn't find it again. And now I've found it, since it was posted on slashdot, but now it's not cool anymore, because it was posted on slashdot. Sigh.
So, some questions for any patent lawyers in the crowd:
Is it illegal that we are discussing this clock?
Is it illegal to build this clock, even if not for sale?
Is it illegal for Slashdot to have posted this article pointing to the plan to build this clock?
Is it illegal for the site that is posting the plans to be posting them?
Some sig group in ACM at my school did a similar thing to this about 4 years ago when i was touring the campus to see if i wanted to go here. It was very cool--they chose to display an apple that gets a bite taken out of it. I was stunned by how 3d it looked. They system was a bit more complex and worked differently than this one, but the general principal was the same.
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
For those of you who actually have the spare time to consider building this, a cheap easy-to-build programmer that can program the 16C84 chip can be found at Covington Innovations NOPPP
I origionally saw this programmer in "Electronics Now" magazine (Now "Poptronics") a couple years ago.
Enough already! Some of us (me at least) have never seen it before and appreciate the pointer.
Mind you, I get my electric motors from CD-ROM drives. The worm drive shaft from the tray shuttle motor made the ideal axle for a paddle wheel on a balsa wood boat.
-c.
--
Casey
More scratches on the cave wall, thanks be to anonymity.
Slashdot is the well known "News for Nerds website."
You can find it by typing "http://www.slashdot.org" into the top part of your web browser thingie.
They often print articles that would interest nerds but not normal people. It has been theorized that this is why they are called, "News for Nerds."
http://www.lonezone.com/2000/catalog/6915.htm l
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Go sperical with this. R and Phi are determined by the position on the disk, Theta by timing. If you've done polar, sperical should not be too hard. You also seem to have figured out how to get data through the spin.
The shiny surface would add some interesting artifacts, but paining it black would solve that problem. Two disks with wires between might look nicer.
More points, more noise and wind, what more could you ask for?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
BAM! Did not see what I ran into. Then saw stars.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Cool! Bob Blick, my old Electronics teacher from high school, made Slashdot! When he was teaching, he was pretty much everyone's favorite teacher. Congratulations Bob.
Mendocino High School is an example of how all schools should be. Nothing like JonKatz's articles at all -- for schools like that, you will have to continue up the coast to Fort Bragg... yuck...
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
For the lazier geeks out there- Eyefo sell a neat frisbee that will display any message you like.
I've got one. It's bright enough for broad daylight in the middle east (unlike some of the "propeller" clocks in the pictures) and seems to be indestructable.
I got mine at a Maplin store, geek heaven in its own right.
For a laugh, check out Andrew Jardines' stat page: htt p:/ /nl.viewstat.nedstatbasic.net/cgi-bin/viewstat?nam e=count_andrews_page (esp page views per day)
I have replaced all the LEDs on my boxen with blue LEDs. ...to match the blue colour of the box. I just bought them at ELFA (Local store in Oslo) and they are very common and does not cost any more than "ordinary" LEDs.
it says news for nerds not new news for nerds :-)
...
.oO0Oo.
hey there's this great thing called a wheel
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
or just plain lazy, a design based on a similar concept can be found here. For some really wild designs (like the "binary" clock) check out this. And to add some non-commercial links, here is a clock based on Blick's design for DIYers.
MotorMachineMercenary"I'm just not there"
-- Patrick Bateman
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
Hey.. that's a pretty neat idea.
I'll call my patent attorney tomorrow and see if I can make their idea my intellectual property.
Give me 2 days and all you folks will owe me lots of money. In two weeks, I'll own slashdot. Ahh... the sky's the limit.
Megalomania gives me such a nice warm fuzzy feeling.
you've gotta love it when an AC that knows less about hacking than you do posts an inflamatory reply to a joke.
and BTW - WTF is a scientist? could you be slightly more encompasing in your classification of a group of individuals. I suppose we are to infer by your statement that all bio-chem majors know FORTRAN as well.
All poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles you fuckwit.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
WARNING! This is a hardware project. Do NOT attempt it if you don't know at least a little electronics. This isn't trolling, it's straightforward common sense. Would you advise someone to go kernel-hacking if they didn't even know what a computer was? If you can't navigate a soldering iron and don't know what a resistor is, you really need more electronics skills, so practice on something simpler (and cheaper!) first.
A Berg connector - I don't know, but there's all sorts of connectors named after their manufacturers/designers/specifiers.
A threaded spacer - a metal or plastic post, with a threaded hole at each end so you can put a screw in to bolt it onto something. The idea is you use these to stand a PCB off from the case, or similar uses.
How to program it? Well, you learn the language these chips use, and write your program in it. Then you download the program to the chip's EPROM memory to program it, and once the program's in the EPROM, it stays there. There's programmers available (or you can build one) which pull certain pins up to certain voltages to activate programming mode.
EPROM can only be erased by UV light. EEPROM and Flash can be erased by special commands on the programming port. So they're semi-permanent memory. This is known as "firmware", ie. it stays around, but you can erase it and reprogram it if you want.
Grab.
It's called the Skyliner. Website: http://www.theskyliner.com
-------
Username taken, please choose another one.
Note that one item on the list of things you'll need is "[a] programmer that will program a PIC16C84 or 16F84 microprocessor." Often you can find these inside broken VCRs.
:)
Uhh, don't you mean the motor that spins it? I highly doubt you'd find a PIC 16x84 in a VCR.
You _might_ find the parts needed for the programmer in the VCR, too. I built mine a while ago using 6 components
300 submissions now ... then there's junk ... let's take away another 200 .... (60%) ... or if we're going through the total ... (40%)
so yeah ... we're at ummm 100 ... once we're to this point ... is where my original post comes in to play ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
This post was made to poke fun, be flaimbait, be funny, be insightful, but mainly just to make people a little more aware ... and maybe even slashdot as a whole.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
You mean like this?
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Christ, the article makes it sound like it's difficult to come by a PIC programmer or something. It's not. I built Michael Covington's No-Parts PIC Programmer (NOPPP) from Rat Shack parts in less than an evening (which, as you may know, is some sort of standard unit of time for electronics kit building). It has worked flawlessly for me ever since. It only programs the 16C84/16F84, but if all you want to do is get into PIC programming or build this funky clock, that's all you need!
Offtopic: Is it just me, or is there an extreme concentration of MIT people on /. ? Oh well, back to 6.170.
Karl
I'm a slacker? You're the one who waited until now to just sit arround.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
C'mon folks, you got $13M for this heap 'o Perl Scripts you call Slashdot. Take the time and care to fix things right, or leave them alone.
--- Speaking only for myself,
Suck my dick, fartcatcher.
--- Speaking only for myself,
And what you'll find in the VCR is the MOTOR, not the PIC!
C'mon, slashdot! Your standards are slipping.
--- Speaking only for myself,
It's much easier to have a laser scanning out multiple 2D images onto a moving plane for the 3D.
[pink beam of light]
I thought that they meant that the clock gave the illusion that it was LCD by using LED's...at least...that is how i read it...of course...I might be delusional.
The anti-salmon
I find the comments better around -1. At least the people here are being stupid on purpose, as opposed to thinking they know what they're talking about when they actually don't.
It should be possible to make this thing being a fan as well as a clock. Or the other way around; a windmill-clock! There's the idea, who wants to try and build one?
---
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
Actually I read the site in more detail and I see the date on the plans is Jan 25, 1997. I am even more impressed now! :)
Enigma
Enigma
Enigma
That is pretty neat. Although it doesn't look hard to replicate, it is a nice feat to build the first one :)
.sigless
BTW, better get the obligitory posts in:
Does it run Linux?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Enigma
Enigma
Enigma
Actually if you read the page.. which I stumbled across almost a year ago.. it says you need a small motor which you can often find in a broken vcr or floppy drive..
Aren't tape players normally setup to go in forward and reverse? Wouldn't you just have to wire it like the appropriate directional button was pushed? :recorder motor but I had to do some major :(or minor depending on how skilled you are :with these things) mods to the motor :including getting it to spin in the :right direction.
I'd love to have a clock like this on my desk at work but I'm not very good at building electronics. Anyone know where I could buy something like this?
And that's probably where I'm remembering the LED image stuff.
So you mean all this time I've been programming a programmer? Is that the reason we could never get our VCRs to record the right shows? Some little bastard(ette) is sitting in there doing it on purpose for their own amusement?
From now on I am just going to threaten to take away the jolt bottle from my VCR.
Why was I not surprised to discover this...
This one took me a little longer to find than the contest patent.....
U SP# 5,302,965 covers...
A display comprises a static unit (8) on which is mounted a rotating unit (7) driven by a motor (12). The rotating unit carries light emitting diodes (6) arranged as vertical columns which sweep around a cylindrical surface. The light emitting diodes (6) are controlled by a control circuit (6) in accordance with data stored in a memory (61) so as to provide a cylindrical display. The control circuit (60) and memory (61) are located in the rotating unit 97) and the memory (612) has a capacity for storing several different images for display.
I'm thinking maybe I should change my
-jon
A thousand pardons for not copying all that information to save you the effort of clicking on the link that goes straight to the patent.........
-jon
One of the big challenges in making rotational devices is: how to supply power to the rotating portion without tangling up the wires after one rotation.
I've always tried to build a system of brushes on the back of disks, but it looks like this project solves it via the motor, yes? Does the motor actually have wires that come out of the spinning part (armature)?
What other ways have people found to solve this problem w/o a special motor? IMHO it sounds like the kind of problem that engineers resolved 50 years ago...
Thx,
S
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
No, it isn't new. But when was the last time you bought something this cool that came with schematics /parts lists /source code /etc? That is why it's here, not to break some new ground on visual perception technoligies. Slashdot may be "News for nerds" but it's also "Stuff that matters". Simple to build, inexpensive geek toys are pretty cool, so what's the big problem with it being here on Slashdot?
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Hell, all I had to do was move my head up and down really fast and it looked like the numbers stayed put will the clock moved, but it had to be dark in the room, and it only worked with red LEDs. I bet it has something to do with the fact that the cycle-time of your red-sensitive cones (rods? who can remember!) in your retina is the longest, meaning that red persists longer than any other color. Normally you don't notice it because of all the other stimulus, but in a dark room you can actually see the pure red last longer than the image of the clock. Then again, I could be wrong. Any optomologists read slashdot?
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
Slashdotted in 13 comments.. One of the quicker ones we've had recently...
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
I was the one knocked off..
Damn ping floods.
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
I guess it was for the days where Westerns were the biggest entertainment on TV. Always a need for blue sky and green grass....
I'd like to see a modification to this to get it working with LCDproc so that we can pump more than just the time out to it.
1. What is a slip ring? 2. What is perfboard 3. What is a Berg connector? 4. a threaded spacer? 5. a 16C84? how do you even figure out to program it in the first place? 6. DIP resistor? 7. what is a PIC16C84? what is a "programmer" for a chip and how can you force something to recognize insturctions? don't you know need to have some form of way of stching instructions onto the chip with a laser or something?
Respond to s
That is the question I thought you had to manually force instructions with some physical means to allow them to run your custom programs. Wouldn't this generate heat?
Respond to s
I laugh at you. Har. har. har.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
I'm a programmer, and I wouldn't be caught dead in a broken-down VCR. Most programmers I know are doing pretty well and live in fully-functional DVD players -- a few are even progressive scan.
What's a sig?
Like This one
--------
SlashGeek REMOVE ALL @ CAPS .hotmail.com
Umm.. the S and G in "SlashGeek" are capitalized as well...
Actually, yes, the programmer. Or you can build one with Bob's instructions here. This is probably not the kind of programmer you were thinking of, though. :)
see subject for query
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Ugh, perish the thought. If SI picked this up, they would charge a buttload for it! These simplistic, renegade clocks could become corporate paperweights and another brown-noser's best friend (a.k.a.: executive gift)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?
it's his hand!
Apologies to Daniel Waters
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
- Do you use a micro controller or is the device connected to the PC while running ?
Both, really. The spinning portion of the display has a 68HC11E2 microcontroller on board. The host computer can talk to the controller over a 115kbaud serial line. Since the controller only has 64K of RAM, animations and such are sent in real time over the serial line.- How do you supply power/control to the rotating parts (the LEDs)?
It's not obvious from the picture, but most of the electronics are on the rotating portion. The board basically has the HC11, a giant AMD PAL (about twice as big as the processor), 64K of VRAM, and a bunch of MOSFETs to drive the LEDs. Power is supplied via motor brushes on slip rings. The brushes drop a few volts, so power is supplied at 12 volts and regulated to 5. Communication is via an infrared trasmitter/receiver pair embedded in the axle of the ROPOD. The tranmitter is stationary, and the reciever rotates with the axle. You can see me holding the tranmitter in one of the pictures on the ROPOD web page. Communication is just 115kbaud unidirectional RS-232 serial.- How do you read out the instantaneous angle of the LEDs ?
There's an infrared LED on the base at a particular location, and a sensor on the rotating disc. The sensor gets triggered once per revolution, letting the processor figure out rotation speed and orientation. In the big picture (the one where it says "ROPOD Mark I") on my web page, you can see the trigger LED as a bright spot in the lower left - the video camera I was using is sensitive to infrared.- Is the software available?
I suppose I could supply schematics and PAL code and 68HC11 code and the (Linux-based) communications environment, but all of the hardware is horribly outdated, and if I made a ROPOD now, I'd use totally different stuff. I've been meaning to make an updated version. With surface mount LEDs I should be able to get much better resolution, and with the relatively cheap blue LEDs that are available now, I could make it full color. And programmable logic devices and processors are so much bigger and faster now that I could make it much more capable. I've been meaning to, but always had too many other projects on the back burner.A $90 version of the clock you're talking about should be available at the Store of Knowledge in your local mega-mall. Or, just click the link to visit their online store and search for 'clock,' it'll show up in the results. (Sorry, the site won't let me link to a specific product's page). It is kinda cool, but IMHO it is not worth $90.
~Philly
Here's the same idea but on a programmable Frisbee
Will wonders never cease.
I'm a 2000 man.
This guy knows what he's talkin about. But, if you'd like to take the easy way out, and you live in the chicagoland area, you can come to my store, Gamers Paradise (12 convenient locations), we sell a clock that has 6 lil LED lights that spin really fast, thus creatint he optical illusion of a screen. Tell em Negative sent ya (maybe i'll finally get my raise)
I'm not saying that god doesn't exist, merely that he is not necessary - hawking
Imagine the crucial rule this totally crappy gadget might have in the epic human attempt to terraform Mars!
Human extinction is on the way.
It allows all timezones to be displayed :-)
years ago i saw something similar on a german "science" tv show. they build a barrel like contraption with 8 rows of 128 led's across lengthwise which was then spun up to about 2000 rpm. i felt unsafe just watching on tv, in the studio everone shrunk away from the thing. they then connected a tv reciever and voila, a mechanical tv set. pretty good picture considering ...
no reference on the net that i could find....
Can this device be multi leveled? If so imagine a small 3d projection instead of just being a flat clock.
Setting the time's a bitch with those push buttons spinning around.
You could have submitted it, 2 years ago even.
Use parts from a VCR to make your illusionary clock and what'll you get? An illusionary flashing "00:00".
Regards, Ralph.
Check out
http://www.spectrumkinetics.com/
This sig washed every five years whether it needs it or not!
You can also get 1F caps from custom car stereo shops, they're used for subwoofers or something. If you go cheap and get used, make damn sure it's discharged, since that's a lethal amount of juice.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
This reminds me of how John Logie Baird's first television worked. It's actually more sophisticated than that really, in that Baird's TV gated the light output by shining it through apertures in a spinning disk. But you get the picture :o)
The digits apparently floating in the air reminded me that some of the current prototype 3D TV's look a bit like this too. Plus ca change...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
These spinny things are all fine and dandy, but what I want is a clock that really is suspended in midair, i.e. a hologram.
Is there such a thing? And could we make one at home?
By steering laser beams at a rapidly rotating helical surface, you can build a 3D display that doesn't require special glasses and can be viewed simultaneously from all angles. Only slightly off-topic. Here's a descri pti on of a fancy color version, and the photo at the bottom of this page shows one in operation.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
The device is called The Fantazein Clock at www.fantazein.com and in PBS-affliated Store of Knowledge. The STK web site says $89. I think it is nifty.
Very very cool stuff... I image that with different color LEDs you could also work at simulating color. Though I imagine blue LEDs are hard to come by, you could have some fun with read and green (and the sickly orange the make combined).
How is the work on blue LEDs coming?
Wouldn't LED clock be more accurate? LCD would indicate a Liquid Crystal Display, like a watch, but this device uses lights, so LED would be more like what it actually is, similar to a desktop alarm/clock type device.
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Somehow, I don't think the police realized the dangerous situation they were creating...
First of all, the only thing that patents clearly make illegal is building a device covered by patent and profiting from it either by using or selling that device, without first coming to a licensing agreement with the patent holder.
Theoretically, if you build this clock for your own use, the patent holder might have some claim (although I'm not sure if there's an exception for non-profit use), but in practice, he would have to sue you in federal court to get anything from you, and would be likely to be awarded zip, so realistically he's not going to sue you, he's going to sue the guys with deep pockets who're making money off his patent instead.
It's perfectly legal to be discussing it, because patents are public - that's kind of their whole point, they're the opposite of trade secrets. The details of patents are published so that others can decide whether they want to license them, and be aware if they're violating them.
As for the existence of these other plans, it's up to the patent holder to uncover and enforce their patent, via civil lawsuit if necessary, so the holder should be sending a notice to the owner of that page. I believe if the page owner were to include a notice saying "these plans may be covered in part by U.S. Patent #XXX", he'd be fine, since once again, it's perfectly legal to discuss the details of patents.
It is most certainly not illegal for Slashdot to link to the plans. The only kind of argument I can think of which might lead to such a conclusion is the as-yet unresolved "Napster argument": because Slashdot profits by linking to information about a patented device, the patent holder might be entitled to a cut of that revenue. However, that issue hasn't been decided in the Napster case, and further, clearly doesn't seem to be extensible from copyrights to patents. In the case of Napster, the actual content is available for download, not mere discussion of it. In this patent case, all that is available is information about building a patented device, which overlaps information in the publicly accessible patent database. In addition, Slashdot has strong rights based on freedom of speech as well as freedom of the press.
The one I'm thinking of is the Fantazein clock. The animated image on that page gives a pretty good rendition of the way the clock behaves in real life. It has a strip of LEDs mounted on a metronome-like arm that moves back and forth fast enough that you don't see the arm, so the numbers appear to float in space.
The article says nothing about finding a programmer inside a VCR.. it says the guy got his motor from the VCR..
There would *NOT* be a PIC programmer inside a VCR, unless I'm completely mistaken. A PIC is genearally a one-shot deal anyway.. you can't 're-program' it.
I've seen similar devices in the mall..
usually a string of LEDs on a stick, that swings back and forth like a pendulum. Works great. Less bulky, and less effort.
Yes, it exists. I bought one at DisneyWorld a few months ago when I took my girlfriend down to orlando. It was $20 or $25, comes pre-programmed with certain words, and lets you add your own message as well. It also has a toggle to allow lefties to swing it the other way. (The first time I saw one was at a Sasha/Digweed party, and someone had it writing "Digweed")
I'm not sure where else they can be bought, nor can I remember the product's actual name, as the packaging is long gone...
A friend of mine did this, among others the games tetris and pong.
They're described, along with pictures of them in action, on this page on his home page.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
(Note that the latest binutils release supports the AVR, but the AVR GCC support is available as a patch to 2.95.2 at the location given above, or in the latest CVS & snapshots of GCC. The server hosting the patches seems to be down and has been for a short while, so Google's caching might come in handy. Google won't let me link directly to the cached version so just to to the cache of the first link for this search.)
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
The 'F' in PIC16F84 stands for 'flash' - i.e., the PIC used here has 2kwords (2048 12-bit blocks) I think of flash, that can be reprogrammed up to 1,000 times.
Anyhow, they're cheap enough chips to get off of digikey, jameco, mouser, etc.
And cheap programmers: Amazon Electronics, http://www.electronics123.com, click on Amazon electronics. No relation to amazon.com.
A coworker of mine picked up something *very close* to this at a gift store in St. Louis. We haven't been able to find it again. It works very close to this, but is different.
This is a complete clock that consists of a base stand, and what looks like a pendulum (or a metronome) with a bar that sticks upwards. The bar is spring loaded, and in a vertical position. In order to see the time, you move the pendulum all the way to the left, then let go.
As the arm swings back and forth, it displays the time "in the air" using a single column of LEDs. It has a sensor on it so when it is travelling to the left, it starts up so that by the time the arm is swinging to the right, it displays the time.
Its really neat. I wish I was able to find one again (did the best internet searches I could) but I have not been able to yet. This rotating clock is even better in that you have to take no action for the time to be displayed. Sounds commercially viable to me. A good geek toy.
I can't think of any VCR with either.
Not that the PIC isn't suited for that kind of application...
Myself, I built a parallel programmer at first (I also partially wrote KDE software for it). Later on I bought Microchip's serial programmer. I'm glad I got it. I had no trouble finding good software for it, I'll have to make an IDE for it one of these days.
Interestingly enough, Microchip's Windows IDE has TeX support. It's based on PFE, which I made sure was present on every Win machine I had to deal with.
So how do I hook that programmer to my PC? I have just never seen something like that, but maybe I've had my head up the wrong place.
A friend of mine made a PIC programmer using just a few transistors and probably some resistors and caps, and that was it. I'm sure those parts are probably in old VCR's but what would a VCR use a fully functional PIC programmer for?
No worries there, I've built PIC programmers, but I prefer the Scenix chip these days.
;)
I was just wondering exactly _where_ you would find a programmer in a VCR, and how you would hook that up. And, yes, I was sarcastic...
I thought the little network programmers were inside my TV... now you say they are in my VCR, too?
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is exactly how the Adventurevision worked. It had a row of LEDs and a rotating mirror thing. The result? A cheap display. As the mirror rotated, the LEds flashed to make the image, REALLY fast.
Combine this concept with an array of Red, Green, and Blue LED's pointing at the right angles and you should be able to get floating 3D pictures a la 'Help me Obi Wan Kanobi'.
For even more fun, instead of a line of LCDs, you can have a 2d array. Spin this to get a 3d display.
Probably would make an even more hellacious racket.
There always HAS been a series (16C84, 16F84) that can be reprogrammed, but there is an equivalent write-only device known as a One-Time-Programmable (or OTP) that is cheaper. That's the one you are likely to find in most consumer electronics devices because they are cheaper in quantity than the reprogrammable ones that would be useful to you or me.
Even in devices that may be flash upgradable, the PIC isn't likely to be the chip containing the flash where price is an issue to the designer.
"A $90 version of the clock you're talking about should be available at the Store of Knowledge in your local mega-mall."
t ion=1&category=15
$90!!!! Jeez, you can get simpler one for $30 at sciplus.com. It doesn't seem to have all the features, but it still looks rather cool.
Here's the address:
http://sciplus.com/category.cfm?subsection=1&sc
If that don't work, just look under toys->desk toys. They have lots of fun and cheap junk that other "science toys" places overcharge for.
Just remember to feed the jolt to the VCR in moderation...too much may cause your programmer to blow your VCR to smitheriens...
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Dammit I have been saving 5-6 of these up for something to use them for and now I have a use for em! I bet all you suckers that got rid of yours are now looking for em...I am heading to eBay to rake in the dough!
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
for your fingers? :) Isn't it like a fan that can cut easily?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
No, it's not a misprint. 1.0F, not picoFarad, not microFarad, but one whole damned Farad.
I don't have any at the moment, so I can't read the can. Serious electronics shops have them (i.e., not Radio Shack). Barring that, see if there are any local HAM radio enthusiasts... someone'll sell them along with the mythical blue LEDs at a table.
The ones I got were a regular electrolytic can shape, with two leads poking out one of the flat bottom of the can. The can was a squat 1" diameter by 0.5" length, not including the leads, which were spaced at 0.1", the same pin spacing as most hobby boards (and the BASIC Stamp's pinout).
With the bidirectional 5-12V DC regulator on the BASIC Stamp, you can set up solar/capacitor projects easily. The solar cell can power the Stamp all day through one pin, and excess goes to trickle into the capacitor on the other pin. When the cell is in shadow, the voltage flips the other way, draining power from the capacitor instead. The total energy WILL drain the capacitor before dawn, for all but the smallest projects, but the Stamp will just resume or reboot when the solar energy starts up again.
[
Last time I checked, the Stamp used a PIC.
Yep, and you could probably do a lot more if you knew what you were doing with PICs. I didn't, so I opted for the Stamp, which added a massive layer of abstraction on top of the PIC internals that made it much easier for me to experiment. That's what makes Stamps great for beginners: no need for anything but a parallel cable, a battery and a few LEDs before you can get your first project running.
It's like saying, "Last time I checked, Linux used a microprocessor." If you wanna write your own code directly on the iron without an OS on it, sure, go for it. If you prefer to have a little bit more support added, allowing for device I/O and such, well, use a microprocessor+software combination.
[
Does anyone remember the Virtual Boy? Made by Nintendo, it worked just like the device you describe, but projected a slightly different image into each eye to make things look 3D. For some reason, no one liked it. I thought it was neat.
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7 LEDs -- That's only 4 :CueCats!!!!!!
I hope that this clears things up for you.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I've seen similar designs at football games. A few LEDs on a stick spell out "Go [local football team]!" when you move your hand and the stick swings about the handle. I thought it was pretty neat. AFAIK, it works exactly like this clock does, except without a motor.
I'm trying to find a link to anything like it, but I'm not finding anything. ARGH! It does exist, I tell you! I've seen it!
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one item on the list of things you'll need is "[a] programmer that will program a PIC16C84 or 16F84 microprocessor."
Actually, you can find these on ebay. Right next to the "programmers looking for a job coding FORTRAN" section.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I wonder if they could find a resonable way to make a giagantic wristwatch with this thing a good novelty item
Your pain is funny
I know I saw something like this at the Discovery Store, Natural Wonders, or one of those similar mall stores that always has huge geodes and stuff in it. You know the kind of store I'm talking about. Their model was pre-assembled, and the LEDs (not LCDs) oscilated back and forth on a light-weight transparent wand. This gave a much more realistic illusion of floating numbers.
Related--in college I discoverd that an ordinary LED clock, when combined with a strobe light, could be used to create an illusion. Just move the clock slowly back and forth, and it looks like the numbers are sliding off the clock. No psychoactive substances are required to view this illusion.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
http://www.lonezone.com/2000/catalog/6915.html is exactly what I was talking about. Thanks.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If i switched the LEDs to all different colors could i give my clock a tye-dye motif? Or would it just look like a mass of ugly colors then?
The anti-salmon
the site is slashdotted already...anyone got a mirror?
The anti-salmon
Why was I not surprised to discover this...
This one took me a little longer to find than the contest patent.....
U SP# 5,302,965 covers...
A display comprises a static unit (8) on which is mounted a rotating unit (7) driven by a motor (12). The rotating unit carries light emitting diodes (6) arranged as vertical columns which sweep around a cylindrical surface. The light emitting diodes (6) are controlled by a control circuit (6) in accordance with data stored in a memory (61) so as to provide a cylindrical display. The control circuit (60) and memory (61) are located in the rotating unit 97) and the memory (612) has a capacity for storing several different images for display.
I'm thinking maybe I should change my
p.s. sorry about the duplicate posting I responded to the wrong message with my first try...
-jon
Wasn't there a really cheap item sold to make a B&W TV look color? It was simply a plastic filter with blue on the top half and green on the lower half that mounted to the TV. (I'm not kidding about this). I guess it was for the days where Westerns were the biggest entertainment on TV. Always a need for blue sky and green grass....
Absolutely, there was. It was kinda like the screen overlays on a Vectrex video game system.
But no, that's not the color TV system I was talking about. The color TV system I was talking about (I think it was from Westinghouse, but I can't remember for sure) actually had the primary colors on a rotating disk.
If you wanted to show the red in a picture, only the red portions of the image would be displayed on the (black and white) TV screen. At this point, the red portion of the disk would be over the screen. When you wanted to show blue or green, same thing - the image displayed on the CRT would switch as the disk came to that point in its rotation. It would have been flickery, but it would have been true color. And the noise and bulk of a rapidly spinning disk over the CRT would have been nasty.
Part of the issue was that when the NTSC (National Television Systems Committee) was choosing the support for a new color TV standard, the FCC had decreed that it had to remain backwards-compatible with the existing black and white TV standard (they pushed for this back in the late '80s, too, with the proposals for the new HDTV standard). This color wheel system, elegantly simple but unwieldy, would have done that.
Fortunately for us, RCA invented the color (three-gun) cathode ray tube at about that time, and had come up with a way of encoding the color information onto a black and white image by syncing an oscillator in the TV set with one at the TV station (the 3.5758MHz "colorburst" signal) which was hidden in the horizontal blanking interval (the black bar that you see geting torn all over the place when your horizontal hold is set wrong). The color information then rode over top of the video brightness information. Old TV sets don't notice the color signal, but your color TV set compares the phase of the signal riding on the luminance (brightness) and demodulates it by phase to each one of the three primary guns. And the more saturated the color has to be, the bigger the color signal riding in the brightness info.
Basically, it's an all-electronic version of the nasty old Westinghouse color system. We should all be grateful to the pioneers like RCA, Nipikow and Zworkin for what we now take for granted. And, of course, to John Logie Baird, whose mechanical TV system is completely irrelevant now, but he got the ball rolling by proving that TV was possible.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Havn't you ever seen The Matrix?
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
I wonder why it didn't do well?
ftp://ftp.armory .co m/pub/user/rstevew/PIC/DaveTait/picprog.html
This file contains links to plans for building really cheap but functional PIC programmers. I've done it before; it's not too hard.
These are really cool little chips.
-John
I want one on the wheels on my car
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It was called "The Private Eye", by Reflective Technologies (don't look them up, they've been out of business for a while [and I don't even know if I got their name right!]). It was a monochrome eyepiece meant to be attached to a computer or a diagnostic device. It consisted of a row of minuscule LEDs on one end of a plastic casing about 1.25 inches square and 4 inches long. The other end had a constantly oscillating mirror that reflected the image out through the eyepiece to the user's eye. The image wasn't too detailed (50x60 monochrome red), but it did make for a less obtrusive, more private display device. You could view stock quotes, read a secret document, or even play a game of chess by viewing this eyepiece. However, that was 1990 (the eyepiece was expositioned at my Cub Scout pack meeting [not exactly COMDEX!]), and lack of demand and evolving technologies made this disappear from the face of the earth. Only after seeing the propeller clock did the memory of it get conjured up.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Steve Ciarcia did this in his Circuit Cellar column in Byte magazine around 1978. At the time it was a cheap display if you couldn't afford a terminal for your state of the art 8-bit computer.
Also see Daryl Bender and Ottawa Canada's page, where Darly and Ottawa explain other ways to obtain electric motors.
They made a 32' tall tower with LEDs down the length of it, in full color, with a Linux box controlling it. You could see it halfway across the city!
Since the site is slashdotted, here's another propeller-clock sites to look at in the meantime:
http://home.wxs.nl/~luberth/propklok.htm
-- Anne Marie
This definitely is very cool, I've seen the police with 'wands' like this, basically they have a stick which the wave back and forth and a message appears in the air, it's a cool illusion, I saw a "slow down" message from one of them. I wonder if "you're a stupid moron" is too long to be made out ;)
I've also seen this technology on TV a while ago.
Very clever.
This is at least two years old. It's been around for a long while.
PICs are great little microcontrollers. Get one from DigiKey for around $6. A good programmer for them you can build is called the NOPPP. It's easy and cheap to build.
This guy built a better version of the propeller clock.
Hope this helps.
Most of it is mirrored here.
Dave Barrett's Clock
The Original - Bob Blick's Clock
Luberth Dijkman's Clock
Andrew Jardine's Clock
Ken Staton's Clock
Victor Tihonov's Clock
Don Zehnder's Clock
Come one, build a clock, join the club!
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So at night, a driver passing by in a car would see a message, yet if they stopped to see what the hell was that, they wouldn't see anything.
What I describe has been done and is VERY OLD (> 20 years). Stiff fun stuff though.
From the article: If you don't have any way to put the program into a PIC 16C84 or 16F84 chip, you can build your own programmer.
So if you don't already have a programmer, you'll have to build a programmer yourself. None of this weak "find a programmer in a box" crap -- do it yourself.
-- Anne Marie
John Logie Baird, a Scot, is supposedly the inventor of the television (but not anything we'd recognise today as a TV.) His device, which was experimented with by the BBC in the mid twenties[? I think - any geek historians out there?], was a large wheel with thirty lenses around the edge, all at a slight offset from one another. The transmitter was a light sensitive resistor on one side of the such a wheel. The receiver also had a wheel, and had a light bulb on one side, and a screen on the other. The different offsets for the lenses meant that when the wheel was spinned, the resister would automatically scan 30 lines; on the receiver, the light bulb would illuminate the same positions on the screen thanks to having a similar set of lenses.
Needless to say, while it was first, it was also crap (30 lines for crying out loud), but it was capable of transmitting something that looked like a human face in real-time, and thus, for the twenties, was reckoned to be the coolest thing since the, well, coolest thing that had come before it. No doubt it was much discussed on Slashdot's predecessors at the time.
Now we have tiny little leds with less persistance, and can bank them, and presumably are perfectly able to generate wheels with considerably more than 30 lenses, the question arises - is it possible to create a mechanical TV (camera and/or receiver) capable of producing/showing an NTSC or PAL signal?
Or even have... *shudder* a mechanical VGA monitor?!
Well I think it would be cool anyway. I'm guessing if we can use leds on a spinning drum to generate a clock from cheap off the shelf components, we ought to be able to out-Logie Baird right now.
(No, I don't know what that meant either)
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
For a moment there, I thought the headline of this story was "Illusionary LSD clock".
Makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?
The ROPOD (ROtating POlar Display) is a similar device, only the screen is a spinning disc rather than a rotating cylinder, making this one of the few displays to use a polar coordinate system. It's also capable of quite a bit more than telling time; the resolution is much higher, and the author has software that can decode a compressed animation format for video display. Follow the link for photos etc..
The coolest thing about the ROPOD is that it's this huge, whirling, rickety contraption that makes bystanders fear for their lives...
If you find this project interesting, you may want to also see THIS link which has details/schemas on many other Mech.Scanned clocks. None as neat and clean as Blick's - but nice nonetheless. Has a few projects with pretty large units - different formats/methods ect.. have a look.
/. about the Home Robot. I dug up this link which is decidedly more hardcore an offering compared to the Pocket-Bot (scroll to very bottom of page) offered by Divent (though _Not_ the bot featured in the /. article - it is the other kit Divent apparently markets).
Ive been putting off building a mechanically scanned clock like this for some time! I saw this page some time ago, Bob Blick's project is very neat and clean. I stumbled across it while researching about BEAM robotics. Meant to comment on the last story here on
Hey Americans: Big Biz has bought your Democracy, are using your gov' and military to enslave you. Wake up. Free yourselves. Do the world a favour; Tell your friends/relatives/neighbours to:
Note that one item on the list of things you'll need is "[a] programmer that will program a PIC16C84 or 16F84 microprocessor." Often you can find these inside broken VCRs.
I'm sure not the programmer but the PIC16C84 itself, right?
Mini Programmers save space and hardware. They feed off the dust inside VCRs and TVs. Unfortunately the heat eventually makes them pass out. Which is why electronics stop working for no reason and then start back up again after you shake them, you just woke him back up.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
In 1995 or so, I built a simpler model using a Parallax, Inc. v1 BASIC Stamp circuit.
(For those of you who haven't toyed with a BASIC Stamp, it's a 14 pin SIPP circuit board (1.4" x 0.5") with a 5-12V DC voltage regulator, clock, 8 programmable I/O pins, 256 bytes EEPROM memory, and TTL/RS232 control lines. You download programs that are tokenized BASIC, and the program is run whenever power is available.)
My clock and silent-radio didn't have a spatial sync, but did drive five LEDs to scroll through a message. I trickle-charged a small 1 Farad capacitor to power the circuit for about ten minutes, and spun the whole apparatus around on the end of a pencil to read the display.
I recommend the BASIC Stamps (v1 or the more capable v2s) for anyone who wants to play with digital programmable circuits for the first time.
My other 1.0-Farad-powered project was a small sound-effects generator that rode inside a slotcar racer. It used four tilted mercury switches as a crude accelerometer, to provide screech and revving sounds for my racecar.
[
Would definitely wake me up...
/me reaches over
*whap* *whap* *whap*
/me awakens quickly