Something very beautiful appeared in our feed this evening, something that has to be shared. [Duncan Malashock] has created an animation of raindrops creating ripples. Very pretty, you might say, but where’s the hack? The answer is, he’s done it as a piece of vector display work on an oscilloscope.
He’s using [Trammell Hudson’s] V.st Teensy-powered vector graphics board. We’ve featured this board before, but then it was playing vector games rather than today’s piece of artwork. The ‘scope in question is slightly unusual, a Leader LBO-51, a device optimized for vector work rather than the general purpose ‘scopes we might be used to. The artwork is written using Processing, and all the code is available in a GitHub repository.
So sit back and enjoy the artwork unfolding in the video. We look forward to more work featuring this hardware.
Though we’ve not featured any vector graphic pure artwork before, we’ve featured quite a few vector graphics projects over the years here at Hackaday. There is this FPGA-driven vector arcade machine, some vectorscope animations from Germany, and of course a Vectrex console brought back from the dead. Does this playable oscilloscope Tetris Easter egg count, or is it a raster?
Beautiful.
If it could be implemented as a “screen saver” on a ‘scope that would be really cool!
I swear there was an After Dark screen saver that did this
Very nice
if he didn’t include the waves at the bottom it almost looks like he started a matrix interface
waves?
Did you mean ripples?
LOL
a ripple is a wave form is it not?
Compared to this the martix interface can suck it.
High-tech Chinese water torture.
Nice!
Slap in a Raspberry with Vectrex emulator!!
i was hoping that the animation was the result of a particular waveform leveraging temporal aliasing on the display… but alas. still cool though.
I would be curious to hear it, that is what does the input signal to the scope sound like for that.
I love it when art meets technology.
Let’s make it with analog oscillators!
Thanks very much for the write-up, Jenny, and thanks to all of you who commented for the encouragement. I’m glad you enjoyed this clip. Trammell and I, along with a few other folks like Adelle Lin and Jacob Joaquin, have been working off and on together on the v.st project and associated code libraries for some time, so you can look forward to more projects from our group in the near future.
The high brightness hurts a little bit.
Add a variable “wind” parameter, so the drops don’t have to fall straight down, and a “rate” parameter so the intensity of the simulated rainfall can be adjusted, and…
which circuit do you use to Make this?
nice