Unique Flat-Screen Display Put To Use In CRT Game Boy

November 13, 2018 by 30 Comments

The cathode-ray tube ruled the display world from the earliest days of TV until only comparatively recently, when flat-screen technology began to take over. CRTs just kept getting bigger over that time until they reached a limit beyond which the tubes got just too bulky to be practical.

But there was action at the low end of the CRT market, too. Tiny CRTs popped up in all sorts of products, from camcorders to the famous Sony Watchman. One nifty CRT from this group, a flat(tish) tube from a video intercom system, ended up in [bitluni]’s lab, where he’s in the process of turning it into a retro Game Boy clone with a CRT display. The display, which once showed the video from a door-mounted camera, was a gift from a viewer. Date codes on the display show it’s a surprisingly recent device; were monochrome TFT displays that hard to come by in 2007? Regardless, it’s a neat design, with the electron gun shooting upward toward a curved phosphor screen. With a little Google-assisted reverse engineering, [Bitluni] was able to track done the video connections needed to use his retro game console, which uses an ESP32 that outputs composite video. He harvested the intercom speaker for game audio, added a temporary Nintendo gamepad, and soon he was playing Tetris in glorious monochrome on the flat screen.

The video below is only the first in a series where the prototype will be stuffed into one nice tidy package. It certainly still needs some tweaking, but it’s off to a great start. We can’t wait to see the finished product.

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Fail Of The Week: How Not To Make A 3D Scanner

July 23, 2018 by 12 Comments

Sometimes the best you can say about a project is, “Nice start.” That’s the case for this as-yet awful DIY 3D scanner, which can serve both as a launching point for further development and a lesson in what not to do.

Don’t get us wrong, we have plenty of respect for [bitluni] and for the fact that he posts his failures as well as his successes, like composite video and AM radio signals from an ESP32. He used an ESP8266 in this project, which actually uses two different sensors: an ultrasonic transducer, and a small time-of-flight laser chip. Each was mounted to a two-axis scanner built from hobby servos and 3D-printed parts. The pitch and yaw axes move the sensors through a hemisphere gathering data, but unfortunately, the Wemos D1 Mini lacks the RAM to render the complete point cloud from the raw points. That’s farmed out to a WebGL page. Initial results with the ultrasonic sensor were not great, and the TOF sensor left everything to be desired too. But [bitluni] stuck with it, and got a few results that at least make it look like he’s heading in the right direction.

We expect he’ll get this sorted out and come back with some better results, but in the meantime, we applaud his willingness to post this so that we can all benefit from his pain. He might want to check out the results from this polished and pricey LIDAR scanner for inspiration.

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