Prusa Printer Gets An LCD-ectomy, Gains A VFD

June 12, 2019 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

What’s wrong with the OEM display on a Prusa I3 Mk3? Nothing at all. Then why replace the stock LCD with a vacuum fluorescent display? Because VFDs are much, much cooler than LCDs.

(Pedantic Editor’s Note: VFDs actually run a little warm.)

At least that’s the reasoning [Scott M. Baker] applied to his Prusa upgrade. We have to admit to a certain affection for all retro displays relying on the excitation of gasses. Nixies, Numitrons, and even the lowly neon pilot light all have a certain charm of their own, but by our reckoning the VFD leads the pack. [Scott] chose a high-quality Noritake 4×20 alphanumeric display module for his upgrade, thriftily watching eBay for bargains rather than buying from the big distributors. The module has a pinout that’s compatible with the OEM LCD, so replacing it is a snap. [Scott] simplified that further by buying a replacement Prusa control board with no display, to which he soldered the Noritake module. Back inside the bezel, the VFD is bright and crisp. We like the blue-green digits against the Prusa red-orange, but [Scott] has an orange filter on order for the VFD to make everything monochromatic. That’ll be a nice look too.

A completely none functional hack, to be sure, but sometimes aesthetics need attention too. And it’s possible that a display switch would help the colorblind use the UI better, like this oscilloscope mod aims to do.

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Finger Recognition On The Kinect

July 17, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

The Kinect is awesome, but if you want to do anything at a higher resolution detecting a person’s limbs, you’re out of luck. [Chris McCormick] over at CogniMem has a great solution to this problem: use a neural network on a chip to recognize fingers with hardware already connected to your XBox.

The build uses the very cool CogniMem CM1K neural network on a chip trained to tell the difference between counting from one to four on a single hand, as well as an ‘a-okay’ sign, Vulcan greeting (shown above), and rocking out at a [Dio] concert. As [Chris] shows us in the video, these finger gestures can be used to draw on a screen and move objects using only an open palm and closed fist; not too far off from the Minority Report and Iron Man UIs.

If you’d like to duplicate this build, we found the CM1K neural network chip available here for a bit more than we’d be willing to pay. A neural net on a chip is an exceedingly cool device, but it looks like this build will have to wait for the Kinect 2 to make it down to the consumer and hobbyist arena.

You can check out the videos of Kinect finger recognition in action after the break with World of Goo and Google Maps.

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