Handcrafted Scope Clocks with circle graphics
Fresh from Oscilloclock Labs – a new VectorClock creation, commissioned for the office of a world-famous film and television director:
This unit is based on an original Tektronix 520 vectorscope, which is the predecessor of the 520A that was used in the first VectorClock, described here. This custom conversion employs several key enhancements, and performance has never been better!
Be sure to check out videos on my YouTube channel.
Television broadcasting has switched from analog to digital – and if you’ve got a nice HD TV, you’ll be loving it!
But with that transition came the death of an entire breed of equipment – the Vectorscope.
Just to be clear, these are not monitors for playing ancient video games using vector graphics!! No, the Vectorscope is (was) used to give a delightful view of the ‘vectors’ inside an NTSC or PAL video signal, describing the color components of the signal.
If you were lucky enough to be a TV broadcast technician, you’d use your Vectorscope all the time to check your vectors’ amplitudes and phase. You would even give your vectors names like ‘Jack’ and ‘Jill’, and check up on their relationships daily, just as any responsible guardian would!
But above all, you would marvel every single day at the beautiful hardware you were using, and the complex circuitry involved. Take a look at my Tektronix 526 Vectorscope, which has oodles of delicious tubes to heat my shop on a nice winter’s day:
Well, it all went digital and there is no longer any need for analog color signal analysis. But dry your tears… There is something even better:
This lovely Oscilloclock reincarnation of a Tektronix 520A, sold at Maker Faire Tokyo 2013, allows its new owner to forever relive the magic of NTSC, PAL and SECAM analog color.
The Tektronix 520A has a stunning built-in array of lights for illuminating the CRT graticules. By simply removing the bezel and external graticule, the Tek 520A morphs into a deliciously moody timepiece!
Normally, I shun CRTs with built-in graticules. Their lines detract dreadfully from an Oscilloclock image. But here! The Tek 520A’s internal vectorscope graticule is round! What better way to accentuate a Circle Graphics driven display?
The Tek 520A is solid-state. It can be left on 24 hours a day and not fail for many years. This makes it a perfect match for my Maximum Re-use + Minimum Invasion policy: nearly all existing circuits – HV power supply, deflection amplifiers, blanking – are put to use, with just a few (reversible) tweaks.
The Oscilloclock Power Board is mounted neatly next to its own dedicated low voltage supply. A small relay board can be seen below, for controlling the Tek’s main power unit. All cabling is HV-tolerant and neatly fastened with high-temperature cable ties.
Of the more interesting reversible ‘tweaks’ needed for this retrofit, here we see a delightful little trimpot pretending to be a transistor. Quite an act, I would say!
If you love big, looming Vectorscopes and need to have one put to good use in your living room, Contact me. And be sure to subscribe from the front page, to track all the other exotic experiments and unique timepieces targeted for 2014!
Credits to [Quinn] in Canada, for providing the initial inspiration for the Tek 520A VectorClock project!
The world-renowned Santa Claus. How does he get in your house to deliver presents? Does he go down the chimney (if you have one)? Does he shrink and squeeze under your door? Of course not! What silly ideas.
Santa simply converts himself into pure energy and beams in!! I’ve seen this glorious event myself, and now you can too – with the latest Seasonal Treats enhancement from Oscilloclock.com.
Not only can you watch Santa on his travels, but you can even control where he drops his presents! Can YOU help him deliver the gifts?
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Summer is over! But even as cool weather sets in, the Oscilloclock.com lab is smoking hot, preparing for…
Visit the Oscilloclock.com booth, and check out the luxury 2013 edition Model 1S – to be announced in this blog at end October. One unit will go on sale at the event!
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There are probably many people who think that microcontrollers are bug-free. After all, they are glorified integrated circuits; a hard-wired jumble of infinitesimal transistor logic gates. There should be no unexpected behavior, as long as you operate the device within the rated voltage and temperature parameters….
Wrong!
What we tend to forget from our CPU architecture classes is that a CPU actually has a program inside. Known as microcode, its primary function is to interpret each instruction into the right electrical signals to drive the various parts of the CPU. For example, an addlw 0x7F instruction might involve directing the ALU’s input to the next word in program memory (0x7F), and then telling the ALU to add it to WREG, with output set back in WREG. The microcode for addwf MyVar would be different again; it needs to get a value in RAM, and set the result back there too.
Well, where there is a program, there will definitely be bugs.
My first experience with a microcontroller bug cost me several weekends of frustration, fretting, and frantic but fruitless rework. Here’s how it happened:
It was the early days of the Prototype, And things were looking great! My dream was coming to fruition! Except… every once in a while, the clock would go absolutely berserk. Seemingly at random, it would start displaying crazy, meaningless images, and controls would cease to function. Sometimes it would recover; other times, it would exhibit brain death – requiring a hard reset.
No amount of testing or experimentation could tell me what the problem was. I rewrote huge blocks of code. I removed massive chunks to simplify the code. I drank more and more coffee. Sleepless nights and grumpy days ensued, wasting my precious youth!
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