episode 32: a lying oscilloscope, TV repair attitude and VGA generation

CBA Podcast

Apologies for the apparently low volume and low tone of voice - I think someone might have been tired.

This episode discusses ongoing PCB failures, oscilloscope overdrive recovery, a BT-enabled headphone that would just keep connecting, some local events (GLOW, Awesome Space repair day, and the HCC Retro quarterly meeting). Finally, an experiment gone out of control resulted in a small PCB for generating colour effects for 4 connected VGA monitors. Ruby is used as "effect description language".

Links:

• EEVblog forum post on oscilloscope overdrive recovery
• video 1, video 2 and video 3 of my VGA generator board
• an older QuickStart page I made about using the NetPBM family of human-writable bitmap formats
• the GLOW festival (light-themed, annual, Eindhoven, NL)
• Awesome Space retro place (Utrecht, NL)
• HCC Retro interessegroep / division (Bilthoven, NL)
• HCC Robotica interessegroep / division (page in Dutch, Amersfoort, NL)
• RobotMC.be robot-related group (page in Dutch, Sint-Katelijne-Waver, BE)

If interested, here's basically how one would define one out of many possible colour-effects for the VGA generator board, executed in parallel:

("Compiling" all effects on a timeline will result in a list of (R,G,B) tuples for each 60 Hz frame for each of the 4 monitors connected to the PCB.)

Connector-fail:

VGA generator board rendering:

Actual assembled PCB: