Build Your Own Electric Etch-A-Sketch 104
mhaisley writes "Ok, case mods are cool, monitor mods are nifty... but an Electric Etch-a-Sketch beats either. Students at Cornell University built an electronically controlled etch-a-sketch, controllable by a PC mouse. This was part of a group of class final projects featured by their instructor."
Re:Reminds me of those EtchASketch tech support ca (Score:1, Interesting)
Fractals are where its at... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wouldn't it be cool (Score:5, Interesting)
The cheapest item on the BOM would be ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wouldn't it be cool (Score:2, Interesting)
Forget the etch a sketch. STM project (Score:5, Interesting)
GIF2EAS (Score:2, Interesting)
What the needed to do was
supply a image as input
and have the thing
A) Translate it to b&w
B) Have the EAS automatically draw it
Kind of like the novelty of
translating an image to
ascii
Cheers,
--The Dude
And yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Department of Redundancy Department (Score:2, Interesting)
Inside the mouse is a ball driving two optical encoders: one for X, one for Y, mechanically placed 90 degrees apart.
The optical disks and detector are made in such a manner as to produce a quadrature encoded output.
With very minimal "glue logic", these signals could be changed to the quadrature encoded drive signals required by a stepper motor.
This would have eliminated the whole processor.
But, they used a roundabout way of doing it.
I'll often do things for my own edification that are not optimal just to see how things work.
In this case, the students got to experience working with the AVR compiler, programming in machine code, and real-world interface design, so I won't bang on them for not doing it in such a way I would have if I were gonna make a million of 'em.
Now, if I had found out that they were just drawing lines on the CRT screen, I would have posted a very vile commentary on the state of what is passing for education these days. What I saw looked appropriate to me for a class project for BSEE.
Just for funsies, my final project in College back in the early 70's was building my own oscilloscope from scratch. I thought I was gonna get really good bandwidth because I was using 45MHz IF tubes from television receivers as my CRT drive. Got my design finished... Surprise! I got 10KHz! Well, so much for my rude awakening to plate resistance and capacitive loads... but the professor gave me full credit anyway because I offered the correct explanation of why I didn't get the response I expected.
Re:Forget the etch a sketch. STM project (Score:3, Interesting)
Then again, the EAS project is pretty simple either, just a pair of stepper motors. Cool, but what michael (why the fuck is that moron still allowed to post anything? seriously) described sounds more like an electron beam magnetizing the screen selectively.