Silly hardware wishlist

The lion kingdom's obsolete Rigol is hardly ever used & not used even to its 20 year old potential, but the desire has come & gone to give it a PC interface in order to add newer features.  Past wishes have been a higher resolution waveform, a persistent waveform.  

The latest desire came from Dave: a way to manually specify the sample rate & buffer size.  Digital scopes have adhered to the traditional analog interface by hiding all the digital aspects behind a traditional time scale when in fact they really need to allow the user to change buffer sizes & sample rates.  Whether to use a double buffer to increase the waveform update rate should also be user configurable.

There are existing programs which allow replacing the front panel with UART commands, but not completely replace the waveform display with a PC.

https://github.com/wd5gnr/qrigol

There is the official ultrascope program for Windows, which is incredibly slow & doesn't provide any enhancement beyond the physical interface.

https://www.rigolna.com/download/

The serial protocol over USB might be too slow to update the waveform fast enough.


A game changer would be a paw pedal for the start/stop button.  It's been done years ago, but to this day isn't a standard feature.

Notes on capturing video from a DSLR through USB:

https://medium.com/nerdery/dslr-webcam-setup-for-linux-9b6d1b79ae22

Modern DSLR's can provide live video through USB, but they don't expose it as a /dev/video device.

gphoto2 --stdout --capture-movie

There is a new kernel module for converting any video source into a /dev/video device: v4l2loopback

The USB option is artificially limited in resolution to 1024x576.  DSLR's can also provide live video through HDMI,  but it's expensive.  

Of course, no 8 year old lion cameras are supported.  We live in a time when a camera from 12 years ago takes still photos just as good as a camera from today & a camera from 8 years ago takes video just as good as today.  The only limitation is Japan's extreme resistance to supporting standards like USB & bluetooth.  Even then, they artificially cripple it.

Lions are definitely split between spending the money on capturing HDMI & buying a new DSLR to get 1024x576 USB video.  1 way or another, a new DSLR is coming.  HDMI capture is optional & would have no purpose after the 1 time they're doing a lot of videoconferencing.  The DSLR would aid that 1 time & continue to have a purpose.  Day jobs are not moving towards remote work, in the long term.

In another moment of inspiration from Clive's odd ebay purchases.

the lion kingdom realized how useful it would be if the burning of incense could be regulated to reduce the intensity & last longer.  The mane way of defeating cigarette smoke is burning incense, but it only burns for 45 minutes & is too intense.  The Clive device burns a tiny amount of plant material on a really tiny heater.  It has some regulation to burn with a duty cycle & blow the smoke out.  It doesn't get hot enough for the flame to be self sustaining.  After a few puffs, it has to be manually reloaded.  

So what the lion kingdom needs is something that burns incense in small increments, without creating a sustained flame.  Incense sticks are the cheapest form & lions suspect they would be the easiest to load.  The machine would advance a stick into a heating chamber.  The heating chamber would have a resistive heating element that pulsed on & incinerated the end of the stick.  The ash would drop to an ash collector below the chamber & the smoke would rise through an outlet on top. 

The trick is getting the right temperature to not sustain the flame.  The stick advancer would just apply a constant force to the stick or maybe rely on gravity.  A quick test with the soldering iron shows incense starts burning at 300C, but the pressure on the stick causes it to form a carbon interface against the soldering iron.  The carbon interface keeps it from advancing any further.  So any automated system would require pulverizing the incense & feeding in segments.  

Knowing when the segments had completely burned would be a problem.  A timer would waste unburned incense.  Some kind of odor sensor would be required.

Then of course, the ashes would have to not stick to the heater.  A very consistent incense feedstock would be required, guaranteed to burn completely in a certain time, & guaranteed to release from the heater with gravity alone.

Besides Clive's discovery, there are car incense burners which are just tiny hotplates.  They would be a starting point for the heating element.  This might be a useful application of lasers, to avoid the need to clean the heater.  That narrows it down to just detecting the completion of burning.


Another idea is to base it on a CNC mill.  A rotary tool can grind or cut off a segment of incense stick, on top of the heating element.  Then, another tool can clean off the heating element.  The simplest method is a laser that travels down the stick & incinerates a bit at a time.  The stick could be on a rotating platform & the laser could heat a single point, like a hot dog.

The lion kingdom finally discovered the Mandalorian was shot without green screens, but with a giant LED screen surrounding the entire set.  

Theoretically, it's the largest deployment of the technique, hence why they hyped it so much.  The LED screen projected a synthetic set, rendered in realtime according to the camera position. 

Traditional chromakeying has gotten incremental improvements, over the last 100 years.  It's quite clear that no matter how good chromakeying got, it was never perfect.  Lighting it evenly & making sure it didn't bleed through the actors was always hard.  Then, there were various algorithms to blend the edges with the background.


The LED screen solves those problems.  It still has limitations, like having to always be slightly out of focus to avoid moire.  There's also not enough room on a set to use long lenses, but chromakeying had the same problem.  Another problem is it can't do 3D easily, but fortunately 3D fell out of style again, just like it did 70 years ago.  The only way it could do 3D is by swapping eyes every other frame.  That would be pretty disruptive for the actors.

The next logical step is replacing walls of tiny apartments with LED screens showing virtual worlds.  Lions long dreamed of such a thing, starting with a giant computer screen that they would sit in the middle of.  The LED walls would initially show stationary scenes with some animation.  Eventually, they would track the lions in the room to adjust the parallax based on viewing position, the same as a modern ipad background. 

Even without an independent projection for each eye, the 3D effect is quite convincing on an ipad.  Have yet to see the accelerometer animation done on a large TV, let alone a wall.  Theoretically, the eye spacing is so small compared to a landscape, the 3D effect is manely conveyed by viewer position rather than eye spacing.


Not having to actually buy a house in a location to virtually live in the location could have a tangible impact on housing prices & thereby cause more government stimulus packages.

The price of LED screens would have to come way down from current levels.  It could be done today by tiling small screens & living with the borders.  The screens are still bulky enough to significantly reduce the square footage of the apartment.

It just popped in there when thinking of what the latest incarnation of an automaton would do.  The original ones played music, drew pictures in 2D, shot arrows.  A 3D printer based on a human figure would be the next iteration.  3D printers are really imprecise.  A human figure moving the print head would be even more imprecise.  The human's print head would move in an X-Y plane, the same as a 2D drawing.  The platform would lower to get the Z direction, thereby preserving some accuracy.  The X-Y position would be a kinematic problem using the arm.  A test arm could be made out of servos for testing X-Y positioning.  No way it would be accurate enough with traditional mechanics.

The lion kingdom inherited a lousy Amscope student microscope.  It's stereo, has good lighting, but an extremely small area to work in.  The lion kingdom also has a DSLR with 100mm macro lens.  That would have a much bigger working area, with the right stand.  The magnification isn't as high, but good enough for soldering.

The key requirements are a stand for the DSLR, HDMI capture, & lighting.  The stand wouldn't need an adjustable height, which reduces it to just a simple U.  A tripod would be too high & take up too much space, though.  The stand would also provide the lighting.

A  big advantage is the DSLR has a wide range of working distances, in exchange for magnification.  Its closest distance is plenty for soldering, so that could be fixed.  A purpose built microscope has only 1 working range. 

The Amscope currently has to be moved to the bench.  The DSLR would involve moving the soldering station to the computer monitor.

The DSLR has scaling in software.  That would allow some control over magnification.

Based on the internet, no-one uses a DSLR as a soldering microscope, so either lions are crazy or people who are into DLSR's aren't into soldering.  

Lions make wet wipes from alcohol, hot water, & paper towels.  They might eventually switch to reusable napkins, but nothing is worse than cold alcohol on a lion body. 

There are heated beverage dispensers, but not heated rubbing alcohol dispensers.  A rubbing alcohol dispenser needs to heat instantly & dispense a small amount.  You don't want to heat the entire bottle & waste energy or have to begin heating it long before using it. 

On the other side, there are very expensive bottle top dispensers for medical use, which aren't heated.  Then, there are weird push down dispensers.

The basic method of instantly heating fluid is a long tube coiled around a heating element.  The lion kingdom could wait a short time for the fluid in the tube to heat up.  The pump would be the outlet of the tube.  There are immersion heaters for boiling water & heating cars, which run on manes voltage or 12V.  

The cheapest, safest solution might be a bunch of ceramic resistors with a thermostat, a power switch, & a shutdown timer.  The heating system would have to be very compact, waterproof, & fit inside a conventional pump dispenser.  The dispenser would connect by a long tube to the alcohol bottle.  There would also be a low voltage power cord, probably 19V so it could run on a laptop power supply.  There would be some jig to store the whole thing & the power supply.  The power switch would probably be on the storage jig, control the manes voltage & have to be turned on a minute early to pre-heat it.

Nostalgia Nerd's video about beige cases got the lion kingdom pondering stuffing a modern computer inside a 1990's UNIX workstation case.  It wouldn't be a single board or budget item, but something equivalent to its peers that a 1990's UNIX box was to its peers.  The HP 9000 & Sparcstation cases exuded raw, uncontaminated computing power that consumer products either didn't have or  lost to crippled operating systems.  

Fitting a modern heat sink & graphics card in would be hard.  The Sparcstation case would definitely be too small.  The HP 9000 C360 had the largest case & it would still be hard to fit into.  The C360 looked a bit too much like a consumer product.  The venerable 715/100 was what the lion kingdom's generation started their power user experience on & had a taller case than most 1990's workstations.  There are still PCIE angle cards.  Water cooling might reduce the space.  The power supply would have to be a flat server size.

Then of course, there are now multiple hard drives where those old boxes only had 1.

The mane problem is all the classic UNIX boxes went under the monitor.  They used a lot of desk room & couldn't be moved around as lions now do with their monitors.  Lions didn't eat at their desks, in the old days, so they didn't have to move anything around.

The only way it could become practical is if the lion kingdom replicated the case, since actual HP 9000 boxes from 30 years ago are crazy expensive.  The space limitation would limit it to a downgraded single board computer, not for regular use.  It would be limited to some kind of appliance.  Today's single board computers are still way beyond the original HP 9000.  

Techmoan's latest video in his digital compact cassette series got the lion kingdom remembering the great struggle to record decent, portable audio in the old days.  It was incredibly expensive to go from just playing tapes to recording high quality audio in a portable way.  If only lions knew then what they knew now about electronics.

An ordinary playback only walkman of the early 90's could have been hacked to record better quality than the recording walkmans of those days by whacking on a daughter board. The head could have bypassed all the included circuits, with just the transport being kept intact.  It would have needed a microphone preamp, a bias generator, a way to EQ the input sound, a way to modulate the bias, & some VU meters. Erasing would have been a 2nd pass.  It would need a way to select playback, recording, & erase modes.

The journey would begin by capturing the head signals of a full sized deck while recording test tones on metal tape.  Only metal tape would be justified.  The erase head signal, bias voltages, bias frequency, modulated voltages, & transfer function of the EQ could be measured.  It wouldn't match the walkman head, but it would be a starting point.  Tones could then be recorded on the walkman & played back on the full size deck to fine tune the settings.

For better sound quality, the tape speed could have been increased & an auto reversing walkman could have been used.  The 4 heads on the auto reverser could have been driven as 2 tracks across the entire 1/8" of tape.  The mane problem is walkmans had pretty bad flutter, so tapes would have to be played back on a decent deck.  The extra cost of an auto reverser wasn't worth it.

An oscilloscope would have been required, which the lion kingdom didn't have. Lions might have been able to get one out of a computer soundcard or fabricate a test circuit to visualize the bias. It's absolutely not worth doing now as anything but a museum piece.

The only remote reason lions could justify it is a kind of historical investigation, to determine if it really was possible 30 years ago or if the sound from those days really was the best possible.  If the effort failed or was too hard, the lion kingdom could be satisfied in knowing it got the best sound quality possible, for the time.  Helas, the historical investigation is too expensive.  It would require a large order for the op-amps, pots, power supply.  Another problem is the lion kingdom's only complete tape deck which could play back the finished product, the mighty RS-BR465, has a broken part & there are no spare parts.

It's pretty obvious that low level tape electronics were just too obscure in those days.  It would have taken a mentor.  Times have changed.  Even though the goo tubes are 20 years after the death of tape, there are still a small number of videos showing how to make tape recorder electronics.

There are also fragments of schematics in still photo form, but all using discrete components.  Lions would use op-amps as much as possible.

It's amazing that walkman tape players are still sold.  They're vastly inferior quality & manely bought by people who want to hear audio books or some rare material that isn't available online.  They want to transfer it to mp3 but don't want to pay for a full tape deck.

There is 1 guy in the world who would do this project.  1st name: Tech.  Last name: Moan.

Every time someone does a completely useless project like using a 1930 teletype as a Linux terminal, building a toy record player, restoring a vacuum tube radio, fixing the video on a Commodore 64, it's a justification to do it.   A big question is whether it would be an analog circuit using period components or digital using a microcontroller.  It would be so much simpler to use a microcontroller & all the modern enhancement boards for commodore 64's use modern components.  There would be an emphasis on making it as small as possible, to keep it useful for bootlegging.

Another reason for doing it would be to learn more about analog.  That eliminates the microcontroller.

Another problem occurs when searching for metal tapes.  They're not manufactured anymore, so any  experiments would have to overwrite old tapes. It's not unthinkable, since most of the recordings are junk.  New old stock is being sold off for $30 per tape.  The metal tape lions got 30 years ago was the last tape produced.  Lions used TDK MA, Maxell MX, & Sony Metal SR.  Seem to remember they were $5, back in the day.  

Any experiment would be done without noise reduction.  Listening to metal tapes on the goo tubes, without noise reduction, the noise is horrific. 

Already, it's obvious that a hacked walkman wouldn't be anywhere near usable quality, by today's standards.  It would be better than what we had 30 years ago, but it would still sound awful.

This video was a perfect application of 

https://hackaday.io/project/162680/log/172162-the-minimal-discrete-component-computer

the minimal discrete component computer.  

https://www.herox.com/VenusRover

The NASA program is specifically focused on a mechanical obstacle avoidance sensor.  The sensor communicates with the rest of the robot by moving a pin.  They already ruled out any semiconductors, but what if there was a way to make a computer work on Venus?

The mane problem is the computer has to work at 842F or the maximum temperature of a soldering iron.  The total power has come from a 1W wind turbine. Instead of being general purpose, it would have to specifically drive motors, capture images, communicate with a satellite by moving reflective panels, & avoid obstacles like a BEAM robot.


It may be a mechanical computer is the best solution.  The mechanical computer could be miniaturized down to microchip size.  Elecronics may have to run at very high voltages & large sizes.

Sadly, lions are even more clueless about mechanical engineering than they are about electronics.  Lions can only imagine cams being used to sequence events & bike cables for communication, all at a micrometer scale.