3D on a cathode ray oscilloscope

Following my fascination with the mad scientist labs of 50's sci-fi movies, the oscilloscope has always held incredible allure to me as the absolute pinnacle of insane, Bride of the Monster style science... which, of course, it is not. But being an oscilloscope geek definitely helps your appreciation for videos like this, in which cathode ray oscilloscopes are hacked to display 3D imagery. Neat!

[via MAKE]

[#1 posted by JT Montreal , January 14, 2009 11:05 AM]

Pfft, boring. Check out this "Early PC/Amiga/C64/etc" inspired demo, AFAICT produced simply with the stereo outs of a generic PC audio out connected to the X/Y inputs of an analog scope.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1eNjUgaB-g

From a DSP perspective the hardest part might be compensating/avoiding distortion by the DAC's antialiasing filters.

[#2 posted by Anonymous , January 14, 2009 11:15 AM]

well i was going to post about the same thing #1 mentioned.. albeit less dismissively, it is no small task to get this going on a microcontroller

"64K Bytes of In-System Self-programmable Flash program memory" vs 22 mb of pre - generated flac

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/08/youscope_oscilloscope_dem.html

there is also a link on the make blog to the sound file which creates the demo

[#3 posted by Harrkev , January 14, 2009 11:21 AM]

Note that it is possible to do this without extra hardware. The video shows an external DAC board. Most computers have a DAC built in. It is called a "sound card." It should be possible to output special waveforms from your sound output to drive an oscilloscope -- just be sure to turn your speakers off first. Sound cards are limited in their bandwidth, so displaying complex patters will look choppy, but it can be done.

[#4 posted by Piers W , January 14, 2009 11:36 AM]

In the late seventies there were usually a few Tectronix terminals capable of displaying 3d graphics in university computing departments.

A bit later they appeared in arcades with a 3d wireframe game where you got to drive around rudimentary 3d shapes in the outline of a tank and shoot at stuff.

This made a stab at hidden line removal, so not a lot of progress during the last 25 years, if you go by the above.

[#5 posted by claud9999 , January 14, 2009 1:21 PM]

Space Duel did it first. (In color, even.) Seriously, vector graphics displays are the same mechanism as this.

[#6 posted by btb , January 14, 2009 1:38 PM]

Oh how I'd love to see someone make that OpenGL-compliant.

[#7 posted by chrisb , January 14, 2009 2:28 PM]

Dikshit Sehgal? Really?

[#8 posted by jimkirk , January 14, 2009 3:25 PM]

Years ago I made a little circuit which would display what appeared to be a square wave with a negative rise time. A little lab joke to connect to a scope at work and then walk away...

And I remember in college in one of the labs a couple of guys had assembled a TV front end and were watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on an oscilloscope. In glorious green with no sound.

[#9 posted by dwes , January 14, 2009 6:58 PM]

It only took 25 years to forget BattleZone. Sad.

[#10 posted by Anonymous , January 15, 2009 1:35 AM]

http://sites.google.com/site/sehgalds/

[#11 posted by arkizzle , January 15, 2009 6:40 AM]

I was also gonna post the YouScope footage mentioned in #1 and #2 - about half as dismissively as #1 :)

Check out Ray Sweeten's work too, not specifically 3D, but wow!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ApYtQ5S7o

Stay til the end..

[#12 posted by Anonymous , January 15, 2009 6:51 AM]

Hi,

The project in this video is actually an application of what I learned in a course on computer graphics. I made this for a competition called CRO 3D (we were supposed to build an electronic circuit to show 3D images on a CRO) at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Dikshit Sehgal.

http://sites.google.com/site/sehgalds/

[#13 posted by arkizzle , January 15, 2009 9:44 AM]

Glad you dropped by Dikshit :)