13 Nov
1998
13 Nov
'98
8 a.m.
If you need a rationalization that it is ON-TOPIC:
20 years ago, at Jim Warren's THIRD West Coast Computer Faire (the one time
that it was in LA), there was a fellow with a booth there demoing one such.
(1st in SF, 2nd in San Jose, 3rd in LA, 4th (first one that I exhibited
at) in SF. Eventually it was bought out and DESTROYED.)
There was a "light sword" version marketed by one of the major toy
companies. But it had WAY too much mass to be usable. I gave it to a
friend who was going to re-engineer it to put LEDs on the windshield
wipers of his plane!
--
Fred Cisin cisin(a)xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
2210 Sixth St. (510) 644-9366
Berkeley, CA 94710-2219
On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, John Foust wrote:
Several times in the past I've seen home-brewed and perhaps
CPU-driven signs that consist of a single vertical line of
perhaps a dozen or two LEDs.
The "sign" doesn't appear to be anything but a line of glowing LEDs.
Only when you view it at a glance, as your vision moves quickly
from side-to-side, do you see that it is rapidly flickering the
vertical scanlines of a simple dot-matrix image: maybe the digits
of the time, perhaps a smiley face, or some other simple image.
Anyone here know the name of this sort of device, so I can web-search
for others who've made one? It wouldn't be hard to craft. To be
obliquely on-topic, I've thought about making a simple circuit that
would be driven by the parallel port of an old PC.
- John