10 Dec
1998
10 Dec
'98
9:02 a.m.
At 12:54 12/10/98 -0800, Chuck McManis wrote:
Lots of people in the states sell them, its called the
"Actimates" Barney.
As I understood it the toy "saw" signals in the form of IR coded pulses in
IR??? I don't think the red phosphor on the CRT screen emits anything in
the IR range. If it did, the electron beam hitting the red phosphor would
still emit visible light too and there might be an apparent flickering
image. Somewhere around in my color TV archives I think I've got a
technical bulletin from RCA on their color picture tube phosphors which
could verify the spectral output. (RCA developed the first tri-color CRT to
work with their electronic color system introduced in 1953.)
My guess would be that a single scan frame out of the 30 frames-per-second
(in the NTSC standard) picture signal would be blanked at a rate that the
toy's electronics would decode as specific commands. Usually, the 1 frame
missed out of 30 is not noticed by the human eye depending upon the light
saturation of the scene transmitted.
the video and responded appropriately. There are a
couple of groups on the
net who have hacked the toy to give the dinosaur an extended, if somewhat
less refined, vocabulary.
Oooh hoo hoo! I can imagine the fun which ensues:)
Regards, Chris
-- --
Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian
Jamestown, NY USA cfandt(a)netsync.net
Member of Antique Wireless Association
URL: http://www.ggw.org/freenet/a/awa/