NYC Resistor has a fantastic post about how vector displays work, and how you can turn them into clocks, or display graphics.
Vector displays are now mostly historical oddities — old arcade games like Asteroids or Tempest, or ancient FAA radar displays — which gives them a certain charm. Unlike modern raster displays, the electron beam in the CRT is not swept left to right and top to bottom for each row in the image. Instead the beam is steered to a point and traces the lines of the displayed image.
Most dual channel oscilloscopes have an XY mode in which the timebase is replaced by the second channel, so instead of a constant sweep frequency the two inputs to be plotted relative to each other. Generating low frequency analog voltages out of a small microcontroller with PWMthrough a low pass filter is quite common for adjusting the brightness of an LEd, but drawing complex shapes requires a faster way to change the voltage. One very easy way to do this is with an R-2R ladder DAC.
Read on for more details about how to build your own vector display hardware and some ways to draw shapes on your oscilloscope’s screen.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Perfect!
I make the same 20 years ago.