...and an Oscilloscope!

I ran into this a while ago, but forgot to post it.. Someone made an animated music video using and a pc's soundcard to turn an oscilloscope into a monitor! Quite a cool and original trick if u ask me!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY_2J3ckCSQ

Pretty cool.  You can find plans to build an interface to turn your monitor into an o'scope.

Yup thats from one of the Assembly Demo's.  I've posted about Demo Scene stuff before.

I can hear here some Amiga Sound Track Samples used in there for the music.

not so original.....   making letters and fancy wave patterns on an oscilloscope has been done in the 70's..  There was a project on Ciarcias Cellar mag...  back then...

Tom you read that?  Me too.  I believe that was Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar.

 What's Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar?

Ciarcia was an electronics writer who put circuit fragment collections and complete projects into a magazine called Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar.  It was geared toward DIY electronics enthusiasts.

Well an electronic non nerd I had never seen that and thank you for posting for all of us of the unwashed masses.. ...

Steve Ciarcia has built an international reputation as a consultant, engineer, and author in a career spanning over twenty years. Millions of people around the world have followed Steve as he built advanced computers, designed impressive intelligence into the control of his home, explored speech synthesis and communications, and explained leading-edge technology through the use of practical, working projects.

Attached Link: http://www.bastwood.com/aphex.php

 oh yea! good old Aphex Twin!! wow i almost forgot about that.. i remember seeing something about the hidden photos on wikipedia a while ago

Ok, I looked at it again after the aphex twin thing and the implementation is still different enough from direct imbedding of an image in a waveform. From the YouTube comments, it seems that the L and R channels are driving the X and Y coils on the O-scope...

But I see a fairly obvious implementation derived from how that works. It would involve two piezo-electric speakers (to be used as solenoids), a small 1/4" (4mm) square mirror, some sort of laser, and a half-decent method of connecting those together. :D

With a fairly simple and cheap device plugged into the headphone jack and a laptop with similar software, instant portable laser show!

my brother has a laser for use at parties, it does indeed draw patterns by means of wave forms on x and y axis

:D

I modified the idea even further in one of the YouTube comments I made. Put the soundcard output to .mp3. (I doubt the quantization from compression would distort it too much.) Then you could use the headphone output of any tiny portable MP3 player to act as a controller for the mirror head. (The solenoids for the mirror deflection actually could be modified cheap headphone speakers.) And considering the size of average yet decent laser pointers, this means you'd have a very portable package for a laser show. If the software in the demo is open source, it woudn't take very much to have a really cool and customizable DIY portable laser lightshow. And it would be able to show something much more interesting than only random swirly patterns.

 actually, i dont think the mp3 part makes much difference.. its only the encoding of the audio inside the computer, the signal that comes out of it is just like normal cd audio i think..  normal mp3 player or any normal headset can handle 320kbps sound just fine as well as far as i know.