So my dad was a sign hanger/electrician. In the early 80’s he brought home a small demo version of the large time and temp units you would see off express ways in the United States back then. It was small but had maybe like 1024x 50 led matrix (it was very narrow and in a wood case) and he had it so he could program the installed larger units for companies and show employees how to get started posting messages. My mom was charged with learning it because he was NOT a techie guy and didn’t feel like reading the huge manual. It had a very colorful keyboard and you could do a lot of stuff with it. It was the first ‘computer’ to come into our home and shortly after my dad took it back to work we got a computer. Because my mom and me caught the computer bug.
I loved the little quip about Y2K. There were quite a few computers, at a job I had about 7 years ago, that were clearly marked as not being Y2K compatible. Could never be updated anymore, but nothing they could really do. Was running some old avionics test benches that would probably have cost millions trying to redesign with modern hardware.
I used to program one of these for the sign outside my branch of the electronics store I was the computer sales department manager of way waaaay back in 1995!! The exact JVF model!! What a goddamn amazing blast from the past for me! Most of the time it was just updating the default text with certain specials like the Windows 95 launch night but I was able to run the odd cool graphic sometimes too. I wish I still had the software we used, It was floppy based as I recall. I thought it was ancient and cool as hell at the same time when I was programming it, but rarely thought about it as it was just part of my job. OH! while I remember: the reason you had to set the time and date at the start is because that was a default part of the display message, it ran at the start/end of the loop.
I distinctly remember working with one of these while I was in high school in the late 90s. My father was a pharmacist who had one of these in the pharmacy he worked at and the company that produced the disks went out of business. I was able to figure out how to draw new ads for it and kept it going for a while with new content. The one I worked with was a bit older though. It was a 286 and used 5 1/4" floppies, but definitely the same type of display. I remember being able to display the graphics in the corner of my PC monitor in CGA mode, drawing things in pixel-by pixel.
Yeah, I thought the one I programmed was 286-based rather then 386-SX as well, but I remember that it did run off a 3 1/2" floppy disc. I don't know if that was factory installed or an update that a previous owner had made, because we acquired it with the building when we bought it to open the new branch. Also was able to proofread the display off the PC monitor which was a good thing since the signage was mounted way out by the side of the road. Updating that without being able to check it first would have been scary and annoying as hell both.
@@exidy-yt I imagine there was likely was lot of variation in the internal hardware for these things depending on when they were manufactured. The 90s were a crazy time like that, tech was often out of date within months
Our nearby Burger King was displaying "A prob" on its sign for a few weeks. It took a moment for me to realize it was the upper left of a Windows blue screen.
To be fair, I will give that Ebay seller kudos for opening up offers and also selling 2 working units in the same lot with a manual. However, the manual might just be a more recent printout and I do agree that the asking price is a bit steep, though.
It can be fun playing around with these types of signs. I got my hands on two LED sign panels that has a total matrix of 80x16 pixels of bi-colour LEDs. They didn't come with a computer to control them so I had to reverse engineer the panels. I now have a schematic for the panels which allowed me to determine how to control the panels. I have written my own software to drive them. For that "Lite Brite" system you could disassemble the programs that run the display to learn more about it. I wouldn't think it would be difficult to use different fonts but you would need to know the format of the font file.
A couple notes... One, the _reason_ LEDs were being studied -- at TI (where Biard and Pittman worked), RCA, and several industry laboratories, including GE, IBM, Bell Labs, and MIT's Lincoln Lab -- in specific pursuit of laser diodes. This is why they were primarily infrared-emitting and near-infrared-emitting -- IR laser diodes, as we'd call them today, are the heart of a laser cutter, if you can drive 'em, and at the time, the way you made a laser involved two mirrors, one of which was half-silvered, stuck on either end of a large chunk of ruby (!!!), with a rather potent xenon flashbulb-tube wrapped around it. They were all in pursuit of something cheaper than literal hunks of gemstone for making lasers work. Two, as far as I'm aware, while Oleg Losev reported his creation to the scientific community, (a) it was actually built on that of H.J. Round in 1907, who first noted the phenomenon while working with a silicon carbide based "cat's whisker" radio detector, and (b) as far as I can tell, while Georges Destrau, in Marie Curie's lab, as well as the Hungarians Zoltan Bay and Gyorgy Szigeti and a group at Sprague Electric in 1953 composed of Kurt Lehovec, Carl Accardo, and Edward Jamgochian all built on Losev's work... as far as I'm able to tell, Biard and Pittman never knew about Losev at all -- or, at least, while they were doing their work "inventing LEDs" for TI. Their work, from what I can gather, was more likely based on that of Rubin Braunstein at RCA, and since he'd started with gallium arsenide, and I can find no mention of him _ever_ working with silicon carbide (although I admit my search was _hardly_ exhaustive), I believe Braunstein's is original research, not based on prior work. The fact that Biard and Pittman were also working with GaAs-based devices is somewhat supportive of this. Three. Monsanto is better known, even in this day and age, for helping the US Military spray Vietnam full of Agent Orange more than they are anything else, unless you live in one of those roughly squarish states where it's nothing but open fields for as far as you can drive on a single tank of gas. That said, as the son of someone who was a Back-To-The-Land-er in the 80s and early 90s, _literally_ (and not in the hipster sense) doing organic farming before it was cool on a quarter-acre market garden, and selling the produce for a living, thank you for mentioning them in that light. You might also mention just how ruthlessly litigious they are -- it makes Nintendo look positively charitable, by comparison. From what I hear, if you're a farmer, and your neighbor is a farmer, and he's got a contract (without which Monsanto won't touch you, BTW) for Monsanto seeds... and HIS seeds accidentally cross-pollinate with your crops... Monsanto comes and sues YOU because YOU are in breach of contract -- after all, entering into contract is _the only way_ to get those seeds. By the way, you can't sell that crop, either. Even if it wasn't, to some extent, contraband, it's contaminated. That money is burnt before you even got it. Oh, and all their crops are seedless -- you have to get the seeds from them. Seedless grapes, watermelon, etc...? Those are how Monsanto ensures it has return customers. When you realize that, as tight as profit margins are for a restaurant, what a farmer runs on is even thinner -- that head of lettuce you just bought for 50 cents? Farmer Tarmer, if he was lucky, got a whole red cent for that, and the rest went to Dole! -- you realize just how hard-hit this becomes, and how fast. Four. JW Allen and RJ Cherry at SERL in the UK beat Nick Holonyak to the punch by about a year. Five. Monsanto's LEDs, at a nickel apiece single quantity, _are_ in fact considered the first commercially viable LEDs. Also, you _really_ need to have a chat with Fran Blanche about this stuff. It was her 30min geekout-fest video on LEDs that introduced me to her and her channel. Six. On a more personal note. A friend of mine who runs a local computer business gave me an LED sign a couple years ago. Its main processor board has an NEC V20 (I think? Might be a V30) and 512k RAM... and at least two ROM chips. It uses an RS-232 connection to a PC and is old enough that its software only works in... if memory serves, it will install and run in WinXP, but not anything newer, without breaking. The company that made it is no longer in existence, and the rights to repair their equipment -- but not divulge any sort of engineering data, sadly -- have been passed onto the bigger fish that ate them. I'm afraid I don't remember offhand what the software's called or what the company used to be, that made the thing, but I've often wondered if the guts were secretly a cut-down 5150 motherboard implementation. Alas, I'm a hardware guy in the purest of senses, and I have NO idea how to tell. I'll gladly forward you a pair of ROM \*.bin's if you're willing to take a look for me, though...! Seven... does that pet shop sell werewolves, too? I'm in the market... Eight, I had a 386 motherboard like that for a long time... had to get rid of it recently /sniff Nine. Is it just me, or does a 386 seem a tad... overpowered for this kind of work?
Just as a quick addendum to your informative posting: Monsanto doesn't exist anymore as it was acquired by Bayer in 2018. At least, what was left of it (mostly the agriculture division) as parts of Monsanto already went to Pfizer in 2002 (pharmaceutical division). Bayer, not exactly having a squeaky clean vest since WWII, of course has no problems selling "Roundup" today even though the acquision cost them dearly: They had to settle the 10,000+ lawsuits for about $12 billion and its stock went down about 50 % and never really recovered. Now, five years later, investors are talking about breaking up Bayer. The shareholders that owned Bayer and Monsanto stock back then, however, likely got away with a nice share of the $66 billion transaction they engineered so nicely...
Neat. The graphics aesthetic is very similar to the tiny OLED displays you can use with Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Playing with them, you end up searching for old-school bitmap fonts and 1-bit graphics. Too bad it doesn't have at least 64 rows--you could make it into the biggest Arduboy game machine.
The card in the ISA slot is just a bridge that brings the 8-bit ISA bus out to a cable. The custom board has both a floppy controller and the LED sign controller on it. A 386sx is overkill for this thing, given all the I/O is 8 bit ISA, but that's probably what they could get.
Yeah when I scripted I was going off memory and looking at other pics of the sign before I reopened mine. I think I mistakenly called it a floppy controller. The sign dates to 1994.. im guessing they got a smoking deal on 386 hardware and opted for that instead of expensive custom hardware or something.
I remember seeing signs like that in the late 80s. At the time I thought they were really neat, and it later inspired me to build my own LED marquee. But I used a microcontroller and PC which is much easier.
I would love to see you use this to scroll your Patreon members for future videos. Would be super neat (just probably needs a much-smaller font size to fit more characters per line; hopefully that's something that can be figured out in the near future). I would definitely want one, but yeah that price... yikes. Still, very cool!
two things I'd love to see is rule 110, with the panel mounted vertically, or bad apple. also, as with quite a few LED signs, if you put it behind a dark plastic window, then the 2/3 shade should become more distinct.
i made a led pnel with a raspberry pi and two 64x64 hub75 panels and a webinterface and a touchscreen on the back it needs 100 watts at 5v supplied by an pc psu
I once saw the former scoreboard of the gymnasium of my university that was decommissioned and was on the ground. To my surprise, it was a Pentium 200,233 or something like that behind the board. I really liked to tell them give the computer side to me for a money, but I was too shy (or reasonable).
Please watch out for that clock battery on the mother board. Thought I spotted the beginnings of corrosion -- don't want it to leak and destroy that LED matrix. Proprietary LED signage is still a thing, unfortunately. I got saddled with an Inova-branded sign at a job site, dating to 2008. Inova was acquired by another company, and the documentation is buried behind some login screen for a support site I can't sign up for. Customer wants this integrated as part of a new system, but... 🤷♂ Not much I can do.
Wow, fascinating stuff. Although the modern-day microcontroller is Far more powerful than this. My guess on the tech is they used a Custom PLA as a Glue logic for timers and shift registers driving the LED matrix line by line. The brightness is controlled by setting and resetting PWM to power on registers with tri-state outputs. Data movement is assisted by DMA and CPU probably. But 8k for this thing is still Pure Robbery. To convince your wife you can write a sorry greeting on that LED matrix in X86 assembly 😅
Great Video. I have one of these signs that is a bit older than yours (lower serial number) and is using an Intel 286 Motherboard instead of an Intel 386. It was installed in an old Drug Store and still works great. I've been searching around for various example files, do you know of any example file repositories or are willing to share the files you have? I recently compiled the game-of-life program which looks neat as it runs...
My first thought for the Communications -> Send / Receive is IR. If the sign is mounted in an inconvenient place, you can still update it. But then, I guess how would that mode be initiated? Perhaps via IR as well? Hmmmmm
The question at 7:50 can be asked about collecting any old technology. I always find it kind of funny when I'm using a smartphone or modern laptop that has more processing power than my entire collection combined to send some tiny 15kb file to an ancient computer to make it do something basically useless in 2023. Yet, I'm still fascinated by the end result. Most modern games struggle to hold my attention, but I'd probably spend way too much time playing with this sign. Something to be said about simplicity.
Рік тому
The battery on the mainboard looks like it’s leaking - beware of damage by acid. Better remove/replace it.
@@TechTimeTraveller good. I recently found a friend of mine had a similarly small 386-ish motherboard (probably came from me a bunch of years prior) but the varta-style battery had acid-mucked up the board.. (as did a 286 motherboard of mine that i re-found in my basement, but sadly the 286 was far too gone... like a good chunk of a corner of the board was corrosion-crusty.) (I did save a bunch of parts off of the board though, the 286 processor is sitting just to my right at the moment.. wonder what I should build with it?)
Other, far more capable people have been doing that. That's how the Game of Life made it to the sign. I was never a good programmer. But yeah if you Google jvf 2010a you see there's a small community that has really worked at it. I'd love to see some games for it.
@@TechTimeTraveller well you can really just plug a 3dfx or some gpu in it, and add a few megs of ram, and still be able to use teh led matrix at teh same time, since it is also resides on an expansion slot, really you just need a schematic of the isa (pci?) card and teh led driver board, only downside is if teh using vlsi, cpld, and asics, although chip decapping and dumping techinques have gotten vastly easier past 40 years give or take, just need a special laser, or an esp or arduino and some vendor specific programming pulse sent to it, and dump teh lut and raw vhdl or raw verilog logic configurations. only downside is while you can decap ic, still fully functional, you still need someone who can look at em under a microscope and know what teh fuck teh lookin at, otherwise it seems like its mostly of the shelf logic with some ram, and maybe a small dsp or co processor for display rendering
@@TechTimeTraveller youtube lost my comment some how, zdoom supports -width and -height, vanilla doom is 320x200 so it probably wouldnt even look bad scaled to this!
@frogz I know there were a group of guys who were working to reverse engineer the 'video card' for this thing and use it for stuff like that.. but I never saw an update. Only that they figured it was basically a very low res CGA.
LEDs display are way easier to read and a lot less distracting than LCD or any other display technology, it's why you prefer to work on it than working on a LCD screen for example, nothing to do with nostalgia 😉
So my dad was a sign hanger/electrician. In the early 80’s he brought home a small demo version of the large time and temp units you would see off express ways in the United States back then. It was small but had maybe like 1024x 50 led matrix (it was very narrow and in a wood case) and he had it so he could program the installed larger units for companies and show employees how to get started posting messages. My mom was charged with learning it because he was NOT a techie guy and didn’t feel like reading the huge manual. It had a very colorful keyboard and you could do a lot of stuff with it. It was the first ‘computer’ to come into our home and shortly after my dad took it back to work we got a computer. Because my mom and me caught the computer bug.
I loved the little quip about Y2K. There were quite a few computers, at a job I had about 7 years ago, that were clearly marked as not being Y2K compatible. Could never be updated anymore, but nothing they could really do. Was running some old avionics test benches that would probably have cost millions trying to redesign with modern hardware.
I wish I was aware for that. I was a freshman in high school at the time. Legacy hardware is an interesting rabbit hole.
Wasn’t Boeing was it?
I come for the tech tails but stay for the animation and comedy. This is what makes this channel so underrated
The current Like ratio by my phone is 136 to 5. Hardly underrated.
@@cwtrain At 22 hours it's 279 to 5.
It’s true though. Impossible to overrate.
I used to program one of these for the sign outside my branch of the electronics store I was the computer sales department manager of way waaaay back in 1995!! The exact JVF model!! What a goddamn amazing blast from the past for me! Most of the time it was just updating the default text with certain specials like the Windows 95 launch night but I was able to run the odd cool graphic sometimes too. I wish I still had the software we used, It was floppy based as I recall. I thought it was ancient and cool as hell at the same time when I was programming it, but rarely thought about it as it was just part of my job.
OH! while I remember: the reason you had to set the time and date at the start is because that was a default part of the display message, it ran at the start/end of the loop.
"Cat got into the toaster"
I actually LOLed on that! love the humor.
That intro sums everyone's lives up in retro tech xD
Another fascinating video. Thank you Brad and thanks to Brad's wife
I distinctly remember working with one of these while I was in high school in the late 90s. My father was a pharmacist who had one of these in the pharmacy he worked at and the company that produced the disks went out of business. I was able to figure out how to draw new ads for it and kept it going for a while with new content. The one I worked with was a bit older though. It was a 286 and used 5 1/4" floppies, but definitely the same type of display. I remember being able to display the graphics in the corner of my PC monitor in CGA mode, drawing things in pixel-by pixel.
Yeah, I thought the one I programmed was 286-based rather then 386-SX as well, but I remember that it did run off a 3 1/2" floppy disc. I don't know if that was factory installed or an update that a previous owner had made, because we acquired it with the building when we bought it to open the new branch. Also was able to proofread the display off the PC monitor which was a good thing since the signage was mounted way out by the side of the road. Updating that without being able to check it first would have been scary and annoying as hell both.
@@exidy-yt I imagine there was likely was lot of variation in the internal hardware for these things depending on when they were manufactured. The 90s were a crazy time like that, tech was often out of date within months
That would make a great display to emulate the old led handheld games on lol.
Two of them would make a giant Virtual Boy!
I like looking at old Tech I use to setup in the 80's and 90's..
Our nearby Burger King was displaying "A prob" on its sign for a few weeks. It took a moment for me to realize it was the upper left of a Windows blue screen.
To be fair, I will give that Ebay seller kudos for opening up offers and also selling 2 working units in the same lot with a manual. However, the manual might just be a more recent printout and I do agree that the asking price is a bit steep, though.
It can be fun playing around with these types of signs. I got my hands on two LED sign panels that has a total matrix of 80x16 pixels of bi-colour LEDs. They didn't come with a computer to control them so I had to reverse engineer the panels. I now have a schematic for the panels which allowed me to determine how to control the panels. I have written my own software to drive them. For that "Lite Brite" system you could disassemble the programs that run the display to learn more about it. I wouldn't think it would be difficult to use different fonts but you would need to know the format of the font file.
Lmfao!!! The intro was SPOT ON!!
I want a video someday that is all cartoon monolog and then 5 minutes of talking about a roller ball mouse. 😂
A couple notes...
One, the _reason_ LEDs were being studied -- at TI (where Biard and Pittman worked), RCA, and several industry laboratories, including GE, IBM, Bell Labs, and MIT's Lincoln Lab -- in specific pursuit of laser diodes. This is why they were primarily infrared-emitting and near-infrared-emitting -- IR laser diodes, as we'd call them today, are the heart of a laser cutter, if you can drive 'em, and at the time, the way you made a laser involved two mirrors, one of which was half-silvered, stuck on either end of a large chunk of ruby (!!!), with a rather potent xenon flashbulb-tube wrapped around it. They were all in pursuit of something cheaper than literal hunks of gemstone for making lasers work.
Two, as far as I'm aware, while Oleg Losev reported his creation to the scientific community, (a) it was actually built on that of H.J. Round in 1907, who first noted the phenomenon while working with a silicon carbide based "cat's whisker" radio detector, and (b) as far as I can tell, while Georges Destrau, in Marie Curie's lab, as well as the Hungarians Zoltan Bay and Gyorgy Szigeti and a group at Sprague Electric in 1953 composed of Kurt Lehovec, Carl Accardo, and Edward Jamgochian all built on Losev's work... as far as I'm able to tell, Biard and Pittman never knew about Losev at all -- or, at least, while they were doing their work "inventing LEDs" for TI. Their work, from what I can gather, was more likely based on that of Rubin Braunstein at RCA, and since he'd started with gallium arsenide, and I can find no mention of him _ever_ working with silicon carbide (although I admit my search was _hardly_ exhaustive), I believe Braunstein's is original research, not based on prior work. The fact that Biard and Pittman were also working with GaAs-based devices is somewhat supportive of this.
Three. Monsanto is better known, even in this day and age, for helping the US Military spray Vietnam full of Agent Orange more than they are anything else, unless you live in one of those roughly squarish states where it's nothing but open fields for as far as you can drive on a single tank of gas. That said, as the son of someone who was a Back-To-The-Land-er in the 80s and early 90s, _literally_ (and not in the hipster sense) doing organic farming before it was cool on a quarter-acre market garden, and selling the produce for a living, thank you for mentioning them in that light. You might also mention just how ruthlessly litigious they are -- it makes Nintendo look positively charitable, by comparison. From what I hear, if you're a farmer, and your neighbor is a farmer, and he's got a contract (without which Monsanto won't touch you, BTW) for Monsanto seeds... and HIS seeds accidentally cross-pollinate with your crops... Monsanto comes and sues YOU because YOU are in breach of contract -- after all, entering into contract is _the only way_ to get those seeds. By the way, you can't sell that crop, either. Even if it wasn't, to some extent, contraband, it's contaminated. That money is burnt before you even got it. Oh, and all their crops are seedless -- you have to get the seeds from them. Seedless grapes, watermelon, etc...? Those are how Monsanto ensures it has return customers. When you realize that, as tight as profit margins are for a restaurant, what a farmer runs on is even thinner -- that head of lettuce you just bought for 50 cents? Farmer Tarmer, if he was lucky, got a whole red cent for that, and the rest went to Dole! -- you realize just how hard-hit this becomes, and how fast.
Four. JW Allen and RJ Cherry at SERL in the UK beat Nick Holonyak to the punch by about a year.
Five. Monsanto's LEDs, at a nickel apiece single quantity, _are_ in fact considered the first commercially viable LEDs. Also, you _really_ need to have a chat with Fran Blanche about this stuff. It was her 30min geekout-fest video on LEDs that introduced me to her and her channel.
Six. On a more personal note. A friend of mine who runs a local computer business gave me an LED sign a couple years ago. Its main processor board has an NEC V20 (I think? Might be a V30) and 512k RAM... and at least two ROM chips. It uses an RS-232 connection to a PC and is old enough that its software only works in... if memory serves, it will install and run in WinXP, but not anything newer, without breaking. The company that made it is no longer in existence, and the rights to repair their equipment -- but not divulge any sort of engineering data, sadly -- have been passed onto the bigger fish that ate them. I'm afraid I don't remember offhand what the software's called or what the company used to be, that made the thing, but I've often wondered if the guts were secretly a cut-down 5150 motherboard implementation. Alas, I'm a hardware guy in the purest of senses, and I have NO idea how to tell. I'll gladly forward you a pair of ROM \*.bin's if you're willing to take a look for me, though...!
Seven... does that pet shop sell werewolves, too? I'm in the market...
Eight, I had a 386 motherboard like that for a long time... had to get rid of it recently /sniff
Nine. Is it just me, or does a 386 seem a tad... overpowered for this kind of work?
TL,DR.
@@BobKatzenberg Sorry, can't. Just go through it slowly.
Just as a quick addendum to your informative posting: Monsanto doesn't exist anymore as it was acquired by Bayer in 2018.
At least, what was left of it (mostly the agriculture division) as parts of Monsanto already went to Pfizer in 2002 (pharmaceutical division).
Bayer, not exactly having a squeaky clean vest since WWII, of course has no problems selling "Roundup" today even though the acquision cost them dearly:
They had to settle the 10,000+ lawsuits for about $12 billion and its stock went down about 50 % and never really recovered.
Now, five years later, investors are talking about breaking up Bayer.
The shareholders that owned Bayer and Monsanto stock back then, however, likely got away with a nice share of the $66 billion transaction they engineered so nicely...
@@oldguy9051 Sooo... business as usual, I suppose... literally! ;)
@@laserhawk64 Exactly! ;-)
I still have mine and I used to convert pinball DMD animations to the sign which worked really well.
Neat. The graphics aesthetic is very similar to the tiny OLED displays you can use with Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Playing with them, you end up searching for old-school bitmap fonts and 1-bit graphics. Too bad it doesn't have at least 64 rows--you could make it into the biggest Arduboy game machine.
Exceltronix made a similar sign for businesses and Toronto TTC subways. Thanks for sharing
I draw like this on my Psion 5 during meetings. Lots of fun!
The card in the ISA slot is just a bridge that brings the 8-bit ISA bus out to a cable. The custom board has both a floppy controller and the LED sign controller on it. A 386sx is overkill for this thing, given all the I/O is 8 bit ISA, but that's probably what they could get.
could also be familiarity, software wise
Yeah when I scripted I was going off memory and looking at other pics of the sign before I reopened mine. I think I mistakenly called it a floppy controller. The sign dates to 1994.. im guessing they got a smoking deal on 386 hardware and opted for that instead of expensive custom hardware or something.
Seems to me an Arduino/atmel would have a hard time running all those LEDs without a slow refresh.
An analog to your observation that 2/3rds is indistinguishable from full brightness has saved me a lot of ink and toner over the years.
HELL YES ! ... Good job on LED history ...
I remember seeing signs like that in the late 80s. At the time I thought they were really neat, and it later inspired me to build my own LED marquee. But I used a microcontroller and PC which is much easier.
I would love to see you use this to scroll your Patreon members for future videos. Would be super neat (just probably needs a much-smaller font size to fit more characters per line; hopefully that's something that can be figured out in the near future). I would definitely want one, but yeah that price... yikes. Still, very cool!
Dang I missed an opportunity there! Definitely will try this next time! Thanks for the suggestion!
@@TechTimeTraveller please do not tell me you spent $8,000 on this thing.
Just found one for like $600 on eBay, local pickup only.
@@TechTimeTraveller in the listing, had two of them for $600
What an interesting piece, thanks for sharing it with us! Very entertaining and informative.
two things I'd love to see is rule 110, with the panel mounted vertically, or bad apple.
also, as with quite a few LED signs, if you put it behind a dark plastic window, then the 2/3 shade should become more distinct.
Now hook this up to a 2-bit Game Boy Camera with a live feed to this display!
Great video again.
I love the intros you put together :DDD
i made a led pnel with a raspberry pi and two 64x64 hub75 panels and a webinterface and a touchscreen on the back it needs 100 watts at 5v supplied by an pc psu
Thank you for taking the time to show us this device!
I once saw the former scoreboard of the gymnasium of my university that was decommissioned and was on the ground. To my surprise, it was a Pentium 200,233 or something like that behind the board. I really liked to tell them give the computer side to me for a money, but I was too shy (or reasonable).
Please watch out for that clock battery on the mother board. Thought I spotted the beginnings of corrosion -- don't want it to leak and destroy that LED matrix. Proprietary LED signage is still a thing, unfortunately. I got saddled with an Inova-branded sign at a job site, dating to 2008. Inova was acquired by another company, and the documentation is buried behind some login screen for a support site I can't sign up for. Customer wants this integrated as part of a new system, but... 🤷♂ Not much I can do.
Halloween signage fun times.
Wow, fascinating stuff. Although the modern-day microcontroller is Far more powerful than this.
My guess on the tech is they used a Custom PLA as a Glue logic for timers and shift registers driving the LED matrix line by line.
The brightness is controlled by setting and resetting PWM to power on registers with tri-state outputs.
Data movement is assisted by DMA and CPU probably.
But 8k for this thing is still Pure Robbery.
To convince your wife you can write a sorry greeting on that LED matrix in X86 assembly 😅
That's nuts!
The game of life is Turing complete. So once you get it running you can compute anything.
Cool.
👍👍👍😜 Electronics is always cool!
"It's only $8000 " Tammy Wynette's DIVORCE begins to play.
damn, exhibition? i always saw them at the skydome, but i guess i’m just a kid
My Dad took me for a couple games at the Ex. Think I saw a concert of some sort there also once.
Great Video. I have one of these signs that is a bit older than yours (lower serial number) and is using an Intel 286 Motherboard instead of an Intel 386. It was installed in an old Drug Store and still works great. I've been searching around for various example files, do you know of any example file repositories or are willing to share the files you have? I recently compiled the game-of-life program which looks neat as it runs...
Add a CHIP-8 interpreter and play games in 64x32 res.
2:05: GET THAT VARTA PUPPY OUT OF THERE! GET THE DAMN BATTERY OUT! (That is, unless you want this tech rarity of a find to go under.)
Yeah soon as I opened and saw it it got excised.
My first thought for the Communications -> Send / Receive is IR. If the sign is mounted in an inconvenient place, you can still update it. But then, I guess how would that mode be initiated? Perhaps via IR as well? Hmmmmm
I assume someone's gonna port Bad Apple to it, put in a sound card.
I'm sory Dave, I'm afraid I cant do that -Hal
Someone needs to program video drivers for Windows 3.x and 95 for this!
The question at 7:50 can be asked about collecting any old technology. I always find it kind of funny when I'm using a smartphone or modern laptop that has more processing power than my entire collection combined to send some tiny 15kb file to an ancient computer to make it do something basically useless in 2023. Yet, I'm still fascinated by the end result. Most modern games struggle to hold my attention, but I'd probably spend way too much time playing with this sign. Something to be said about simplicity.
The battery on the mainboard looks like it’s leaking - beware of damage by acid. Better remove/replace it.
Someone should make a port of Wolfenstein 3D for this.
GET RID OF THE VARTA BATTERY!!!
It was removed before I closed her back up.
@@TechTimeTraveller good. I recently found a friend of mine had a similarly small 386-ish motherboard (probably came from me a bunch of years prior) but the varta-style battery had acid-mucked up the board.. (as did a 286 motherboard of mine that i re-found in my basement, but sadly the 286 was far too gone... like a good chunk of a corner of the board was corrosion-crusty.) (I did save a bunch of parts off of the board though, the 286 processor is sitting just to my right at the moment.. wonder what I should build with it?)
48 line resolution viewed on a 4K TV LOL
can it play doom?
It can do the title screen probably...
@@TechTimeTraveller sounds like a plan XD
there are currently 386 likes...I /want/ to click like, but I don't have the heart!
:)
19:25 why not dump and disassemble all teh roms and software, and reverse engineer teh expansion pcb....
Other, far more capable people have been doing that. That's how the Game of Life made it to the sign. I was never a good programmer. But yeah if you Google jvf 2010a you see there's a small community that has really worked at it. I'd love to see some games for it.
@@TechTimeTraveller well you can really just plug a 3dfx or some gpu in it, and add a few megs of ram, and still be able to use teh led matrix at teh same time, since it is also resides on an expansion slot, really you just need a schematic of the isa (pci?) card and teh led driver board, only downside is if teh using vlsi, cpld, and asics, although chip decapping and dumping techinques have gotten vastly easier past 40 years give or take, just need a special laser, or an esp or arduino and some vendor specific programming pulse sent to it, and dump teh lut and raw vhdl or raw verilog logic configurations. only downside is while you can decap ic, still fully functional, you still need someone who can look at em under a microscope and know what teh fuck teh lookin at, otherwise it seems like its mostly of the shelf logic with some ram, and maybe a small dsp or co processor for display rendering
those aren't clouds, they're doodies floating in water.
Play doom on it
can it run doom?
It probably could! Just have to make Doom run in a very low res CGA. :)
@@TechTimeTraveller youtube lost my comment some how, zdoom supports -width and -height, vanilla doom is 320x200 so it probably wouldnt even look bad scaled to this!
@frogz I know there were a group of guys who were working to reverse engineer the 'video card' for this thing and use it for stuff like that.. but I never saw an update. Only that they figured it was basically a very low res CGA.
This is my white whale , So wanted it , My high school had one and it was gone so i asked and just missed it , other kid got it for 20$..
Bad apple??
But can it play Doom? 🤣
Please do not tell me you actually spent $8,000 on that thing.
Just found one on eBay for like $600
I would buy it but I don't have the money.
No.. I got mine for free in exchange. I wouldn't even pay $600. They're pretty old now.
Yep. Why buy a sing like that when you can buy a bigger TV for a few hundred dollars brand new. And run a loop vedio
So it's typical French software obscurity. 😑
I love your timestamp titles, Characteristically silly intro indeed
LEDs display are way easier to read and a lot less distracting than LCD or any other display technology, it's why you prefer to work on it than working on a LCD screen for example, nothing to do with nostalgia 😉