Tube Time

Here’s a tiny Asteroids arcade machine I built from scratch. It uses a vintage 3″ round cathode ray tube driven from an amplifier board and high voltage supply of my own design.

A friend of mine ported his 6502 emulator to an STM32F4 Discovery board so this arcade machine is able to run the original Asteroids program without any modifications. The STM32F407 processor has two DAC outputs which work perfectly for driving the X and Y deflection inputs on the amplifier board.

Turns out the ST Micro part is really good for driving displays like this. Not only do the DAC outputs work great for deflection, but the hardware floating point really speeds up things like 3D vector rotation.

Come find me at the Bay Area Maker Faire! (May 17 and 18–go buy your tickets now!) I will be located in the Fiesta Hall (the dark room with the Tesla coils). I’ll set up a second arcade machine running some additional demos, including a Super Secret Game. You’ll just have to come and find out what it is.

It’s back! This is a new vector CRT driver setup. The 3D cube is generated by an Arduino driving an 8-bit DAC.

My friends at Evil Mad Scientist have a new kit for sale. It’s a 555 timer circuit that you can build yourself using discrete transistors. You can wire it into all sorts of 555 timer circuits and then probe individual nodes to see how the chip actually works.The circuit board that you get with the kit has silkscreen labels that mark the functional blocks of the circuit, and silkscreened component designators that match up with the “official” Signetics schematic.

The circuit is full of interesting analog electronic design elements. You’ll be able to play with differential pairs, current mirrors, Darlington stages, diode-connected transistors, and more.

It’s a great kit if you want to learn more about how integrated circuits work, or if you’re a fan of the indefatigable 555 timer and want to have a neat conversation piece, or even if you’re just a beginning electronics hobbyist and you want to practice your electronics assembly and soldering skills.

It’s been quite some time since I last posted about this. The project has been on the back burner for some time now since I’ve just been so busy with other things. It’s actually pretty far along the process but the cost of the parts is just too high, and the kit has quite a few parts.

I’ve been revisiting the design again to see if I can make it easier to build and less costly.

A question: Would you consider a version without a DAC? Instead of having an 8-bit digital interface (Arduino compatible), it would have analog X and Y inputs and a video/blanking input.

If the site’s been very slow for you lately, it’s because someone used a PHP injection attack to add some potentially malicious Javascript to the top of the page. It should be fixed now. Thanks to Olli for the tip.