Doing extremely Soviet things with a vintage neon plasma matrix display - MC6205 part 1
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 2 июл 2024
- Have you ever noticed those monochromatic orange screens in 1960s-80s sci fi? Or have you seen orange computer displays from 1980s hardware? Those are neon gas discharge displays; an early form of plasma screen display, derived from Nixie tubes.
The Elektronika MC6205 (sometimes called MS6205) is a Soviet designed neon gas discharge display. It was used in a variety of consumer and military applications, and unusually was manufactured for a few years following the fall of the Soviet Union. It consists of the display unit itself ( ГИП-10000 or GIP-10000), in combination with a series of control boards to produce a text output.
The example here was produced in Ukraine in the mid 1990s and shows significant improvements over earlier models. I have used it to provide live updates for destroyed Russian vehicles for the ongoing war in Ukraine. However, it could be used to display pretty much any text data available online. It uses and ESP32 and Arduino code, although I'll be switching to Micropython for part 2.
These displays are configured to display text only. However, in the near future I will be converting this to a full graphical display.
00:00 Introduction
01:25 Working Principle
05:11 Disassembly (spelled wrong on the title card)
11:04 How to Build
14:30 Future Work
Code and instructions available here:
github.com/lambdaBoost/MC6205...
Sources:
MS6205 Arduino library by Holzachr
github.com/holzachr/MS6205-ar...
Oryx vehicle tracker:
www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02...
Doing a great job. You're the first person other than my late father to mention UV reprogrammed EEPROMs. He worked in coal mines as a maintenance electrician for almost 30 years, and had countless stories about all sorts of interesting things like that.
It is eprom. Eeprom is electrically eraseable memory. Eprom needs the uv light to get rid of the static electrical charge of the memory cells.
The industrial computer "Cursor" used one of those displays- and had built-in BASIC. Apparently it was used as a microprocessor training system, but it was a full desktop system which could be used for industrial control purposes, and it is built like a tank.
Pre-led matrix display, its a vibe.
This made me subscribe twice over. Brilliant!
Very interesting tech from those pesky soviets, nice teardown and explanation as well! I may have to get my hands on one of these.
Here before this blows up
I'm getting a better camera/mic if that happens!
i always assumed those things were filaments in the shape of numbers i had no idea they worked that way thats fascinating
2D arrays on Arduino are pretty easy because it’s C++ so you can abstract stuff out and access things using a nicer syntax. I’m sure someone out there has a small header only implementation of a 2D bill array that stores bools as bits. But certainly Python would be nicer. That’s why you’d want to run muPython on ESP32 or anything else for that matter :)
I ended up using micropython on a pi pico in the end. It was far from simple: it’s far too slow to refresh properly but I got past that limitation by using the PIO on the pico.
Only 13 subs? The algorithm has some explaining to do lol
Nice video!
Thanks! I'm hoping to produce videos a little more regularly in the future so hopefully I'll have more subs soon - I'm still new to this.
Awesome
Ok, I need to get my hands on one of those displays, it's so cute ! I will hook it to an STM32 Nucleo board and turn it into a Blyatendo
Never seen an E-prom? I hated those things. Sometimes they wouldn’t completely clear… made trouble shooting fun.
How did you get tetris working?
This is so steampunkish or dieselpunkish.
Well I have been playing a lot of Highfleet recently
8:14 my dad had a company that made eeprom programmers thats the only reason I know
schematics from before American companies decided that you should not fix your own tech.
woah
Could you please share code for tetris with us? :)
Right here. It doesn’t really work properly though since i threw it together very quickly just for the video. You could probably fix it:
github.com/lambdaBoost/MC6205-graphical-display/blob/main/mc6205/tetris/tetris/tetris.ino
Tetris!!! 🤣
Really love your wit and everything I have seen you've done.
I sub'd. Hi from California!
Slava Ukraine!
Thanks! I wish I could produce videos more frequently. The next should be a bit better quality- I’m working on my editing skills.
fuck, i was interested, then i saw the nazi slogan. i cant watch this.
the "slava ukraini" is a term that originated from a far right theorist back in the 1910s and was primarily used as a slogan by far right nationalist ukrainian groups and Nazi organizations, and used today by many neo nazi and nationalist groups in ukraine.
donetsk autonomy.
Even if all that is true (I think you’re cherry picking), that is very clearly not what it means now. It’s a slogan of defiance against Russian aggression and has been repeated by many world leaders in support of Ukraine.
@@Alexander-the-ok that is when the term emerged, and a lot of times, yeah, it may be used to signal opposition to russian aggression, but it is still widely seen as a nazi slogan, especially by far right nationalists and neo-nazis in ukraine, especially sects in its military.
but just because it is used as that doesn't excuse it, a lot of world leaders dont know what they are supporting, like Trudeau's whole nazi veteran controversy.
anyways, i guess you didnt know any of this, so im sorry for the initial aggression, obviously dont take it from me, you can do your own research, just dont take it at face value from the guardian headlines either, actually look at sources and stuff
That’s ok (don’t worry, im not a guardian reader - I have no interest in that crap). It’s probably worth pointing out that at the time I made this video my channel mainly focused on doing cool stuff with old soviet electronics. When the invasion happened I wanted to make very clear I’m not one of those insufferable ‘the Soviet Union was fantastic’ idiots.
@@Alexander-the-ok thats fair, definitely good to lay that down as a baseline, and im not dissing the guardian specifically i just have seen a few ridiculous headlines lol
Cringe.
Oryx just announced he has quit. The reason? Because he can no longer pass off photos of ruined Ukrainian tanks as having belonged to Russia. As they have run out of Soviet stocks and are using mostly EU/US made gear from this point on. 😂
Ok mobik
@@curiousentertainment3008 It's been 6 months where is he?
@@SpicyTake What point are you making with this? Oryx stated they weren’t making money for the insane amount of work so the founders Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans stopped personally updating equipment losses but Oryx clarified that the list covering losses in Russia's invasion of Ukraine would continue to be updated until the end of the war by long-time contributor Jakub Janovsky and the open-source intelligence group WarSpotting.
@@SpicyTake also how does it feel to have a supposed ally verify to all you vatnik mobik meat cubes vaunted kinzal (misspelled intentionally cuz idc) is a piece of trash.
@@SpicyTake I’m obviously not going to convince you of anything nor are you going to convince me of anything. So unless you were to meet me face to face (which for both of us I hope never happens.) and have a discussion we will never speak again.
Awesome