eBay: Omni-Ray for sale!

[marta_kson]

Not my auktion.

There is an Omni-Ray display module up for sale on eBay! USD28 BiN. Maybe of some interest for someone here.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-Vintage-Burroughs-Spherical-Display-SD-12-by-Motorola-NOS-/232058166002?hash=item3607be9af2:g:I8QAAOSw6n5XvRdF

[A.J. Franzman]

Someone got a steal, those are super rare! Seller is probably not a member here, or he might have known better than to put a BIN on it. I'll bet the buyer is one of us.

[gregebert]

I almost bought it on a whim, but there was only 1. From what I could gather from a bit of websearching, it's a numerical indicator that uses a bunch of dots to create the characters. I would be very surprised if it was an actual array of individual bulbs or LEDs; the illustration I saw would suggest at least 20x20 dot pattern and that wasn't possible with LEDs in 1969 (based on the date code I saw in the ebay photo).

Anyone here have more details ? 

[marta_kson]

Anyone here have more details ? 

The german Nixie King have some info on his page: http://www.tube-tester.com/sites/nixie/data/SD12W/SD12W-28V.htm

I have a couple of heavily damaged units. They have been exposed to bad environment and the film with the pattern that creates the digits are mostly destroyed. Otherwise I had bought this one and built a 12h clock with three units as one of mine shows the numbers 1..12. Or at least was ment to do...

[A.J. Franzman]

Yes, it makes a dot-matrix sort of pattern, but not bulb-per-dot. Like ordinary projection readuts, it uses one bulb per symbol, but rather than one lens and one image per bulb, it uses an array of lenses and some optical masking trickery to create the symbols.

[John Rehwinkel]

> I have a couple of heavily damaged units. They have been exposed to bad environment and the film with the pattern that creates the digits are mostly destroyed.

The lenses would be hard to re-create, but the film might be doable by laser printing a pattern onto the sort of clear acetate sheets used for transparencies. There would be some geometry and mathematics involved to figure out the pattern to print, but once that was solved, you could make custom symbols. You might even be able to make coloured symbols if you had a way to print transparent coloured ink (or you could use coloured bulbs or LEDs, but with with the right pattern, you could have multicoloured symbols).

- John

[A.J. Franzman]

The pattern on the film isn't that difficult to figure out, though printing it in perfect alignment at exactly the right scale might be a challenge. For each "lenslet" (pixel) in the array, there must be 12 possible clear dots in the film, aligned similarly to the bulbs but inverted. For each displayable symbol, the dot corresponding to that bulb's position will be either clear or black. So to light a "0", the dots on the film in the zero position in front of each lenslet must be set appropriately for the shape of the "0". If you're really clever you could even try antialiasing the curved and angled edges of the symbols...

Near the top and bottom center of the Message Assembly, should be several pixels with 10 of the 12 possible dots being clear - every symbol but the decimals will light those pixels where they all intersect. Conversely, the upper corners of the film should be solid black since nothing should ever be lit there; judging by the size of the "3" and "4" shown on Dieter's page, none of the symbols should occupy the full width of the top of the screen, nor even extend fully into one upper corner.

[John Rehwinkel]

> The pattern on the film isn't that difficult to figure out, though printing it in perfect alignment at exactly the right scale might be a challenge. For each "lenslet" (pixel) in the array, there must be 12 possible clear dots in the film, aligned similarly to the bulbs but inverted. For each displayable symbol, the dot corresponding to that bulb's position will be either clear or black. So to light a "0", the dots on the film in the zero position in front of each lenslet must be set appropriately for the shape of the "0". If you're really clever you could even try antialiasing the curved and angled edges of the symbols...

Exactly. It's probably possible to knock it out in a couple dozen lines of PostScript (possibly by abusing the halftone screen mechanism), with your choice of fonts.

- John