One of the projects I've been working on for a bit is a HUD/ IR vision display system for my carpc. I'm mostly interested in having the gauges displayed, but if I can project the image from my forward camera, bonus. Right now what I've got is a forward facing camera and some hacked together IR illuminators in my fog lights. The big problem I'm having is with proper display of the HUD and focusing it at infinity. The more I experiment and the more I read, getting a properly projected HUD is tough. Then I had an idea while looking at fighter cockpit photos. Many of them have a small projector at the bottom of the HUD. This displays the image directly on the glass (Collimnator) and avoids some of the problems with the projector itself being reflected onto the display. This got me thinking about an old busted camcorder I had. I started thinking about the viewfinder display. It's small (1/2"), so it would be a cinch to find all kinds of optics from the CCTV field. Just a reverse camera. I've got a bunch of half inch lenses I could use. For the light source, I'd replace the bulb with a luxeon star or something along those lines. So I dug up the camera from my scrap box and went to work. There's seven wires going to it. At least a few are for the controls on the side of the viewfinder. Anyone know the proper name for this? Is it a vidicon? That would help googling. Anyone have any ideas of how to drive such a beast? There are two buttons on the side. I'm hoping that accounts for 4 of the lines and the other three are just Signal,+,ground. I've got to see if I can find enough of it to put it back together enough to power it up. I'm curious as it has 4 wires going to the display. I'd think it would only need Signal,+,ground, anyone care to venture a guess or have any experience with how these work? Thanks in advance.
The four wires will be RGB and ground (assuming its colour), I've only seen one before and they weren't very good units, hence why people went to mini TFTs with a pwerful light.
It's a B&W CRT. A CRT is going to have much better contrast than an LCD. From the few projects I've found while googling, fairly bright too. But the main attraction here is size and the abundance of optics that would be available. I found an article on Make, but the post just has tons of pics, no info on the signaling. I found some other similar projects googling, but nothing that's helping me out at the moment.
Got it to work. Looking at the first pic and counting from right to left (rightmost pin = 1, leftmost = 7), 1 = + (I used 6v) 2 = GND 3 = Video. That was easy. Now whether or not it's suitable for my purposes... we'll see.
Yeah, I was suprised there wasn't more to it. Definitely looks like an inverter to me. See the silver box behind the numbered header with the thick wires? There are little pots to adjust the brightness/etc. I have another one of these out of an even older camcorder. One of the early massive ones that took regular tapes and look like the pro rigs today. Oddly enough, the tube is even smaller. It's about the only thing on it that was. Everything else in there were .100 headers and DIPS. Could have been made out of protoboard. It works fine with 6v, with 9v, it won't turn on but doesn't seem to damage it at all. Like there is circuitry in there to detect overvoltage. I don't think you want to overvolt it as there is a slight chance of pesky X-Rays. This might be why you can't put 9v to it. The older tube actually has a warning on it to that effect. Also it's a CRT so high voltage too.
I think some people have done that. One of the few things I found on googling was a reference in a VR Faq, though it lacked details
Don't think it's going to be bright enough for my needs, but anyway, an interesting distraction. I tried to get a pic but my digital camera can't do it. Without the flash, coupled with the long exposure, it just shows up as a bright light. Tried video taping, but you can actually see it being scanned out. So the best I could do is to hold a projection lens in front of it. Between the long exposure and my shaking heads, it's the best I could get.
I'm not big into case modding, (I know probably heresy around here), but you got me thinking. I have some tiny cmos cameras with ir leds. Would make a nifty little "scope" to look in hard to see places.
