Easy Add-on Projects for Amstrad CPC & MSX Computers - Picture Digitiser: Part 1 [TCE #0595]
26Thanks to #PCBWAY for their ongoing support! https://www.pcbway.com/
(This was my first Patreon-exclusive video)
I was rifling through my book collection looking for a Timex Sinclair TS1500 manual and came across this book by Owen Bishop, published in 1986.
Thankfully a good quality scanned copy is available online here:
https://archive.org/details/easy-add-on-projects-for-amstrad-cpc-464-664-6128-and-msx-computers-owen-bishopacme
Let's try to build Project 2, a picture digitiser. On the Amstrad it uses Mode 1 text screen allowing a picture of 23 rows by 40 columns ... at 5mm per "screen pixel" this allows a picture 200 x 115mm to be scanned into Mode 1 text chunkiness. It also uses just four levels of grey.
Project files can be found here:
https://github.com/0ddjob/Easy-Add-on-Projects-for-Amstrad-CPC
I had a thought ... "back in the day" one way to get a colour image if you only had a B&W digitiser was to take the scan three times, once each with a red, green, then blue filter attached. Recombine the images to get a colour image.
So instead of using just a plain white LED, itself a modern improvement, perhaps use an RGB LED ... ?
Anyway, let's see if we can get this one working first. In this first part let's design the PCB that will digitise the image for us. In the next part we will try to 3D design & print the hardware required.
00:00 ... Intro
06:14 ... The Gold Coast
06:45 ... Schematic & PCB design
13:09 ... Design Summary
18:15 ... Channel thanks & outro
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Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio
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/ @whitebataudio