My Christmas present to myself - MUTR mechanical televisor

[Panrock]

At last, a mechanical televisor is available to the public again. I've just ordered one for myself.

http://www.mutr.co.uk/prodDetail.aspx?prodID=1420

Steve

[Kat Manton]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for pointing this out, I might just have to ask Santa for one as well as the Enigma-E kit already on the list...

Cheers, Kat

[ppppenguin]

If it complies with the original Baird standard or the 32 line SSTV standard then Darryl's first converter will work. That's the more expensive multistandard design, not the popular £150 unit.

[DoctorWho]

I don't blame you Paul, it's well worth having. What do the metric sizes quoted convert to in English, that is, Inches?

Thanks for that Jeffrey, I have been musing with feeding the audio from The Dawn Of Television CD ROM 30-line recordings to it, presumably these may give a fair picture if it is 30-lines? If so it may well be worth talking to Darryl about a converter for it, as I rather like the idea of watching 30-line Television over-the-air as it were, and then you're equipped of course should an original Baird Televisor come along.

Great stuff!

[Kat Manton]

Hi,

I found a movie of this in action on "YouTube".

"The image is tricky to view as you have to sit dead square onto the tiny image and it's ever harder to film. The light diffusor works ok on the naked eye but the LED appear to shine straight through and into the camera lens causing an annoying hot spot on the movie. Also the annoying vertical black bar you see scanning over the image is an artefact generated by the lack of synchronisation between the televisor and my digi-cam. You don't see that in real life."

Cheers, Kat

[Panrock]

Originally Posted by ppppenguin

If it complies with the original Baird standard or the 32 line SSTV standard then Darryl's first converter will work. That's the more expensive multistandard design, not the popular £150 unit.

From the handbook, downloadable as a .pdf from
http://www.nbtv.wyenet.co.uk/hot.htm this appears to be a 30-line (not 32-line) system.

Originally Posted by DoctorWho

Thanks for that Jeffrey, I have been musing with feeding the audio from The Dawn Of Television CD ROM 30-line recordings to it, presumably these may give a fair picture if it is 30-lines?

Yes this should indeed be possible, even though it apparently won't work from the readily-available NBTVA CDs.

I should also be able to plug one of the colour channels from my 30-line mechanical camera into it for live pictures - and also view the kit CD at higher quality (in one colour) on my monitor.

Originally Posted by Kat Manton

"The image is tricky to view as you have to sit dead square onto the tiny image and it's ever harder to film. The light diffusor works ok on the naked eye but the LED appear to shine straight through and into the camera lens causing an annoying hot spot on the movie. Also the annoying vertical black bar you see scanning over the image is an artefact generated by the lack of synchronisation between the televisor and my digi-cam. You don't see that in real life."

When trying to film my own system off-screen, I didn't have this LED shine-through problem, as my monitor has 120 LEDs (not 1) and they all mix on a diffusing screen behind the disc. However I did have the black bar problem. So that animation I recently posted was assembled from individual still frame captures.

See also http://www.nbtv.org/kit.htm for useful detailed photos of this new kit.

Steve

[tubesrule]

Originally Posted by DoctorWho

Thanks for that Jeffrey, I have been musing with feeding the audio from The Dawn Of Television CD ROM 30-line recordings to it, presumably these may give a fair picture if it is 30-lines? If so it may well be worth talking to Darryl about a converter for it, as I rather like the idea of watching 30-line Television over-the-air as it were, and then you're equipped of course should an original Baird Televisor come along.

Great stuff!

I was asked a while back by some NBTV members if a version of the low cost converter could be made to do 30/32 line. By stripping out all the unnecessary bits like the audio section, the RF modulators, the FLASH memory and associated connectors, a unit could be built that would accept an NTSC/PAL input, and output 30/32 line video for cost of around $200 (about £100). It would still have selectable features of the larger unit like positive/negative video, gamma correction, etc.

Unfortunately there was very little interest in this project, so it never went anywhere.

Darryl

[jim_beacon]

My kit arrived today. It is a niceley put together kit, and will be built in the next day or two.

It is a 32 line unit.

Jim.

[DoctorWho]

Thanks for the info Jim, glad to know you have got yours successfully.

It's a shame that it's 32 line, as this will not all.ow the playback of the Baird recordings, but hopefully Darryl may be able to come up with a converter? If so I'll definitely be ordering one.

Peter.

[ppppenguin]

Darryl's multistandard converter will certainly do 32 line output.

As for converting 30 line sources to 32 line, I suspect that's a software job running on a PC.

[Panrock]

If you want 30-lines, why not simply make a 30-line disc yourself and fit that instead?

Steve

[jim_beacon]

Just finished building mine, worked first go, and includes a built in test card (what I thought was an 8 pin op-amp was a serial microcontroller!).

Jim.

[yagosaga]

For those which are interested: I have posted three videos on Youtube, showing the video performance of a 32 line Nipkow disk monitor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DFcYRxFdTI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dmY43KeBuE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osF5gg6RKL4

But as one can notice I haven't found a solution for the problem of vertical interference bars, resulting from different frame rates (digital camera vs. Nipkow disk).

Kind regards,
Eckhard

[Courtney Louise]

A quick question to anyone who is using one of these kits... Is it a white or coloured led?

Thanks guys

Andi

[jim_beacon]

It's an red/orange LED

Jim.

[Courtney Louise]

Hmmm... I am guessing they used that to make it feel more original. I wonder how it would look with a white LED?

Andi

[yagosaga]

Originally Posted by Jarl Ayari

Hmmm... I am guessing they used that to make it feel more original. I wonder how it would look with a white LED?

To avoid unnecessary misunderstanding: I have not used this commercial Baird televisor for the video but a self-constructed Nipkow scanning disk monitor. It works with a NBTV scanning disk from Peter Yanczer and with 10 white LEDs.

Informations about this monitor are here:
http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...anningdisc.htm

Eckhard

[Radio_Dave]

Don't know if this will help you guys, but there's a little program at the bottom of this page that claims to convert any video file (that Windows Media Player can play) into 32 line colour narrow band (black and white compatible)

http://users.tpg.com.au/users/gmillard/nbtv.htm

There's a viewer too!

David

[yagosaga]

Originally Posted by Radio_Dave

Don't know if this will help you guys, but there's a little program at the bottom of this page that claims to convert any video file (that Windows Media Player can play) into 32 line colour narrow band (black and white compatible)
http://users.tpg.com.au/users/gmillard/nbtv.htm

This is the software which I use for converting .AVI files into the NBTV standard for my Nipkow disk monitor.

The older black and white version has a larger sync bar which improves synchronisation. The newer version with the colour option has a smaller sync bar to give more space to video content. This needs a much longer time to get the scanning disk into synchronisation.

Please PM me if somebody need the older b/w version.

Eckhard.

[radioman]

Hi everyone,
I have scanned the two articles mentioned above which give details on how to build a narrow bandwidth television - enjoy

NBTV1.zip

Regards,
Andy