Shift Register Drivers

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I’ve been using the Texas Instruments TPIC6595 and TPIC6B595 shift register with high current low-side driver ICs for a while for various tasks, usually driving LED lights and displays.

Someone posted a picture of an old gridless Tung-Sol VFD tube on Facebook and I thought to myself, well…. these are neat, but if you wanted to connect them up to a modern microcontroller, you’d need tons of pins unless you can easily multiplex it. TPIC6B595 wouldn’t really help you here as you’d need to drive +30V or so to the anodes.

I remember trying to figure out if there was a nice convenient high-side equivalent to the TPIC6595 series when playing with flip-dot display panels, and came up with nothing. Well, now I searched it again and came up with the MIC5891 which is exactly that, and it’s good to 35 volts! It’d be perfect for driving the VFD anodes.

The Important Fun Note: Driving a display this way with latched drivers will allow you to achieve a completely flicker-free readout, which is VERY important if you want to have your display appear on screen in film/TV applications! ESE clock displays operate like this (though I seem to vaguely recall they use something like 7490’s behind a set of D latches).

I should have known better.

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Well, I made this silly image one day while taking back to back horrible viewer calls over issues with rescanning their TV sets…
Now everyone’s disappointed that every fader cap in the building is not already a small plastic kitty loaf. They want them all to be kitty loaves.

I also want them all to be kitty loaves.

In other news, Facebook blocked me for 24 hours for posting a gif of a cat in a windowsill, claiming it violates their standards on nudity or sexual content. Well, I mean, the cat isn’t wearing any clothes, but then again, most aren’t. I find this fault of machine vision hilarious.

The glow

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Me: Yeah, sure, I’m turning the lights off back here every day to save energy, that’s it.

Also me: this is……. the perfect aesthetic


The powerful fiery orange flow at the end of the aisle there comes from a couple of Elemental video streaming encoders. These units have the coolest front panel… it’s got kind of a snap-on tub that covers the front of the machine with an LED strip in it and plugs into a front panel USB on the machine. These have orange hexagons. An earlier version I used at another station had green circular bubbles reminiscent of an unequal sized circle packing algorithm.
I think the three really brilliant spots of blue light are the old Ultimatte keyers.

Creatures

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Hey, where’d everyone go?

While the humans are social distancing and working from home, the turkeys are trying to take over…

Don’t Let The Turkey Drive The Truck!!!

A previous attempt to take this picture led to a weird little toast popup on my phone that said something about saving the photo, I didn’t catch it. Apparently what happened was it got glitched! Excellent.

I actually kinda miss this. I used to have a weird HTC device that’d do this often and it was kinda excellent.

Cassie says hello!
I feel like somehow this “Dynex” CRT television that serves as an extra prompter display will outlive the entire facility

Alexander Graham Bell’s Evil Quantum Entangled Cock Cage

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Please forgive my unusual reaction, the stress of current events and a grueling work schedule have affected my state of mind a bit.

If I told you too much about this system it’d make your mind snap like an overstretched rubber band

Nobody who works here now was responsible for this all getting so fucked up, they just inherited its load-bearing zombie corpse.

who took my nice fluke anyway