Posts by Retired Spy

Re: Machines that "know what I want"...

I'm still waiting for my Intelligent Programming Assistant. A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, Byte magazine had an article on the perfect personal development environment. It consisted of functionality in the vertical direction (scroll up and down to go from feature to feature) and level of abstraction in the horizontal direction (tabs across the top, like Firefox, with Requirements on the left, then Design, Detailed Design, Pseudocode, and finally Code). Change a requirement and the design would change, all the way down to code. All you would then have to do is make decisions, from the choices laid out by your trusty Intelligent Programming Assistant, starting at the highest level of abstraction and working your way down to the code. It would let you pump out Elegant, Functional, Robust, and Correct code at unprecedented rates, just like Geordi La Forge on the Enterprise.

Sadly, I'm still waiting ... :(

Re: Storage (Pin Braille Type Display)

This sounds very much like a braille output device. They are mounted horizontally, typically only display a single or small number of lines, are driven via electricity and output in braille. I love the idea tho'. Now if I were to try to build one...

(1) 80x24 character pinboard of 7 segment displays (each segment is a hex pin as shown in the current wikipedia entry),

(2) Pins are set in a plate, plate has cams at corners (and centre), cams push plate back to reset pins, retracting the pins below the "screen" surface, clearing the display,

(3) A carriage traverses the the display one character at a time, pushing pins out towards the user,

(4) The carriage carries a set of dies, each of which will push a select group of (7-segment) pins,

(5) The carriage is positioned so the pusher die of the selected symbol is aligned behind the next character cell,

(6) An actuator (pneumatic would have the best sound I think) pushes the pinsetter forward which shoves some of the pins forward, out through a perforated "screen",

(7) A light shining from the side highlights the set pins so you see the letterforms in the contrast between the pins and their shadows,

(8) For cool factor, Y positioning could be done by moving the screen itself vertically up one line as the carriage slides back to the left. So clearing the screen would included dropping it down so the top line of the screen would be printed first.

To drive it, you would need to select a symbol (1 to N, N <= 128) and a horizontal position (1-80). If you process one line at a time, reaching the end of the line would trigger the carriage to return to the first character position of the next line (sound familiar?). This could be done by having the carriage slide along two shafts. One rotates to select the character position (X position), the second shaft rotates to select the character. I would use a sliding tube for the pneumatic actuator (shiny brass like a trombone).

If the die selector was a wheel (daisy wheel printer), you could use modular arithmetic, so the symbol selector shaft would only ever have to rotate in one direction.

You would have to engineer the whole thing to be self-aligning, which is straight forward, but requires some thought. With high strength materials and adequate power a evolved design might get up to 7 or even 10 cps. If you used a ballistic pin driver, you could probably go much faster, tho' at some point you would run into serious material (elastic rebound, wear, jamming, etc) problems since you are pushing serious mass (pins) as opposed to ink.

The attached keyboard would be pretty cool too. People would probably pay you just be able to type and see their output appear on the display...