Maybe it was dropped at some point in it's life, dislodging the 32bit rod and the end springs. Great job fixing it though, you are now an authorised I.E.E. repair agent and your warranty can be reinstated... (no cover for the bulb though... very sorry)
Would agree, at 7:56 the coppery coloured plate that the rod fits into has isn't straight- it's bent backwards noticeable to the point it's separated from the silver die casting( you can see a gap where there's none on the other two. Probably been pushed by the rod when something's hit the other end of the rod( possibly the other end got smacked when it was dropped on its face) So now I guess it has forward backward play, which was why it fell out of its track
There really is something satisfying about seeing some old clearly "obsolete" piece of electronic equipment brought back to life. The next step is to find a way to actually use this in a larger piece of gear. If only you had 4 you could make a clock out of it.
I wonder if possible for a modern maker to make something similar - perhaps laser cut black anodised aluminium foil and 3d print the rest. 4 bits initially...
@@AntonyTCurtis photo etching would also be a good idea. If the plates are somewhat easy to remove, someone who has a display like this could scan them. People at home could then print them onto overhead projector sheets and use those to expose photoresist-coated sheet metal. Then, the sheet metal can be etched. Pretty much like you do with circuit boards and the way shadow masks for CRTs were made. Now i'm thinking of it, maybe you can even print it on a sheet of baking paper and do the toner transfer method to get the toner onto a thin piece of glass or plastic.
I don't think that a clock would use anywhere near the full potential of that thing. After all it can do the alphabet. You could for example make it spell out the names of new patrons. And by adding a moving platform it could write in long exposure photographs. Add in RGB cob and you have yet more options for your text.
@@MrScoopoo10 Only when it updates. The clicking might actually be useful as a reminder to check the sign again. It would need red and green colors and a right facing triangular arrow.
On the topic of the switching order: The main solenoid lifts the character plates, which allows the selector solenoids to freely rotate the selector arms. Depressing the selector switch, then lifting the character plates while holding down the selector will cause the selector arms to rub against the selection teeth on the character plates. I suspect the best order of operations for this device would be to depress the switch that lifts the plates (set pulse), then, while holding that, depressing the switch to set the selector arms (bit/signal pulse). Now with both switches pressed, release the switch holding the character plates up, which lets them settle onto the selector arms. Now that the character plates are effectively holding the selector arms in place, the second switch can be released. This order of operations agrees with the description in the manual. The set pulse must be at least 30ms, the bit pulse must be at least 50ms, the time between bit pulse going high and set pulse going low must be at least 30ms, and the time between the set pulse going low and the bit pulse going low must be at least 20ms.
I was wondering if the switch for the selection signal was even "expected"; that perhaps the bit signal would be sent continuously, and then the set pulse would simply display whatever was being requested at the time it was triggered. But I can see the concern that the selector arms could be pressing against the teeth in unhealthy ways.
@@tissuepaper9962 Because back then you didn’t have a word processor to merge all this stuff together. It would be a copy and paste job with actual glue and someone would have had to draw the diagram in ink. They probably didn’t have anyone to do it at the time (maybe all their drafts people were busy or whatever). Nowadays that timing diagram would have taken about as long to draw out on a computer as typing this comment took on an on-screen keyboard… Progress isn’t always a bad thing.
Fran, your enthusiasm is contagious! Plus, your brilliance and stick-to-it-tiveness is amazing. To call you a “renaissance woman” would be an understatement.
I just wanted to say, having just watched the first video and luckily having found this one as well, the moment you showed off the front in the first video, my eyes locked onto that 32 bit being too far down, and the whole time my mind was screaming, including for the first half of this video, "PLEASE NOTICE IT ISN'T ENGAGING"... and my absolute relief when you did was something I needed to voice. Thank you, so, so much.
I could see yesterday that the back 2 plates seemed to be stuck together and I was screaming at the tv (ok, only in my head) look, look! Lol. Glad you had a go at fixing it that was satisfying to watch... Next program up a pi to drive it and get it to spell out Fran Lab 😋
On page 8, it says you can connect up to 4 together! ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=5531927 If it's possible to find 3 more, it would be even better!
I can't imagine more satisfying videos. Few days ago I had no idea such a technology even existed. Now I know exactly how it works, I've seen it being repaired, I saw every character. 100% completion. I love it!
@@originalveghead I know, I was having a bit of fun... mind you, there is nothing wrong with a good bodge if it gets sonmething working properly. Stay safe. ( edited because my typing is decidedly average today.)
Interesting note, the Nimo tube and the Bina-View were both products of the same company, Industrial Electronic Engineers (I.E.E). And as some else stated it's still in business today making what else ... Displays.
Fran, you crack me up. Part detective, part engineer, and part the amazement of a kid. Well done. Enjoyed seeing this very interesting piece of gear and you efforts in getting it going. Always fun to check in to see what you are up to. Stay safe and thanks for keeping us entertained and educated.
I am a machinist by trade ... and instrument designer/tech ... and design and build industrial electrical control panels. This is sooooooo fascinating on so many levels! Awesome job explaining the operation in your last video and fixing it in this one! Hats off to you !
I think the datasheet actually tells you to activate the data and latch at the same time. After 30 ms you release just the latch (causing the selected plate to drop) and after another 20 ms you are free to also release the data. The way you did it (first energizing the data) shouldn't impact the way it works, it just wastes the power you put into the data-coils before you activate the latch.
Another option is to pulse one bit at a time, 30ms each, then release the latch. To interface with tube systems, the 6.3V bulb can be driven by the cathode heating voltage while the 24V solenoids are driven from tube-switching 26V power rails. (Tubes are similar to FET transistors). For electronic interfacing, a 2N7002 chip can control all 7 solenoids from TTL level signals like an UART chip or an Arduino, The Arduino could do the ASCII to bini character mapping and control the timing to display something like a chess move or code ID. But so could a small pack of 74xx chips, with a pair of 74121s providing the master pulses fed to and gates. Perhaps a diode matrix could form the core logic and mapping table, with some 22 pin 4-to-16 decoder chips decoding incoming bytes to ROM columns (3-to-8 decoder chips would be needed in larger quantity, a diode logic column selector would need a bunch of inverter/buffer chips). Diode logic obviously needs germanium transistors to stay within the 0.4V margin between 0.4V low outputs and 0.8V low inputs.
This display is mind-blowing. And then, without a manual, you repaired it. Wow. Just... wow. And nowhere else can I learn about this obsolete, obscure tech. Fran, please never stop making this stuff. Can't find the video I was going to comment on, but the haters can seethe all they like. You've run a great company, making products so cool that some people collect them. Your tour of the Wanamaker organ was, for an organ nut like me, astounding-- nobody else on TH-cam goes inside the console, gets into the chests, watches them restore pipes. You just keep being your amazing, talented, cool self, and if someone else has a problem with it, that problem is all and only theirs.
It's such a hilariously complex, error-prone solution to a nowadays trivial problem. But more importantly, it's a thing of beauty, especially the noises it makes. That click-clacking, so satisfying!
You are now the foremost authority on Bina-View displays. I think that these older electro-mechanical displays are easier to repair than their digital counterparts.
Nice job on a part 2! I am sure a lot of people were, like me, screaming at the screen that the right unit was too low. Glad you found it and trimmed it with your tongue at the right angle.
Thanks for making these videos Fran, they fill the hole left now I can't visit my engineer friends. They're just like you. In fact, one of them looks almost exactly like you. They almost exclusively repair vintage valve amplifiers, but if it's obscure; they love that stuff. I wish they'd watch your videos, but they are too busy with repairing random stuff.
This is INSANE! I LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS! From the other video I watched before this, I could tell that the “4/5/6” bits weren’t moving. And then I thought, wait, there’s no wire wrap for the last three solenoids... until you said they were inverted. I knew it had to be an alignment issue. This is so so cool! I love electromechanical things! And this thing must have been a mathematical nightmare to design and build, and figure out. Thank you so much for this video!
Y'know, with so many unused addresses in there, all you would need to do is find a metal sheet of the right thickness and a laser cutter, and you could design and build additional glyphs for that beauty!
There's only space for maybe 4 or 5 additional plates though. The full 64-character versions (if they even existed, the order sheet doesn't seem to imply anything greater than mid-40s) would have needed a longer "rack" for everything to sit in. But that'd still be enough for the old J, K and L Wingdings... And the resolution is enough that it should be possible to just about construct a readable "Fran [Lab]" logo, with the two words vertically stacked.
Thank you for letting me share your joy in that repair. I am trying to imagine a wall of those clacking away at maybe an old train station and it is a lovely steam punkish image
Somebody commenting that Fran's doing something wrong? Sounds like Dunning-Kruger Effect to me. This is pretty close to watch repair! Museum quality restoration of a rare display. Imagine a row of these, clattering away, displaying text and numbers, what a racket! And probably very expensive. Thanks Fran.
Hmmm... 40 plates = 26 letters, 10 digits, Outline box, "+", "-", and (I'll bet) Blank. If no plates are selected, light goes through both end masks and show a lit grid, which is why a separate Blank plate is needed.
@Bill McQuillan: At 3:25 I count 22+22 springs, so presumably 43 or 44 plates (if the 1st lowered spring on the left is not just a dummy like the extra half spring above it), and only 40 plates accounted for as per your description. A blank (fully blocked) can also be created by having front and end grid plates where only one of them can be shifted/selected in relation to the other, but probably both easier and better to have a separate blank plate as you suggest. Also, mounting the grid mask plates outside the springed selection mechanism would be quite possible, but only adds manufacturing complexity. Adding 1 front and 1 back grid gives 42, so still 1 or 2 unaccounted for ... maybe up to 4 grid plates for better mask alignment?
The first and last plates are essentially static - they have no valid address and act as light guides. (I have a few of a latter version of this display).
Kind of reminds me of the 'belt sign' we had at the Army Recruiting Center when I was a recruiter. It had a 6 inch belt with holes punched it in to allow the light through, the belt ran in front of a green florescent lamp and said witty things about the Army, like Fun Travel Adventure ARMY and so forth. Not as complicated but it worked back in 1977.
Someone could also cheat pretty easily and use an LCD panel between the meshes, and some solenoids whose purpose is solely to make clicky noises. That would probably be good enough for anything but a full retro restoration, like a movie prop or something made in miniature.
6:11 I'm here talking to the screen... "It's too low... 32 is too low!" 11:52 Ahhh! I can relax now. 17:16 Preceed or follow this with any other setting quickly for a persistence-of-vision border?
The border could be for some kind of photosetting, maybe? Or a storage type CRT or something similar (anything that has continual feedback) with a set of lenses that can steer the output of the binaview to imprint characters across it... kind of slow given that you might struggle to reach even 10cps, but it may work as a way of putting up teletype messages on a big screen with that artificial persistence? Or it's just a placeholder they put in to allow testing etc, or there's some application for which that would have had meaning distinct from all-black or all-white? Maybe showing "this is a space" actively, so you can be sure the mechanism hasn't jammed in the between-characters all-black position?
2:54 This "BINAVIEW" was built specifically for use with Extended Binary Coded Decimal character set of 40 symbols. That and the archaic looking connector socket on the back makes this look like it was made for tube-based electronics only. So this device was designed long before 1969. 10:20 A time unit of 10 milliseconds used to be called a "jiffy?
Yep. 100 jiffies to the second. It somehow persisted into use for computer animation timing, in terms of ticks-per-frame. Even though there's been little in the way of 50 (or 100) Hz displays outside of the IBM MDA (and Hercules graphics that were compatible with it) and any PAL-region home computer. Animated GIFs, for one thing, have their framerate specified not in FPS, but in jiffies per frame. Which is why it's damn near impossible to get a smooth playback speed out of them.
@@markpenrice6253 Fascinating! I learned much of this in electronic's classes in the late 80's early 90's, but have since gotten rusty. Animated GIFs are not streaming video, just digitally realized flip book animation, like the mutascopes of a hundred years ago by Edison. Electronic Computers renders this type of animation possible, but leaves incorporating audio modulation( a sountrack) impossible, or is it a copyright issue? Please give me your feedback
Fran. So glad you figured that out and so QUICKLY! Great job. I love seeing old electro-mechanical oddities being brought back to life! That's now even more "1 of a kind"! Congratulations.
2:05 A trick to counting those plates would be to use a needle and slowly run it along the edge. Just count the clicks as the needle jumps from one plate to the next.
If you made three custom plates for the Bina, or assigned letters to 10, 11 and 12, and had a couple of masked bulbs or a simple mechanical two-state flipflop thingy to show AM/PM, you could make a 12-hour one at least. In fact with more determined customisation you could do a full 24 hours using the Bina and get away with a 3-device clock. (Or Bina for hours, and two Nimos for minutes? As those would fit together better. Nixies are a different form factor...)
That would be really cool to see! I'd guess the plates were photo engraved. I wonder if Ben at Applied Science could help Fran out with their super fine photoetching skills.
Só much inspiration in 2 “simples” videos, all the clues left on there by chance for the curious viewer to be unable to resist the urge to follow them. Just a genius set of videos Came from Big Clive
I think a paper tape reader could pick up binary codes directly, and all you'd need are opto sensors to detect holes and turn them into signal. Pull the paper tape through the machine and it should display the letters in the correct order, the speed depending on how fast the tape moves.
This could be programed into a simple EPROM such as an old 27C64 or similar and use 6 of the 8 bits to drive the binary and a 7th bit to drive the load. Each character would be a series of 4 memory locations, for example address 0-3 would have the following, 00000000, 00000010, 00000010, 00000000 to load a blank. A 10000000, 10000010, 10000000, 00000000, to load an A etc. First of the sequence sets plate pattern, 2nd toggles the load on, 3rd toggles the load back off, 4th drops the binary and done. A simple binary ripple counter would sequence the message. I know all you arduino fans will want to do a version so the message can be customized and rapidly updated.
@@mal2ksc That was the second step when I was in high school computer class. First lesson was setting the program from the switches on the computer itself, then typing out program to a tape roll from a teletype machine, that was then read on the computers reader.
It’s 15 minutes to 3am. Just finished the video where Fran says “I’m not gonna try to repair it”. Then the preview card pops up with ‘Part 2: I repair it!’. Now it’s 15 minutes *after* 3am. Thanks Fran. 😅
It's Futura Condensed Bold. I knew I'd seen it before, it's a lot in 60's tech stuff. Wasn't quite sure so I took Paul Stubbs' images (wonderfully aligned, Paul!) and ran montage BV\ ?.png -geometry x400+2+2 -tile x1 Bina-View-Alphabet-Montage.jpg And ran it through Whatthefont and FontSquirrel but it was time consuming to handle all the letters. Instead, I just searched the most popular 60's fonts, found a list, saw the F in Futura, checked again with Condensed Bold and voila. fontsgeek.com/fonts/Futura-Condensed-Bold
I was thinking more like creating short animations that could be used by some customizable digital clock software. I was sure I've seen something like this where you could supply your graphics. But my google-fu failed me at this time. Or my memory is wrong. Anyway, you know how flip clocks are often found as widgets on desktops or on phones? I'm pretty sure this would have been at least 3x cooler.
Yeea... I knew you could do it. All 40 plates now accounted for. The border was kind on surprise to me. Maybe back then it kind of acted like a cursor location if you had a big array of BV units as a display. Thanks for the great video!!
The magic of electromechanics: they might be finicky, but always fixable. Hard or easy, always fixable. Can't really do anything about a broken LCD tho. Now imagine an array of those, displaying rolling text, only with one motor controlling it all, and yes it's entirely possible! Just gonna need as much cams as the bits, the profile to match the text sequence, and phasing each display's switches riding the cams apart on the right position. Sure wouldn't be a weekend project, but something impressive just to say you can do it.
I can see why they did that blank plate with a border, as a way to have a blank space in the unit display, but with just a bit of light visible so that you are confident that the blank is intentional, and not a number or digit displaying with a blown lamp. Wonder how much a whole line 40 character display would have cost, as a likely candidate for this unit in use would be as a single line display, or as a ticker display for some sort of stock counter, with the display simply building up from left to right with a stock code, then a space ( the character space not a blank) then a stock price followed by a plus or minus for the stock moving in price. Rest of line then all fully blank characters. Easy enough to do with the existing mechanical teletype mechanisms of the day, and probably also easy to integrate in with only a small amount of modification to sequentially select the actual display only with the enable, all the rest of the coils being run in parallel and ignoring the pulses till rest enabled them to move position.
This reminds me a bit of the Solari boards at places like 30th street station (or in my case, South Station) - they used to make a lot of clattering noises as they changed to reflect the different train numbers and times etc. The new boards are all LED bases but for a while they were programmed to imitate the noises digitally but they don’t do that anymore. I miss the old ones 😀
I still have a very vivid memory of those flip-flaps as I saw them at Victoria Station in London way back in 1981. Must have burned their way into my brain... The loud clacking noises and their fascinating sequencing to the selected symbol, especially when they were reset or had a lot of changes done simultaneously!
A good engineer can design something super-complicated, but a GREAT engineer can design something simple! Holy crap! It would have been easier to make a simple slide-show wheel (Remember the old ViewMaster toy?) and have it rotate the correct slide into view of the projector.
Or if you go with 3-level (or more, given the fractional pixels?) greyscale for antialiasing it could be 26x30. Still pretty smooth compared to most classic computer fonts, and really anything commonly used on a modern non-retina screen.
@@markpenrice6253 some other comment mentioned that diameter of the holes of the first layer are a little bigger then the rest. because of that the points have smooth edges and natural anti-aliasing.
I'm glad you fixed it. This is a very cool display. When you mentioned that someone said you were using the wrong sequence of operation, I think I can see what they meant. When you connect power to set the bits first, then the reset, you energise the coils for the teeter-totters before they can freely move. So the coil end is trying to flip, while the brass plate is still held stuck by the notches at the bottom of the character plates, which puts some twisting force on the rod linking them. I can see how it could be beneficial in the long run to do the sequence as follow: - Energise the reset to lift the plates - Energise the bit setting coils, hold it on - Release the reset to lower the plates - Then release the bit setting coils That would avoid putting any twisting forces on the teeter-totters and also avoid the brass plate scratching at the little knob between the high and low notch of each bit, at the bottom of the character plates. But those probably wouldn't have any significant effect on the life of the mechanism.
I'm glad you heard me screaming at my screen, because the camera in front of the display showed that plate out of alignment right away. Now you can find a binary coded thumbwheel to make switch selection easier. I've seen them on old computer cards and systems from the 1980s and 90s. So, Part 3 after you find the thumbwheels and hook them up!
Exactly what I was thinking ... or at least, what I was thinking when Fran first said "interference display". The truth of it wasn't quite the same as what I expected! The Kinos (and their smaller equivalents used as the alternate history version of a powerpoint projector or computer monitor) were, as I dimly remember, rather more like macro versions of the DMDs in DLP projectors, or really intricate, high rez, high update speed (and almost certainly insanely expensive, complex, and loud) versions of an EM flip-dot signboard. Or Terry Pratchett's (also rather based in reality) binary light-matrix "Clacks" semaphore telegraph, which does the necessary thing of combining the two ideas in a Binaview way to produce an output pattern from a single incoming light source (well, in the daytime anyway... using the sun... at night, a bunch of high intensity oil lamps, thus becoming a weird OLED/Plasma-and-LCD hybrid).
I mentioned a trade show called ED90 in the first video (Electronic Display 1990 - I was in the display biz) and there were many, many electromechanical displays on show, some were even more intricate than this one (multiple tiny mechanical vanes that could create perfectly rounded alpha numeric characters, for example). Unsurprisingly I never saw any of them in the wild! The company I worked for made the original Lords cricket ground display that used flip dots and made quite a lot of displays using the dots and also 7 segment digits with flip vanes, but the rest of the exotica never really made it out of prototype. One of them had a power supply that we all said you could weld with and we proved it by having our expert welder in engineering do precisely that :D
You're an awesome human, Fran. Thank you for making both of these Binaview vids - so satisfying. And, thank you to @bigclivedotcom for the channel recommendation!! What a time to be alive.!! 😷
Amazing piece of old tech! Thank you very much for bringing this to us. Any movies where BINA-VIEW devices appear? maybe at an airport? maybe in Wargames movie?
Time to hook that up to an Arduino. Make the world's first 1x1 text terminal.
Arduino + keyboard, type name for intro!
Can you imagine how loud a bank of those would be?
Make a clock out of these would be awesome!
@@tngunworks9065 If you can use floppies to make tunes, well, here's the percussion section.
@@DCFusor lol
Maybe it was dropped at some point in it's life, dislodging the 32bit rod and the end springs.
Great job fixing it though, you are now an authorised I.E.E. repair agent and your warranty can be reinstated...
(no cover for the bulb though... very sorry)
Would agree, at 7:56 the coppery coloured plate that the rod fits into has isn't straight- it's bent backwards noticeable to the point it's separated from the silver die casting( you can see a gap where there's none on the other two.
Probably been pushed by the rod when something's hit the other end of the rod( possibly the other end got smacked when it was dropped on its face)
So now I guess it has forward backward play, which was why it fell out of its track
There really is something satisfying about seeing some old clearly "obsolete" piece of electronic equipment brought back to life. The next step is to find a way to actually use this in a larger piece of gear. If only you had 4 you could make a clock out of it.
I wonder if possible for a modern maker to make something similar - perhaps laser cut black anodised aluminium foil and 3d print the rest. 4 bits initially...
@@AntonyTCurtis photo etching would also be a good idea. If the plates are somewhat easy to remove, someone who has a display like this could scan them. People at home could then print them onto overhead projector sheets and use those to expose photoresist-coated sheet metal. Then, the sheet metal can be etched.
Pretty much like you do with circuit boards and the way shadow masks for CRTs were made.
Now i'm thinking of it, maybe you can even print it on a sheet of baking paper and do the toner transfer method to get the toner onto a thin piece of glass or plastic.
I don't think that a clock would use anywhere near the full potential of that thing. After all it can do the alphabet. You could for example make it spell out the names of new patrons. And by adding a moving platform it could write in long exposure photographs. Add in RGB cob and you have yet more options for your text.
@@PenZon News headlines or weather predictions would be nice!
@@PenZon Two words: Alphabet Aerobics.
Imagine an airport departure board made with these!
AJC it would be loud
@@MrScoopoo10 Only when it updates. The clicking might actually be useful as a reminder to check the sign again. It would need red and green colors and a right facing triangular arrow.
User 2C47 I was thinking of those old departure boards
@@MrScoopoo10 That were the old Italian made Solari Udine flip boards and clocks.
Imagine the power
Idea for a use: Put an ultraviolet lamp in it, and arrange a strip of glow-in-the-dark film scrolling in front of it.
Greg Ewing That would make a really cool scrolling marquee effect!
That's a really cool idea.
Using an Arduino for control? 🤔
Trans-Lux had something like that in stockbrokers' offices displaying the NYSE ticker.
Ooh, that'd have a neat fade effect as the letters moved too
On the topic of the switching order: The main solenoid lifts the character plates, which allows the selector solenoids to freely rotate the selector arms. Depressing the selector switch, then lifting the character plates while holding down the selector will cause the selector arms to rub against the selection teeth on the character plates. I suspect the best order of operations for this device would be to depress the switch that lifts the plates (set pulse), then, while holding that, depressing the switch to set the selector arms (bit/signal pulse). Now with both switches pressed, release the switch holding the character plates up, which lets them settle onto the selector arms. Now that the character plates are effectively holding the selector arms in place, the second switch can be released. This order of operations agrees with the description in the manual. The set pulse must be at least 30ms, the bit pulse must be at least 50ms, the time between bit pulse going high and set pulse going low must be at least 30ms, and the time between the set pulse going low and the bit pulse going low must be at least 20ms.
@@tissuepaper9962 Did timing diagrams even exist when this thing was made?
I was wondering if the switch for the selection signal was even "expected"; that perhaps the bit signal would be sent continuously, and then the set pulse would simply display whatever was being requested at the time it was triggered. But I can see the concern that the selector arms could be pressing against the teeth in unhealthy ways.
@@tissuepaper9962 Because back then you didn’t have a word processor to merge all this stuff together. It would be a copy and paste job with actual glue and someone would have had to draw the diagram in ink. They probably didn’t have anyone to do it at the time (maybe all their drafts people were busy or whatever). Nowadays that timing diagram would have taken about as long to draw out on a computer as typing this comment took on an on-screen keyboard… Progress isn’t always a bad thing.
Fran, your enthusiasm is contagious! Plus, your brilliance and stick-to-it-tiveness is amazing. To call you a “renaissance woman” would be an understatement.
I just wanted to say, having just watched the first video and luckily having found this one as well, the moment you showed off the front in the first video, my eyes locked onto that 32 bit being too far down, and the whole time my mind was screaming, including for the first half of this video, "PLEASE NOTICE IT ISN'T ENGAGING"... and my absolute relief when you did was something I needed to voice. Thank you, so, so much.
I could see yesterday that the back 2 plates seemed to be stuck together and I was screaming at the tv (ok, only in my head) look, look! Lol. Glad you had a go at fixing it that was satisfying to watch... Next program up a pi to drive it and get it to spell out Fran Lab 😋
I've seen the 32 bit plate being too low and did the same..
On page 8, it says you can connect up to 4 together!
ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=5531927
If it's possible to find 3 more, it would be even better!
I can't imagine more satisfying videos. Few days ago I had no idea such a technology even existed. Now I know exactly how it works, I've seen it being repaired, I saw every character. 100% completion. I love it!
I literally cheered when that 'A' appeared. A perfect bodge.
I think bodge is a bit strong! It was an expert technical intervention :D
@@TheOwlman Oh I agree - I was using Fran's terminology.
@@originalveghead I know, I was having a bit of fun... mind you, there is nothing wrong with a good bodge if it gets sonmething working properly. Stay safe. ( edited because my typing is decidedly average today.)
Love your avatar, Originalveghead
@@wembleyford takes one to know one - BBC fans need a secret handshake
Can you try with a more powerful bulb and put the diffuser back in place? I'd like to see how the characters looks like diffused.
I was thinking modding it with a big aquare LED. Also driving the bits with an Arduino.
@@guffaw1711 The light needs to be collimated, so a square LED wouldn't work. It needs a point source. A normal LED in clear plastic might be okay.
@@gcewing A round 1W luxon star would work very well.
Just centering the filament on the parabolic reflector would brighten the display considerably.
This is the kind of stuff I come here for. Thank you Fran.
Please make a proper driver board so it can display some text. The sound should be great if it switches way faster.
On page 8, it says you can connect up to 4 together!
ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=5531927
Interesting note, the Nimo tube and the Bina-View were both products of the same company, Industrial Electronic Engineers (I.E.E). And as some else stated it's still in business today making what else ... Displays.
Fran, you crack me up. Part detective, part engineer, and part the amazement of a kid. Well done. Enjoyed seeing this very interesting piece of gear and you efforts in getting it going. Always fun to check in to see what you are up to. Stay safe and thanks for keeping us entertained and educated.
Engineers HAVE to be detectives, or they'd never get anything to work.
Thanx to Fran & her Patrons. This was educational and fun.
What a coincidence! Bina in Persian is an adjective and means "Being able to see , Seeing , Watcher. The antonym of Blind.
Aah! Another Persian retro tech nerd!
I am a machinist by trade ... and instrument designer/tech ... and design and build industrial electrical control panels. This is sooooooo fascinating on so many levels! Awesome job explaining the operation in your last video and fixing it in this one! Hats off to you !
This. Was. *Fran-tastic*!!! These are the videos I love.... not just finding the rare bit of equipment, but them to figure out the repair!!!
I think the datasheet actually tells you to activate the data and latch at the same time. After 30 ms you release just the latch (causing the selected plate to drop) and after another 20 ms you are free to also release the data. The way you did it (first energizing the data) shouldn't impact the way it works, it just wastes the power you put into the data-coils before you activate the latch.
Another option is to pulse one bit at a time, 30ms each, then release the latch. To interface with tube systems, the 6.3V bulb can be driven by the cathode heating voltage while the 24V solenoids are driven from tube-switching 26V power rails. (Tubes are similar to FET transistors).
For electronic interfacing, a 2N7002 chip can control all 7 solenoids from TTL level signals like an UART chip or an Arduino, The Arduino could do the ASCII to bini character mapping and control the timing to display something like a chess move or code ID. But so could a small pack of 74xx chips, with a pair of 74121s providing the master pulses fed to and gates. Perhaps a diode matrix could form the core logic and mapping table, with some 22 pin 4-to-16 decoder chips decoding incoming bytes to ROM columns (3-to-8 decoder chips would be needed in larger quantity, a diode logic column selector would need a bunch of inverter/buffer chips). Diode logic obviously needs germanium transistors to stay within the 0.4V margin between 0.4V low outputs and 0.8V low inputs.
Agreed: this is the most satisfying video I've seen on TH-cam in a long time. Great job, Fran!
This display is mind-blowing. And then, without a manual, you repaired it. Wow. Just... wow. And nowhere else can I learn about this obsolete, obscure tech. Fran, please never stop making this stuff.
Can't find the video I was going to comment on, but the haters can seethe all they like. You've run a great company, making products so cool that some people collect them. Your tour of the Wanamaker organ was, for an organ nut like me, astounding-- nobody else on TH-cam goes inside the console, gets into the chests, watches them restore pipes. You just keep being your amazing, talented, cool self, and if someone else has a problem with it, that problem is all and only theirs.
You're probably the world's leading expert on Bina-View repair now!
It's such a hilariously complex, error-prone solution to a nowadays trivial problem. But more importantly, it's a thing of beauty, especially the noises it makes. That click-clacking, so satisfying!
YES! You fixed it!!
Now you only need 6 more to write FranLab :)
You are now the foremost authority on Bina-View displays. I think that these older electro-mechanical displays are easier to repair than their digital counterparts.
Nice job on a part 2! I am sure a lot of people were, like me, screaming at the screen that the right unit was too low. Glad you found it and trimmed it with your tongue at the right angle.
I like how they use smaller holes for anti-aliasing to make the character edges look nicer.
They really do look smooth!
@@originalveghead It's really noticeable on the "7".
@@AntonyTCurtis The numbers look very clean, did not expect that
Nice one, I did not realize it is anti-aliasing indeed.
There is supposed to be a diffuser at the front, she took it off as the bulb is 28v on a 24v supply and it wasn't bright enough.
Thanks for making these videos Fran, they fill the hole left now I can't visit my engineer friends.
They're just like you. In fact, one of them looks almost exactly like you. They almost exclusively repair vintage valve amplifiers, but if it's obscure; they love that stuff.
I wish they'd watch your videos, but they are too busy with repairing random stuff.
I remember seeing these things in air ports and train stations as a kid. Thanks for showing how this works.
This is INSANE! I LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS! From the other video I watched before this, I could tell that the “4/5/6” bits weren’t moving. And then I thought, wait, there’s no wire wrap for the last three solenoids... until you said they were inverted. I knew it had to be an alignment issue. This is so so cool! I love electromechanical things! And this thing must have been a mathematical nightmare to design and build, and figure out. Thank you so much for this video!
Wonderful video. Takes me back to the days when these were used on railroad arrival/departure boards.
I knew there was no way you'd let this thing sit as it was. I wish this sort of display were common today, its so magical and pleasing.
Y'know, with so many unused addresses in there, all you would need to do is find a metal sheet of the right thickness and a laser cutter, and you could design and build additional glyphs for that beauty!
Smiley faces? Emoticons? It could be your workshop mood indicator. :D
There's only space for maybe 4 or 5 additional plates though. The full 64-character versions (if they even existed, the order sheet doesn't seem to imply anything greater than mid-40s) would have needed a longer "rack" for everything to sit in. But that'd still be enough for the old J, K and L Wingdings... And the resolution is enough that it should be possible to just about construct a readable "Fran [Lab]" logo, with the two words vertically stacked.
Fran really is the greatest. There won't be another woman like her for centuries.
Thank you for letting me share your joy in that repair. I am trying to imagine a wall of those clacking away at maybe an old train station and it is a lovely steam punkish image
Somebody commenting that Fran's doing something wrong? Sounds like Dunning-Kruger Effect to me. This is pretty close to watch repair! Museum quality restoration of a rare display. Imagine a row of these, clattering away, displaying text and numbers, what a racket! And probably very expensive. Thanks Fran.
So glad you restored it, classic piece of electronics history.
Hmmm... 40 plates = 26 letters, 10 digits, Outline box, "+", "-", and (I'll bet) Blank. If no plates are selected, light goes through both end masks and show a lit grid, which is why a separate Blank plate is needed.
@Bill McQuillan: At 3:25 I count 22+22 springs, so presumably 43 or 44 plates (if the 1st lowered spring on the left is not just a dummy like the extra half spring above it), and only 40 plates accounted for as per your description. A blank (fully blocked) can also be created by having front and end grid plates where only one of them can be shifted/selected in relation to the other, but probably both easier and better to have a separate blank plate as you suggest. Also, mounting the grid mask plates outside the springed selection mechanism would be quite possible, but only adds manufacturing complexity. Adding 1 front and 1 back grid gives 42, so still 1 or 2 unaccounted for ... maybe up to 4 grid plates for better mask alignment?
At 1:56 plate count = 42 including back and front masks.
Blank would need to be a plate as the unused numbers are fully lit. The front and back masks would likely be required to minimize off angle light.
The first and last plates are essentially static - they have no valid address and act as light guides. (I have a few of a latter version of this display).
This is really a beautiful device. Digital displays from the pre-digital era are really fascinating.
Of all the bina view repairs I have seen, this is the best one
Kind of reminds me of the 'belt sign' we had at the Army Recruiting Center when I was a recruiter. It had a 6 inch belt with holes punched it in to allow the light through, the belt ran in front of a green florescent lamp and said witty things about the Army, like Fun Travel Adventure ARMY and so forth. Not as complicated but it worked back in 1977.
Like one of those scrolling LED signs, but with a physical scroller?
Oh wow there is something very special about this device. The design is so elegant. Glad you made it work again.
Someone needs to kickstart a modern version of the Bina-view displays
Absolutely, add in stretch goals for other IEE displays too
Someone could also cheat pretty easily and use an LCD panel between the meshes, and some solenoids whose purpose is solely to make clicky noises. That would probably be good enough for anything but a full retro restoration, like a movie prop or something made in miniature.
you can 3dprint or lasercut the sheets!
@@rarbiart Etch or lasercut. Can't use shiny metal or transparent material.
6:11 I'm here talking to the screen... "It's too low... 32 is too low!"
11:52 Ahhh! I can relax now.
17:16 Preceed or follow this with any other setting quickly for a persistence-of-vision border?
Yes I saw that too and screamed as well.
17:16 the display is not that fast and would wear out quickly.
The border could be for some kind of photosetting, maybe? Or a storage type CRT or something similar (anything that has continual feedback) with a set of lenses that can steer the output of the binaview to imprint characters across it... kind of slow given that you might struggle to reach even 10cps, but it may work as a way of putting up teletype messages on a big screen with that artificial persistence?
Or it's just a placeholder they put in to allow testing etc, or there's some application for which that would have had meaning distinct from all-black or all-white? Maybe showing "this is a space" actively, so you can be sure the mechanism hasn't jammed in the between-characters all-black position?
@@markpenrice6253 could it have represented a cursor or something? Maybe indicating the next character to be updated from a live text stream
The mechanical binary "decoder" is the sexiest thing I've ever seen.
You seriously need to get out of that basement
@@chadcastagana9181 Basement life > real life
O RLY?? Then you need to have a look at the Curta Calculator. Also check out the mechanical accumulator / register in early jukeboxes!
Railgap Esoterica True.
Have you seen Technology Connections vídeo on it?
2:54 This "BINAVIEW" was built specifically for use with Extended Binary Coded Decimal character set of 40 symbols. That and the archaic looking connector socket on the back makes this look like it was made for tube-based electronics only. So this device was designed long before 1969.
10:20 A time unit of 10 milliseconds used to be called a "jiffy?
Yep. 100 jiffies to the second. It somehow persisted into use for computer animation timing, in terms of ticks-per-frame. Even though there's been little in the way of 50 (or 100) Hz displays outside of the IBM MDA (and Hercules graphics that were compatible with it) and any PAL-region home computer. Animated GIFs, for one thing, have their framerate specified not in FPS, but in jiffies per frame. Which is why it's damn near impossible to get a smooth playback speed out of them.
@@markpenrice6253 Fascinating! I learned much of this in electronic's classes in the late 80's early 90's, but have since gotten rusty.
Animated GIFs are not streaming video, just digitally realized flip book animation, like the mutascopes of a hundred years ago by Edison. Electronic Computers renders this type of animation possible, but leaves incorporating audio modulation( a sountrack) impossible, or is it a copyright issue?
Please give me your feedback
@@markpenrice6253 Yet another bit of evidence that "GIF" should be pronounced "jif".
@@markpenrice6253 Also, the internal timer clock unit in UNIX/Linux is a jiffy, and was original HZ=100 .
Fran. So glad you figured that out and so QUICKLY! Great job. I love seeing old electro-mechanical oddities being brought back to life! That's now even more "1 of a kind"! Congratulations.
when you first looked at this display and said you wouldn't try to repair it, my heart brok a bit... I'm glad you decided to have a go Fran.
Wow, that is a cool display. Nice find Fran
2:05 A trick to counting those plates would be to use a needle and slowly run it along the edge. Just count the clicks as the needle jumps from one plate to the next.
Or take a photo, zoom it, and put numbers on them in MS Paint ;)
I simply counted the springs in the first video.
What an amazing bit of kit. Designing it in the first place is no mean feat.
Thank you for all you do! I’m so happy you decided to attempt a repair.
make a clock with a Bina-view, a Nimo tube, a Nixie tube, and an electro-mechanical device for each digit.
If you made three custom plates for the Bina, or assigned letters to 10, 11 and 12, and had a couple of masked bulbs or a simple mechanical two-state flipflop thingy to show AM/PM, you could make a 12-hour one at least.
In fact with more determined customisation you could do a full 24 hours using the Bina and get away with a 3-device clock.
(Or Bina for hours, and two Nimos for minutes? As those would fit together better. Nixies are a different form factor...)
Great idea, Fumitaka. I hope she will realize it.
I said it on the first video, but you need to laser cut or photoengrave a Franlab logo plate and install it in the display!
That would be really cool to see! I'd guess the plates were photo engraved. I wonder if Ben at Applied Science could help Fran out with their super fine photoetching skills.
A full multi character display with these would be a thing to behold.
Só much inspiration in 2 “simples” videos, all the clues left on there by chance for the curious viewer to be unable to resist the urge to follow them. Just a genius set of videos
Came from Big Clive
Excellent! Nothing feels better than bringing old tech back to life. Job well done!
I just can’t stop smiling everytime I hear this intro song I WOULD PAY FOR A FULL LENGTH VERSION
I love you to pieces, Fran! I'm glad you changed your mind about trying to fix this thing ;D
Learning letters and numbers feels like sesame street all over again. :-)
Fran, I think your 40th plate is just the Blank. 26 for the letters, 10 for numbers, 3 for +, -, and the border, and 1 for the blank. Just a theory.
Make sequencer that’ll spell out F R A N L A B rapid fire. With sound!
I think a paper tape reader could pick up binary codes directly, and all you'd need are opto sensors to detect holes and turn them into signal. Pull the paper tape through the machine and it should display the letters in the correct order, the speed depending on how fast the tape moves.
Mal-2 KSC
Like the paper roll in a player piano
This!
This could be programed into a simple EPROM such as an old 27C64 or similar and use 6 of the 8 bits to drive the binary and a 7th bit to drive the load. Each character would be a series of 4 memory locations, for example address 0-3 would have the following, 00000000, 00000010, 00000010, 00000000 to load a blank. A 10000000, 10000010, 10000000, 00000000, to load an A etc. First of the sequence sets plate pattern, 2nd toggles the load on, 3rd toggles the load back off, 4th drops the binary and done. A simple binary ripple counter would sequence the message. I know all you arduino fans will want to do a version so the message can be customized and rapidly updated.
@@mal2ksc That was the second step when I was in high school computer class. First lesson was setting the program from the switches on the computer itself, then typing out program to a tape roll from a teletype machine, that was then read on the computers reader.
It’s 15 minutes to 3am. Just finished the video where Fran says “I’m not gonna try to repair it”. Then the preview card pops up with ‘Part 2: I repair it!’.
Now it’s 15 minutes *after* 3am. Thanks Fran. 😅
I saw that just after 5:44 when you started trying the bits... I'm so glad you solved it. Keep 'em coming.
Someone capture frame grabs of the characters and make a TTF font.
I feel it had already been sampled from another font.
Anyone else think of Thunderbirds when that particular 5 came up?
@@TheErador That's why it looked so familiar! Just couldn't place :P
It's Futura Condensed Bold. I knew I'd seen it before, it's a lot in 60's tech stuff. Wasn't quite sure so I took Paul Stubbs' images (wonderfully aligned, Paul!) and ran
montage BV\ ?.png -geometry x400+2+2 -tile x1 Bina-View-Alphabet-Montage.jpg
And ran it through Whatthefont and FontSquirrel but it was time consuming to handle all the letters.
Instead, I just searched the most popular 60's fonts, found a list, saw the F in Futura, checked again with Condensed Bold and voila.
fontsgeek.com/fonts/Futura-Condensed-Bold
I was thinking more like creating short animations that could be used by some customizable digital clock software. I was sure I've seen something like this where you could supply your graphics. But my google-fu failed me at this time. Or my memory is wrong. Anyway, you know how flip clocks are often found as widgets on desktops or on phones? I'm pretty sure this would have been at least 3x cooler.
It's amazing what you spot on camera. I had no clue, but could see that flange was lower than the rest and not engaging 😀
Yeea... I knew you could do it. All 40 plates now accounted for. The border was kind on surprise to me. Maybe back then it kind of acted like a cursor location if you had a big array of BV units as a display. Thanks for the great video!!
Thank you for taking the time to show this to me. ❤️
So... Apparently no Anti-Aliasing in those days... Still though... You are so lucky to find such an awesome piece of engineering history.
Thanks for doing this Fran, fascinating content. I think most of us were eager to see if it could be repaired and I'm glad you did it in the end.
The magic of electromechanics: they might be finicky, but always fixable. Hard or easy, always fixable. Can't really do anything about a broken LCD tho.
Now imagine an array of those, displaying rolling text, only with one motor controlling it all, and yes it's entirely possible! Just gonna need as much cams as the bits, the profile to match the text sequence, and phasing each display's switches riding the cams apart on the right position. Sure wouldn't be a weekend project, but something impressive just to say you can do it.
Rolling text means excessive noise and wear. This may have been designed to work with a teletype machine and some type of sequencer.
Glad you decided to tinker with it. Really awesome to see such an interesting piece working
I can see why they did that blank plate with a border, as a way to have a blank space in the unit display, but with just a bit of light visible so that you are confident that the blank is intentional, and not a number or digit displaying with a blown lamp.
Wonder how much a whole line 40 character display would have cost, as a likely candidate for this unit in use would be as a single line display, or as a ticker display for some sort of stock counter, with the display simply building up from left to right with a stock code, then a space ( the character space not a blank) then a stock price followed by a plus or minus for the stock moving in price. Rest of line then all fully blank characters. Easy enough to do with the existing mechanical teletype mechanisms of the day, and probably also easy to integrate in with only a small amount of modification to sequentially select the actual display only with the enable, all the rest of the coils being run in parallel and ignoring the pulses till rest enabled them to move position.
How to handle a decimal point? Or fractions (in the U.S., stocks used to be priced in increments of 1/8 of a dollar) ?
@@robertlozyniak3661 Pretty sure they made versions with a decimal, and also fractions as a custom mask.
I saw prices of $30-$110 per display in mid 60’s dollars
@@robertlozyniak3661 I have at least one with the "optional decimal point"
Dunno how much a 40 line bina-view display would cost but I imagine that it'd be pretty loud.
This reminds me a bit of the Solari boards at places like 30th street station (or in my case, South Station) - they used to make a lot of clattering noises as they changed to reflect the different train numbers and times etc. The new boards are all LED bases but for a while they were programmed to imitate the noises digitally but they don’t do that anymore. I miss the old ones 😀
I still have a very vivid memory of those flip-flaps as I saw them at Victoria Station in London way back in 1981. Must have burned their way into my brain... The loud clacking noises and their fascinating sequencing to the selected symbol, especially when they were reset or had a lot of changes done simultaneously!
A good engineer can design something super-complicated, but a GREAT engineer can design something simple! Holy crap! It would have been easier to make a simple slide-show wheel (Remember the old ViewMaster toy?) and have it rotate the correct slide into view of the projector.
Awesome! Very satisfying to see it working. It would be cool if you could build a project around this, perhaps a countdown timer or something?
What are you doing with me? What am I watching here? Fran, you make me a fan. Thank you for your great content.
counted the "pixels" its 52x60 (also counting the black pixels of the checkerboard)
we need a 780 plates version for pixleart ^^
Or if you go with 3-level (or more, given the fractional pixels?) greyscale for antialiasing it could be 26x30. Still pretty smooth compared to most classic computer fonts, and really anything commonly used on a modern non-retina screen.
@@markpenrice6253 some other comment mentioned that diameter of the holes of the first layer are a little bigger then the rest. because of that the points have smooth edges and natural anti-aliasing.
They're not at all like pixels, though. More like the holes in a screen, as in silkscreen.
Like I commented in your first video, I saw that last rail not actuating right, glad you found it!
I'm glad you fixed it. This is a very cool display.
When you mentioned that someone said you were using the wrong sequence of operation, I think I can see what they meant.
When you connect power to set the bits first, then the reset, you energise the coils for the teeter-totters before they can freely move. So the coil end is trying to flip, while the brass plate is still held stuck by the notches at the bottom of the character plates, which puts some twisting force on the rod linking them.
I can see how it could be beneficial in the long run to do the sequence as follow:
- Energise the reset to lift the plates
- Energise the bit setting coils, hold it on
- Release the reset to lower the plates
- Then release the bit setting coils
That would avoid putting any twisting forces on the teeter-totters and also avoid the brass plate scratching at the little knob between the high and low notch of each bit, at the bottom of the character plates.
But those probably wouldn't have any significant effect on the life of the mechanism.
I'm glad you heard me screaming at my screen, because the camera in front of the display showed that plate out of alignment right away. Now you can find a binary coded thumbwheel to make switch selection easier. I've seen them on old computer cards and systems from the 1980s and 90s. So, Part 3 after you find the thumbwheels and hook them up!
This display is so freaking cool! I'm glad you got it working, it is an amazing piece of early tech!
What a very cool yet impractical display idea!
Phenomenal! So glad we got a 'deeper look' into this fascinating display! Thanks Fran, you're amazing!
Congrats on the repair!
This reminds me of the "kino" theater screen in "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson.
Exactly what I was thinking ... or at least, what I was thinking when Fran first said "interference display". The truth of it wasn't quite the same as what I expected!
The Kinos (and their smaller equivalents used as the alternate history version of a powerpoint projector or computer monitor) were, as I dimly remember, rather more like macro versions of the DMDs in DLP projectors, or really intricate, high rez, high update speed (and almost certainly insanely expensive, complex, and loud) versions of an EM flip-dot signboard. Or Terry Pratchett's (also rather based in reality) binary light-matrix "Clacks" semaphore telegraph, which does the necessary thing of combining the two ideas in a Binaview way to produce an output pattern from a single incoming light source (well, in the daytime anyway... using the sun... at night, a bunch of high intensity oil lamps, thus becoming a weird OLED/Plasma-and-LCD hybrid).
I am almost certain that I once thought of "inventing" a display similar to this, but I would never have had the idea of the checkerboard patterns.
I mentioned a trade show called ED90 in the first video (Electronic Display 1990 - I was in the display biz) and there were many, many electromechanical displays on show, some were even more intricate than this one (multiple tiny mechanical vanes that could create perfectly rounded alpha numeric characters, for example). Unsurprisingly I never saw any of them in the wild! The company I worked for made the original Lords cricket ground display that used flip dots and made quite a lot of displays using the dots and also 7 segment digits with flip vanes, but the rest of the exotica never really made it out of prototype. One of them had a power supply that we all said you could weld with and we proved it by having our expert welder in engineering do precisely that :D
Thankyou Fran... i am sure curious mark would love to get his hands on that display..
What an incredible display device! I wish their were more like it.
I just listened to the vocals on you theme song. You got bars! It was super funky.
Please, let us all try to buy more BINA-VIEWs and send them to Fran so she can make a multi character display!
Thank You again Fran, so nice to see you got it working so well.
So glad you decided to! I was hoping you might try to include your own custom plate, maybe a FranLab Logo or something.
This is very satisfying! Glad you had a stab at it after all.
Smartly and elegantly done. Great video again!
You're an awesome human, Fran. Thank you for making both of these Binaview vids - so satisfying. And, thank you to @bigclivedotcom for the channel recommendation!! What a time to be alive.!! 😷
Amazing piece of old tech! Thank you very much for bringing this to us. Any movies where BINA-VIEW devices appear? maybe at an airport? maybe in Wargames movie?
I can just imagine how you felt when you got those other characters you hadn't seen before! How exciting. What an interesting display
Well done Fran. Great video. Thank you for posting.