Best fellow NBTV enthousiasts,
I am new here, so I'll first shorlty introduce myself: I'm Thomas, live in small Belgium, am 24 years old and I have been interested in Mechanical TV ever since I read a child-book-biography about John Logie Baird at the age of 9. I attempted at that age to build a mechanical TV system, wich, in the pre-internet age, obviously failed. Now about 15 years later I friend of those days started talking about the experiments and my old fascination has caught on again, I've been experimenting for about a week now.
So far I have build 3 Nipkow disk receivers, the first disk I calculated wrong , the second one was only 18cm and the ratio width-length was not good, but now attempt 3 is the more serious and succesfull one. The Nipkow disk is cut from plastic clad cardboard, better lined out, and blackened with Graphite paint. I use by now a single transistor driving 3 9000mCd LED's (white) in a cardboard box, wich gives plenty of contrast so far. The engine is now (after two days of fighting with synchronisation got quite tiring) being driven by a Pulse Width Modulator print wich gives quite some stability for the price (16 Euro kit) and simplicity of it (it is a kit produced/sold here in Belgium, don't know if it's available in other European Countrys, will have to look that up, all the parts are there, ideal for us it appears ) and it appears the IC has a connection marked "Synch" (not used on the print) so I guess adding synchronisation later might be possible. I am still going to add a small modification tonight so RPM adjustement becomes A LOT finer.
And now that I got the hang of it: This stuff is FUN! Nothing beats the experimental kick you get out of this, I get pure euphoria when you get the picture stable!
But now on to the problems and questions:
-I am using Linux, and have no Windows back-up system and I wanted to create some extra files to play off, like some old movies of the day. I'm not good at programming and so on, I ended up using Linux by chance, because there was no alternative at that time. But when using Wine (Linux users will know it) the program crashes or fails to convert the files. Does anybody know any Video To NBTV program that will work readely on Ubuntu?
-The picture of the TV appears to be moving from left to right all the time, it appears a problem with horizontal synchronisation, how does that come?
Thank you very much in advance,
ow yes, I'm glad I found this hobby
Greetings,
Thomas