{"id":1231,"date":"2021-01-27T21:43:18","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T21:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/?p=1231"},"modified":"2021-01-27T21:43:18","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T21:43:18","slug":"mincvt105-screenshots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/mincvt105-screenshots\/","title":{"rendered":"MINC+VT105 screenshots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Some screenshots of MINC and the vt105 – literally screenshots, with a camera in front of an LCD screen. And an old one at that, the spots you might notice are caused by worn backlight tubes, and the top end is a bit darker because of the viewing angle. The current version of the vt105 has VGA output only; some future version will probably have digital I\/O and allow for more modern and crystal clear screenshots – or maybe I’ll come up with a trick to save screenshots directly. It was kind of fun to do this way though, painstakingly aligning the screen to the camera on a tripod, and trying to type commands without hitting either. Kudos for the first one to correctly name all edits I had to do to the photos for them to come out like this \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Figure 6.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The screenshots are from the examples in MINC-11 Book 4: MINC Graphic Programming – I used that book a lot to check if I was on the right track with my vt105 implementation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MINC can of course sample analog data, but the book uses datasets directly created from mathematical functions – so you can easily recreate the same graphs. The book works really well to show all the different options and parameters for the GRAPH statement – and there are many. Figure 6 starts with a simple sine, created from the following program:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10 DIM X1(199),F1(10),Y1(199)\n20 FOR I=0 TO 199\n30 Y1(I)=SIN(I*PI\/50)\n40 X1(I)=LOG10(I+1)\n50 NEXT I<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
And then one simple statement to create a graph from that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GRAPH(,,,Y1(0))<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
That’s all – pretty powerful, and very useful for the laboratory setting that MINC was created for. And there’s more: MINC can do two graphs at the same time by dividing the screen in an upper and lower half. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Figure 7.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
The lower graph – showing a small part of the sine wave – uses some of the other tricks: shading and markers (or ‘brands’, in the MINC BASIC translation). Useful to show the source values in the graph, in contrast to interpolations. And quite flexible, enabling or disabling a keyword on the GRAPH statement making a graph look completely different. As in the example, figure 9:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Figure 9.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Or something like this – with some different data:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
10 DIM Y(200)\n20 FOR I=1 TO 200 STEP 2\n30 Y(I-1)=SIN(I*PI\/100)\n40 Y(I)=COS(I*PI\/100)\n50 NEXT I\n60 REGION('UPPER',1)\n70 REGION('LOWER',2)\n80 GRAPH('SHADE,LINES,BRANDS',100,,Y(0),2,,1)\n90 GRAPH('SHADE,LINES,BRANDS',100,,Y(1),2,,2)\n100 LABEL('BOLD','Sine Wave','Graph 1',1)\n110 LABEL('BOLD','Cosine Wave','Graph 2',2)<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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Figure 21.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
The next trick doesn’t really display very well – it needs a movie or a live demonstration really. You can set up a graph such that the user can scroll over the data points, highlighting one of the markers – and then set an action on those. Note the highlighted marker on Figure 24.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Figure 24.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
and the output from selecting that point – in a very simple example that just displays the X and Y values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Chapter 4 in the book uses a single data set to showcase what else MINC can do with the vt105 graphics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
10 DIM X(255),Y(255)\n20 FOR I=0 TO 255\n30 X(I)=LOG10(I+1)\n40 Y(I)=SIN(I*PI\/50)*COS(I*PI\/200)\n50 NEXT I<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
I won’t go over all the examples – that would take out all the fun of trying yourself. Just a few examples of nice graphs…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Figure 28.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Figure 29 – modified with the -GRID option to better show the line pattern.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Figure 35.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Figure 36.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
So what I haven’t covered yet is that MINC can also do dynamic displays – moving graphs, or ‘strip charts’ in the official documentation. A bit like the electronic version of Hollywood’s interpretation of a seismograph, or a lie detector – one of those things with a roll of paper and a moving pen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And of course you can put that together with the analog capabilities of the MINC – sample a real time signal and display the wave form on the terminal. Not quite the same thing as an oscilloscope, but signals in the single-digit Hz range come out nicely. And there’s a lot of options in signal capture that I haven’t had the time to play with yet \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meantime I’m finishing up the vt105 stuff – expect it on the download page soon! and there’ll be a bugfix for the MNCKW too!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some screenshots of MINC and the vt105 – literally screenshots, with a camera in front of an LCD screen. And an old one at that, the spots you might notice are caused by worn backlight tubes, and the top end is a bit darker because of the viewing angle. The current version of the vt105 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minc","category-pdp11","category-vt105","missing-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}