I’d the pleasure of meeting track of Tony Hill lately, where I obtained a duplicate of his new glitch zine, Junk DNA from the Digital Mind. He was kind enough to divulge he used a few of the devices by Video Tech Designs to produce content. Being relatively cheap (because of their limited functions) I immediately got onto ebay to locate my very own to bend, that we did in the Many & Varied Skills Share Jamboree!
Bending the VEC1070
The system itself is a reasonably simple one in comparison with actual video mixers such as the Panasonic WJ AVE3. Karl Klomp includes a more in-depth consider the hackability of video mixers.
Apart from fundamental video adjustments, like brightness and contrast, there isn’t anything else that you can do. That’s before the bending begins!
With this modification I merely added an on/off change to the foremost and middle pins from the potentiometer controlling contrast. Once the switch is switched on and also the contrast switched as much as its maximum things start getting glitchy! The outcomes are most likely easiest proven within the below video:
As you can tell things looked great once the unit was linked to an analogue TV but less then when linked to a monitor or projector through the composite port, and what i mean is there is frequently no display whatsoever! Like a perpetual beginner to everything about circuit bending I’ll admit that my knowledge of why this really is happening continues to be hazy, but I’m brought to think the glitchy video causes synchronisation errors, resulting in the device studying the signal to obtain confused and fall over. To rectify i (may) require a time base corrector. Any expert understanding in regards to this is cordially welcomed!
I didn’t permit this to glitch within the works stop me from looking for a method to record a minimum of a little bit of output to my computer. Upon my go back to basecamp home I raided my device clump and located a hacky solution that utilises the VEC1070, my laptop (running Ubuntu 12.04 on the Dell Studio 1555), an exterior monitor Easy Cap USB TV capture card along with a scan ripper tools (that one).
Developing a loop
Possibly the toughest part to configure normally made available was the simple Cap USB TV Capture Card. There’s a blog dedicated installing a while using USB card having a particular bias towards individuals using the DC60 chipset. Fortunately the one which I got myself years back has that chipset and thus installation was fairly painless but time intensive. These blog has all of the info you’ll need/find regarding finding, installing and taking advantage of the credit card on Linux.
All of those other connections are possibly best described within the following diagram:
The reason behind the exterior monitor would be to monitor the creation of the VEC1070 and perform some feedback loops! It isn’t necessary in every case. With this scenario I additionally set my display to increase the desktop, instead of mirror it.
Recording the output
Displaying the output wasn’t always a large headache. Since the USB capture card is really a video device (mine is /dev/video3 ) I possibly could display it on the watch’s screen using avplay -f video4linux2 /dev/video3 . The output sometimes stuttered, however it was otherwise ok. Regrettably, just like the VGA monitor and projector, as soon as I switched around the glitch switch it very quickly eliminate. This left me
1 second to capture a few of the visuals using screen-recording software. 🙁
Oddly, however, Pure Data (all over again) found my save. Using Pd-extended .43.4 I could send the content [device /dev/video3 ( to [pix_video] to show the creation of the VEC1070. In addition, it didn’t eliminate as frequently after i flipped the glitch switch! The only real drawback? The color is mainly yellow and eco-friendly. :-/
This, In my opinionOram wishing, could be fixed within an update towards the Easy Cap kernel module. I’ll do some bug reporting…
I ought to most likely just purchase a time base ripper tools along with a composite to VGA scan ripper tools.