4 ms·
A really ancient secret, one of the grey beards I learned a lot from early in my career told me about how he got CV running on an Apple II way back in the day o
by monocasa 5y ago
A really ancient secret, one of the grey beards I learned a lot from early in my career told me about how he got CV running on an Apple II way back in the day on the cheap. He decapped a DRAM, and carefully stuck a lens on it. They're not just susceptible to cosmic rays; without the package regular old visible light rays can cause bit flips too. If you look at CMOS sensors these days they actually have quite a bit in common with DRAM.
- dapids 5y agoI think I'm missing the point. What does any of this have to do with computer vision?
- LukeShu 5y agoHe was able to turn a RAM chip into a camera, allowing the computer to process a video "feed" simply by polling the right bits in RAM. On a device that would normally be considered much too primitive to do any image processing.
- dougabug 5y agoThere was a Byte Magazine article by Steve Ciarcia, in Sept 1983, entitled “A 64K-bit dynamic RAM chip is the visual sensor in this digital image camera,” describing how to do exactly this hack. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-09/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-09/mode/2up
- hoseja 5y agoOh god it's the xkcd but real.