Flashback: the NCSG

One of the first electrical devices I ever designed and built was a static generator.

The NCSG (NCSG Controlled Static Generator) relied on Radio Shack brand RCA (phono plug) to S-Video converters to separate luminance and chrominance channels of an incoming video feed (a video camera in my original test), modify them, and convert the signal back to composite video so that it can be understood by the final display device (my TV). The two channels could be independently resisted by rotary potentiometers, swapped by a single flip-switch, or controllably mixed by potentiometers.

The effect? Increasing the resistance on the chrominance channel reduced the saturation of the resulting image until it was in greyscale. Increasing the resistance on the chrominance channel reduced the structural integrity of the image, creating zigs and zags in the image until it was completely unintelligible and very trippy. Switching and swapping the channels also resulted in a trippy image, which my teenage friends appreciated very much. What was really fun to do was to point the video camera at the television, which would normally result in a solid blue color, then let the NCSG turn it any color of the rainbow, with intricate patterns appearing simultaneously with any movement of the camera or any adjustment of the potentiometers.

Obviously, the NCSG isn’t a very useful creation (well, maybe druggies might appreciate it), but it did give me an opportunity to learn more than I had bargained for when I began the project. This is about when my fifteen-year-old self developed a love for Wikipedia; I probably spent more hours reading about the nature of video and learning about the technical terms than I did actually building the project. This was the first experience I ever had with a soldering iron, which I had up until that point called “that piece of metal that gets really hot”. I had not even known what a potentiometer was until I set out to build the NCSG.

All in all, I am very satisfied with the time I invested in this device. I feel like this was the project that really set the framework for electrical projects that I would develop in the future.