[optacon-l] Prototype Optacon story

From: Keith Shaw <scitech200@xxxxxxxxx>
To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 05:55:02 -0800 (PST)
Along with Jim Bliss, there were some very talented engineers involved with the 
development
of the prototype Optacon. One of these engineers was James Meindl, and at a 
conference in 1969:
Linvill's daughter Candace demonstrated the Optacon, and she got a standing 
ovation. “That,” Meindl says, “was the most thrilling moment in engineering 
work that I have ever had.” He later named his own daughter Candace to honor 
Linvill's daughter and the moment.

I have tried to present the background to this statement by Meindl, the 
recipient of the prestigious 2006 IEEE Medal of Honor, in the following text. 

Enjoy,
Keith
---------------------------------------
James D. Meindl
Professor of Microelectronics at the Georgia Institute of Technology 

Meindl received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1958 and a year later was 
assigned to the U.S. Army Signal Research and Development Laboratories, in Fort 
Monmouth, New Jersey. Just after his arrival, the Army awarded a research 
contract to Dallas-based Texas Instruments Inc., where Jack Kilby had 
fabricated an IC (integrated circuit) for the first time, and Meindl became the 
technical liaison for the project. He met Kilby and then, a few months later, 
he visited Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor Corp., in 
Palo Alto, California. Those three pioneers taught Meindl about the nascent 
field, and he began his own research, trying to figure out how to make an IC 
(integrated circuit) operate at a power level so low that it could be used 
inside a helmet as part of a radio receiver.
By 1966, several professors at Stanford were encouraging Meindl to leave New 
Jersey and join them in California. In 1967, John Linvill, then chair of the 
electrical engineering department at Stanford, made Meindl an offer he couldn't 
refuse. Linvill had come up with an idea for a system that would let blind 
people read - including Linvill's own young daughter, Candace. It would use a 
camera to take a picture of the letters on a page and then translate that 
picture to a tiny pad of vibrating pins. With training, Linvill reasoned, a 
blind person would be able to place a finger on the pad and decipher the text. 
But making such a device portable and useful required two custom-designed, 
low-power chips. One chip would act as the image sensor - a solid-state camera, 
basically, at a time when they were experimental. The other chip would operate 
at a high voltage to vibrate the tactile array, consuming as little power as 
possible to prolong battery life. Meindl
 worked on the project for about a year, along with several graduate students, 
including Jim Plummer (now Dean of Engineering at Stanford). “We had 
significant problems,” Plummer recalls. They were using MOS devices in a 
high-voltage application - which no one had done before. After a lot of trial 
and error with the voltage levels, they finally found one that was high enough 
for the vibration to be felt by the user and
yet low enough to keep the devices from burning out. The group dubbed the 
device the Optacon, for optical-to-tactile converter, and demonstrated it for 
the first time at the 1969 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, in 
Philadelphia. Linvill's daughter Candace demonstrated the converter, and she 
got a standing ovation. “That,” Meindl says, “was the most thrilling moment in 
engineering work that I have ever had.” He later named his own daughter Candace 
to honor Linvill's daughter and the moment. In 1970 Linvill, Meindl and their 
team rolled the technology out into a company, Telesensory Systems Inc., now a 
division of the Singapore company Insiphil. Telesensory produced thousands of 
the devices and sold them around the world. Today, text-to-speech converters 
have supplanted the Optacon, but it was an important aid in its time. 
Telesensory never made its founders a fortune, but that didn't bother Meindl. 
Throughout his career, he says, he and his co-workers have always selected 
“areas that could have the most impact.” 

Adapted from IEEE Spectrum: Wizard of Watts by Tekla S. Perry 


      
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[optacon-l] Prototype Optacon story

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