[optacon-l] Re: [optacon-like] Prototype Optacon story
- From: Linda Gehres <ljgehres@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:17:50 -0800
Keith, I very much like this.
On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 05:55:02 -0800 (PST), Keith Shaw wrote:
>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. â??That,â?? Meindl says, â??was the most thrilling moment in
>engineering
>work that I have ever had.â?? 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). â??We had
>significant problems,â?? 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-Âtactile 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. â??That,â?? Meindl says, â??was the most thrilling
>moment in
>engineering work that I have ever had.â?? 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
>â??areas that could have the most impact.â??
>
>Adapted from IEEE Spectrum: Wizard of Watts by Tekla S. Perry
>
>
>
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