[optacon-l] Re: [optacon-like] Prototype Optacon story
- From: Keith Shaw <scitech200@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 04:37:11 -0800 (PST)
Linda,
I'm pleased to hear that you enjoyed this Optacon anecdote. It struck me as
being quite remarkable that an engineer of this standing with the IEEE
considered the Optacon demonstration to be a defining moment in his career.
Regards, Keith
----- Original Message ----
From: Linda Gehres <ljgehres@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 8:17:50 PM
Subject: [optacon-l] Re: [optacon-like] Prototype Optacon story
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. “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
>
>
>
>to view the list archives, go to:
>
>www.freelists.org/archives/optacon-l
>
>To unsubscribe at any time, just send a message to:
>
>optacon-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "unsubscribe" (without the
>quotes) in the message subject.
>
>Tell your friends about the list. They can subscribe by sending a message to:
>
>optacon-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "subscribe" (without the quotes)
>in the message subject.
to view the list archives, go to:
www.freelists.org/archives/optacon-l
To unsubscribe at any time, just send a message to:
optacon-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "unsubscribe" (without the
quotes) in the message subject.
Tell your friends about the list. They can subscribe by sending a message to:
optacon-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "subscribe" (without the quotes)
in the message subject.
to view the list archives, go to:
www.freelists.org/archives/optacon-l
To unsubscribe at any time, just send a message to:
optacon-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "unsubscribe" (without the
quotes) in the message subject.
Tell your friends about the list. They can subscribe by sending a message to:
optacon-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "subscribe" (without the quotes)
in the message subject.
Other related posts:
