About a year and a half ago, I started work on a fun little project. I’ve been dabbling with it on-and-off, and now it’s finally finished. So I thought I’d post a retrospective, as the process and challenges along the way were just as enjoyable as the end result.

It all began with a tweet that randomly popped into my head one day:

Sean Martell replied with a classic GIF, and something about the combination of tweets made me start itching to build a real, physical version. The basic plan came together quickly, but I didn’t realize that it would be a long and meandering path through researching GIFs, vintage electronic hardware, nitpicky laser printer output, metalwork, 3D modeling/printing, and more.

I think the finished result is pretty good:

GIVE-A-FUCK-O-METER

Here’s a bit more about the process of building it.

Research and Foundation

The first thing I had to do was some due-diligence: what are the essential qualities of meme-meter? After extensive research on every such GIF I could find, I knew exactly what I wanted. A meter with a retro feel, a realistic face that was scientific and precise, and a needle that jittered around the bottom of the scale to indicate approximately “zero fucks given”. In metric.

All the GIFs

The next day, I jumped on Ebay to scope out some vintage analog meters, and got unbelievably lucky: a pair of Triolab voltmeters from the early 1960s for just $16 (plus shipping). One was rather ugly and worn, but the other was absolutely perfect. Retro, with just enough wear to be authentic, yet in excellent condition. A compact 4-inch cube with a hefty weight makes it perfect for desktop display. And, oh, the details – industrial black crinkle-paint finish, sturdy knobs, brass and stainless steel screws, and a classic aluminum product nameplate.

The insides are equally amazing. Lots of colorful antique components (even a vacuum tube!) on a wire-wrapped board, complete with that distinctive “old electronics smell” that may or may not be known to the state of California as causing cancer. Even the cabling just oozes quality, neatly bundled with lacing that’s rare to see today outside of aerospace applications.

Old-skool components

As an added bonus, there’s an instrument calibration label on the top from “Martin Marietta Corporation, Aerospace Division,” certifying that it’s within 2% of manufacturer’s specs as of November 1963.  Plus an earlier ink stamp from June 1961. They help make it feel like it fell into a time warp straight from a mid-century laboratory. (I’d love to know what this meter was originally used for – Martin Marietta was probably best-known for the Titan family of rockets and ICBMs, so something involving them might be a good guess.)

Calibration sticker and stamp

Unfortunately, the paper sticker was in desperate need of conservation; it was starting to degrade and was very fragile. One corner was missing, and another was barely hanging on. Not too surprising, as it was a simple tag meant to be replaced after 6 months, and not designed for a 50-year lifetime. To fix it I used some adhesive to fasten the loose edges, and a clear “Ultra Matte” polyurethane paint to stabilize the surface. I was pleased with the result, which maintains the appearance of plain (unpainted) paper. [Aside: the tech who originally applied the label was very sloppy with the glue, if you look closely that’s what you see around the edges, not my work!]

Face Time

My first major undertaking was to design a new faceplate for the meter. I used Acorn to draw the scale using vector lines and circles; most of the work was tedious but straightforward. One handy trick was to scan the original faceplace at 600dpi on the office scanner/copier, and use that as a template for accurate physical sizing.

I spent a disturbing amount of time in the vintage typeface rathole. My first thought was to use Futura, which is commonly used in aerospace instrumentation (notably, the flight controls on Apollo and the Space Shuttle). But it didn’t feel quite right – ironically(?) too modern. I also looked through piles of other typefaces, named and unnamed, from hobbyists who recreate flight controls on vintage aircraft. In the end, I just used the modern Avenir Next Condensed font that comes with OS X for the main text. It’s a faithful nod to the original meter faceplace. I also matched typefaces as best I could for the  smaller labels, and redid the “triolab” logo to make it sharper than the original scan.

Once printed, I carefully disassembled the analog meter, flipped over the original aluminum faceplate, and affixed my version with some spray mount.

Before and after. Well, after and before. You know what I mean.

Laser Printer Resolution

Attention to detail was important to me on this project, but one issue I didn’t catch until too late (and never fully resolved) was print quality. Despite my work being in resolution-independent vector format, I consistently got suboptimal output when printing. Here’s an example of a 10pt capital letter “K” printed 3 different ways, photographed through a USB microscope:

Bad K, bad K, ok K.

On the left is output from Acorn, as printed on my 10 year old home HP LaserJet 1012 (600dpi), and in the middle as printed on a new Ricoh C2503 (1200dpi). The rightmost is the same letter “K” printed on my HP, but using TextEdit instead of Acorn. I tried myriad combinations of printing to intermediate formats, source bitmap resolutions, and printer settings, but the results were always the same… Anything coming from Acorn or Photoshop came out with bumpy edges, while output from a text editor was crisp.

My assumption is that something in the pipeline was rasterizing everything, and the printer was just doing it’s best to blithely print a greyscale bitmap with halftones. Eventually I got slightly better, but not great, output by printing to an absurdly high-resolution PDF, filtering to B&W and downsizing with ImageMagick, and then printing the final 1-bit depth image. I’m curious if a dedicated vector program like Adobe Illustrator would have made this Just Work, or if there’s even any good way to do this. Back in the day one could have hand-crafted some PostScript/PCL for this, but I’m not sure exactly how modern printing pipelines work.

Who knew that 1200dpi wasn’t enough for good black-and-white output?! (This guy, apparently.)

Electronics

The electronics on the new meter are slightly overkill, but are what I had sitting around. At the core is a Digispark (basically a tiny Arduino clone), with an IO port expander and a custom protoboard for gluing everything together.

New-skool components

The Digispark controls the meter through a PWM output. Analog meters are driven by rather small currents, and I needed just 206 microamps to drive it full-scale, which is trivial for the microcontroller to provide directly. At 4.65v that needs about 22k

https://dolske.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/hardware-gif/