Hi,

I just checked out their web site, and it looks like they still have a number of interesting devices, including a multi meter.

I sure hope they are able to continue, as their company has helped many blind people with innovative solutions by supplying technical solutions over the years.

John


----- Original Message -----
From: Martin McCormick <[log in to unmask]>
To:  [log in to unmask]
Date: Monday, Sep 20, 2010 9:18:16
Subject: Re: D-star?

>
>
> I remember them. Their equipment modifications were
> pretty good. They did have some kind of business-related problem
> and I remember reading about a fire that destroyed a wear house
> full of products, etc, so I am not sure if they exist today or
> not, but whether or not they do, here's the problem and within
> that problem is also the solution.
> 
> As one who likes to build and tinker with stuff, I can
> tell you that the kind of stuff that Science Products used to
> put ports on just doesn't exist any more. I bought a used DVM in
> the early eighties that I had the intention of making talk by
> tapping in to the display lines that fed the digits in the
> display. It would have been possible and this is the kind of
> device that Science Products would have been modifying back
> then.
> 
> The display was on a board with the 7-segment LED chips
> right there where one could solder ribbon cable to the back of
> each chip or remove the chips and replace them with 16-pin DIP
> headers if one wanted to sacrifice the display. One could have
> then taken the 8 segment leads which were actually 7 segments
> and a decimal point, anded that with the strobe which activated
> each digit, and fed those leads to logic circuits or a
> microprocessor to decode each actual digit. This could have all
> been done in the eighties and while the result would have been a
> little awkward, one could have had a talking DVM or a DVM that
> sent CW.
> 
> "QST" even had articles about how to modify DVM's and
> frequency counters to make them accessible.
> 
> It is all very different now in that the level of
> integration in common electronic devices is so much greater than
> in the Science Products era. You simply can't get to the display
> drivers without totally destroying everything. Open up something
> today and you may see a monster surface-mount IC that is the
> whole device. The rest of the board is possibly hundreds of
> traces going to the LCD display screen. You could have 500 or
> 600 columns and another 500 or 600 rows to address each pixel on
> the screen to make it possible to generate graphics, words and
> numbers, and even whole pictures.
> 
> I am not trying to be negative or explain why this or
> that can't be done, but today, it must be done differently. You
> just can't run 20 wires out from the display board any longer
> and read the display. If there is a signal to read, it may be a
> serial data channel consisting of a clock line plus at least one
> more wire that goes high and low according to bits being sent
> and received. You really need some kind of processor to decode
> those data and that is a possibility, but the whole level of
> complexity is way up there compared with how things used to be.
> 
> In some ways, the possibilities are greater now but the
> techniques for getting at the data are totally different now.
> By the way, I was lazy and never got around to building that DVM
> interface. I had one of the analog DC volt meters that AFB, I
> think, sold in the early seventies that used a Wheatstone Bridge
> and chopper modulator so I could read DC voltages and
> resistances. I fooled around and procrastinated until the early
> nineties when the Radio Shack Talking DMM came out and I just
> never got around to finishing that project.
> 
> Martin
> 
> Tom Brennan writes:
> > Actually, I wasn't even thinking about a computer.  In fact, ten or 
> > twenty years
> > ago there was a move toward one of these systems as a universal access 
> > tool.  It
> > wouldn't be much more than a speech synthesizer.  There used to be an 
> > outfit
> > called Science for the Blind which became Science Products who would add 
> > speech
> > output to any digital device that you had by just adding a port and 
> > supplying
> > you with a voice box.