DI
Y
CIRCUITS
NET DATA METER
Antique voltmeter displays current air
quality from the web. By Tom Igoe
One thing that disappoints me about computers is
how little character they possess. Antique instruments
of information display, like Victorian pendulum
clocks, barometers, and compasses, and Babbage’s
calculating engines, have a presence that modern
computers lack.
Photography Tom Igoe
I dig the look of the iPod as much the next guy, but
even the best manufacturing design today doesn’t
match that old brass-and-hardwood handcrafted
love. Desktop widgets replace the need for clocks,
barometers and stock tickers, and multipurpose
display hardware like the Ambient Orb also perform these functions. But because these things have
little presence and are so easily reconfigured, it’s
easy to forget what information they’re displaying.
Does the meter’s sudden plunge mean my Google
stock tanked, or that it’s going to rain tomorrow?
Many geeks, myself included, resist this trend
by fanatically collecting old instruments for
aesthetic reasons. I’ve been playing around
with using antique instruments to display data
from new sources. I have some beautiful, wood-encased voltmeters and ammeters from the early
20th century, which I rescued from my university’s
physics department trash. They work quite well but
they’re not as portable as my current multimeter,
so I wasn’t using them, which is a tragedy for such
proud, functional instruments. So I decided I’d take
a cue from Ambient Devices ( ambientdevices.com)
and make one of them into an air quality monitor.
First, I came up with the basic system. The
meter I used is an analog voltmeter that ranges
from 0–3V DC. That’s a good range to control
from a microcontroller, so I decided to use my
Make: 133
