Honestly, this is probably best viewed on mobile due to the low resolution of the display. It's impossible to film properly.

An update on the project to convert a Soviet Ukrainian MC6205 (aka MS6205) neon plasma matrix display to show full raster graphics. This operated with the same principle as a nixie tube, as explained in part 1. It was originally designed to display text only and I have yet to find anyone else who has been able to fully convert one to show images. A rare varient, the IMG-01-02 does exist that uses the screen (GIPS-10000 or ГИП-10000) in conjunction with a different board and was designed for images, but this is harder to come across and more expensive.

Originally the plan was to use an ESP32 but I switched to the Raspberry Pi Pico W, which turned out to be a crucial addition due to the PIO state machines. Without those, Micropython would be too slow and I'd be stuck programming in C.

FastAPI was used to provide the images to the display via my local network, with Numpy and Python Image Library (aka Pillow) used for preprocessing. Originally, I wanted to use OpenCV but there were issues with installing this in the Docker container.

This has been a significant project so far and has been the most complex piece of PCB design and electronics I've worked on so far. Of course, the image quality is never going to be great but I'm pleased with the results so far.

I will post a final update in the next few months when I have every pixel active. Keep an eye of the github repo for documentation.

00:00 Intro
01:53 Capability Demo
05:19 PCB Design
08:53 Design Journey
15:19 Code Design
18:39 Future Work


Further info:

Part 1:
   • Doing extremely Soviet things with a ...  

Github repo for all the code and board designs:
https://github.com/lambdaBoost/MC6205...

Extremely helpful page with further info on these displays. Provides a good explanation on frame rate control:
https://habr.com/ru/post/588588/

The real MVP: Waifu-API:
https://github.com/Waifu-im/waifu-api

Kaggle anime faces dataset:
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/splch...

Pi Pico PIO info:
https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-e...

Edit. The random pixel flickering or 'visual snow' issue has been fixed. I'd accidentally left the snubber capacitor off the power circuit. A rookie error which could have blown the mosfet arrays had I left it unchecked.