Terms in Use

The working vocabulary of this site, dictionary order — industry terms as they apply here, and the shop's own words, marked as such. A few sentences apiece, no more.

The words below are used consistently across the case studies, the resources, and the product pages. Industry terms carry their standard meanings, narrowed to how they matter on this bench. Terms that exist only in this shop are marked.

° = a term of this shop, not the industry.

attractor state — A stable output a system settles into at a given setpoint. One setpoint can host more than one; the device on this bench has alternated between two with the controls untouched.

bend — A deliberate disturbance introduced into a working video circuit — a capacitance to ground, a resistance between two points, drive into a control node — and the behavior it produces. Used as both verb and noun.

bend point — A location in a circuit where a bend can be applied and does something worth keeping. On found hardware you locate them by poking; MK ULTRA brings fourteen of them out to labeled pads instead.

bistable — Holding two distinct states at one control coordinate. Documented at the onset: one setpoint, two glitches, alternating repetition to repetition.

burst (color burst) — A short packet of 3.58 MHz reference tone following each horizontal sync pulse. A display compares the picture’s chroma against its phase to recover color; a decoder that cannot lock the burst returns no color at all. See Composite sync, explained.

characteristic curve — Borrowed from transistor datasheets: hold the device steady, step one input, record what the output does. The same document can be written for a bend instrument — where the picture breaks, and how little of the dial that takes.

chroma — The color portion of a video signal, carried in composite as the phase and amplitude of the subcarrier. Timing errors of a few nanoseconds show up as hue shifts before they show up as geometry.

composite video — One wire carrying the picture, the sync that addresses it, and the color riding on a subcarrier. The format every instrument on this site works in. See Composite sync, explained.

control resistance° — A resistance presented to a chosen point in a circuit, used as the control variable of a bend. The instruments here set it optically — an LED driving a photocell — so the controlling electronics never touch the video path.

cream° — The softening bend: high-frequency energy measured at −94%, produced with 2.2 nF on the signal. Edges dissolve and color bars pool. The opposite number of etching. See The Performed Bend.

CRT — Cathode-ray tube display. The forgiving witness: its sync circuits coast through timing a digital decoder refuses, which is why one hangs at the end of every chain here.

decoder — Software or equipment that holds a signal against the specification and reconstructs the picture only when it passes. The strict witness: asked to decode a sweet-spot signal, it returned zero frames.

dressed° — Said of a finished board whose every switched or swappable position is labeled with what is loaded there, so the hardware states its own configuration. A board is not done until it is dressed. See How an Instrument Gets Made Here.

drive — The commanded input into a control channel, stated as an index rather than a measurement — an IREF value, a 0–255 level. What a sweep steps.

etching° — The high-frequency-boost bend: +31% high-frequency energy, measured. The picture reads as engraved into the raster. The opposite number of cream.

fingerprint° — A glitch’s signature computed from the waveform rather than the picture: spectral flatness, spectral centroid, and autocorrelation at the 63.5 µs line period. Lets a look be recognized from the signal alone.

flywheel — The circuit in a display’s sync section that keeps scanning at the learned rate through missing or damaged pulses. The mechanism behind a CRT’s forgiveness.

luma — The brightness portion of a video signal. The grayscale figures in the case studies are raw luma, decoded straight from the capture.

one-of-one — A unit whose panel finish is drawn once and not repeated. Every L/S/D+ enclosure is one.

onset — The drive level where a signal stops surviving the device and starts coming apart. The narrow band around it holds most of the expressive action, and it moves with device state and part history.

raster — The grid of scanned lines a display draws, whether or not a stable picture lands on it. When sync fails, the raster is what remains.

regime — A region of control space where the output holds to one species of behavior. A sweep here typically resolves into two: a narrow onset band, then a sustained regime that only morphs as drive increases.

scanline — One horizontal line of the picture, about 63.5 µs in NTSC with its sync pulse included. The unit the line reader grades.

series — A numbered production batch of hand-built units — ten to twenty at a time here. Within a series the circuit repeats; the panels do not.

setpoint — A fixed control coordinate: every channel’s drive held at stated values. A setpoint maps to a family of glitches plus a switching behavior, not to one glitch.

subcarrier — The 3.58 MHz carrier riding on the composite picture, carrying chroma as a phase relationship. Disturb the phase and hue detaches from geometry.

sweet spot — A setting where the signal is too bent for a decoder to certify and still willing to be displayed. The defining exhibit is 470pF + 330Ω to ground: 60% of lines off-pitch, zero fields of color lock, near-clean on the tube.

sync — The portion of a composite signal that tells a display where every line and field begins. Breaking the picture is the work; protecting sync is what keeps the work watchable, and it is the architecture L/S/D+ is built around.

witness gap° — The distance between what a forgiving display shows and what strict test equipment certifies, on the same signal. Where the two disagree is where this kind of work lives.