Jeri Ellsworth Spins a CRT TV for Mysterious Reasons

If you were an alien that understood physics, but not human technology, CRT (cathode-ray tube) TVs would probably be easier to comprehend than LCD TVs. In a CRT, you’re just shooting electrons at a screen that glows when hit by electrons, using magnetic coils to deflect the path of the electrons in the X and Y axes.

If I asked you, “alien, please make the picture on that CRT TV spin,” your solution would probably involve an adapter before the deflection coils that uses fancy math to translate the signals over time.

But you, as an alien, lack the practical common sense of human Jeri Ellsworth. Her solution is brilliant in the kind of way that seems obvious in retrospect: she simply rotated the entire CRT inside the TV housing. Bosh!

Why does she want to do that in the first place? I don’t know. She says she has “big plans for spinny CRT” and that sounds awfully suspicious, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Foreboding and enigmatic messages aside, her method for controlling the spin actuated by a stepper motor is also very clever. Where you, dear alien, would hook up some kind of microcontroller-managed stepper driver, adroit Ellsworth connected a rotary encoder directly. Through some sort of dark magic I didn’t know about and don’t understand, the quadrature output from the encoder can act as a pulse signal that drives the stepper directly.

To complete the project for its prophesied purpose, Ellsworth just needs to do some 3D printing, add a slip ring, and somehow implement an optical interrupter with her stepper control for homing.