I’ve been working on this for 6 months….
This little box in my hand is something I’ve been working on for quite literally 6 months. I’ve poured thousands of hours of actual blood, sweat and tears into it, and I’m so excited to show it to you. It’s almost ready, I’m hoping to have it live and available as early as next week, but for now I thought I’d give you a bit of a teaser and first look.
So, what is it? In short, a tool for reviewers to test monitors more with much better detail so that you, the person actually buying the thing, have a true picture of what you are buying and how monitors properly compare.
In more detail, it’s a response time testing tool – at least right now anyway, as it wouldn’t be all that hard to make it do input lag testing as well but I haven’t added that yet. It measures the same 110 grey to grey transitions you’ll find in Hardware Unboxed’s reviews, in steps of 25 or 26, from RGB 0 to RGB 255. It’s based on the same basic design Aperture Grille outlined in his video about 10 to 90% measurements (something I’d like to talk about at some point as well…), which is a Melexis MLX75305 light-to-voltage sensor, and an Adafruit M4 Express microcontroller – the one with the ARM based SAMD51 core. The difference though is I’ve worked exhaustively hard to make this as close to a “plug and play” device as I can.
That means that, in theory, anyone can install the software, connect the device via USB, stick it on your monitor, calibrate the brightness, then it’ll run the test, no questions asked. It automatically processes all of the data, so you don’t have to look at oscilloscope lines or graph the raw data in Excel and manually work out every reading. That should mean you the viewers will get more accurate, and more detailed information, assuming your favourite outlets currently even test response times. It runs checks for how stable your 5V USB supply is, if your monitor is strobing or pulsing its backlight, and automatically adjusts the sensor’s output window to match the monitor’s brightness.
I’ve also got it to save all of the raw data to file, so if you want to verify any of the results you can file it up in Excel, graph it and see what’s going on. This is a fairly normal transition, versus one with horrendous overshoot. It also runs the test multiple times and averages the data (and even does outlier rejection!) so the final results are as accurate as possible.
If I’m being honest, I build this thing for me. I want to test monitors more thoroughly, more accurately, so I can render well informed verdicts and provide you as much information as possible so you can spend your hard earned cash on something that is genuinely good, and not just something that claims to be. But, if it was exclusively for me I could deal with it being a bit janky, needing to check with a multimeter before doing a test and writing some basic code to help process the data. The reason this is a more polished device with more robust checks and calibrations all built in is that the mission to bring you prospective buyers as much information as possible doesn’t just stop with me. The more people testing, well anything, in detail, the better. Ideally, everyone who tests monitors would test response times with a similar level of detail and accuracy.
That’s why this entire project, from the C# desktop program and C arduino code, to the PCB design, circuit diagram and STL files for the 3D printed case are all open source. Everything. I want you to not only be able to trust the results as you can verify every single line of code and hardware component, but also build one yourself if you have the tools and skills. I’m giving everything I’ve built to the community, in the hopes it improves how we as reviewers test monitors and you as consumers are informed when you make your often expensive purchases.
Now, I fully appreciate the majority of reviewers and even enthusiasts likely won’t be able to, or even want to, build one of these units themselves. If you don’t have your own resin 3D printer, that alone makes it painfully expensive to have a single unit built, not to mention many electronics component suppliers will often only sell you bags of hundreds or thousands of components you only need one or two of to build this. So, I’m planning on building pre-built units that will be available for people to buy. That includes everything, from the PCB and all of the components soldered in (by hand, by me), the casing, the elastic and tensioner, and even a 5M micro-USB cable. I’m not 100% set on pricing yet, but to give you a ballpark I’m looking at £100 or less, probably more like £75 or around $100. It’s safe to say I won’t be making money on this – the development cost of everything I’ve bought alone would exceed any ‘profit’ I’d make on them, but again I’m not doing this for money.
If you’d like one of these pre-built units by the way, send me an email to [email protected] with “OSRTT Kit” in the subject, or send me a tweet or DM. If you’d like to support the project and don’t need a kit, the best thing you can do is also completely free, which is send this video to your favourite monitor reviewers, especially if they don’t already test response times. If you’d like to support monetarily, there are plenty of ways to do that too. There’s a direct donation link in the description, you can sign up to become a YouTube member and get some extra rewards like sponsor-free videos and access to our exclusive discord channel, or you can use Patreon instead if you’d prefer. You can also pick up a hoodie or T-Shirt like this one or a load of other designs I made myself, or there is even a bitcoin address if you are that way inclined.
So yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing while still making all these videos. Most of this was done between like 8PM and 2AM, for pretty much 6 months straight. I’m really tired. Anyway, make sure you are subscribed with notifications on so when I’m finally able to make all of this properly public and available you get notified.
