Dining Room Fiber

 

Video Scope
Input is standard vertical bar test image

Sony Umatic tape head

 

 

 

 

 

 

Early Christmas

Just some of the equipment donated from the local municipal tv studio!

 

Trace of 5MHz Oven Controlled Oscillator

Click on title for link to original post Oct 2009.

What can happen when you are simply too good at repairing flat panel tv's.....

Power Resistors!

Large Nixie Tubes

An exceptionally generous gift arrived today from an old friend now in Minnesota...four large Nixie tubes plus a full set of documentation and plans. My first guess is they are Burroughs B-7971's; click on title to this post for link to more information.

DSO Nano

New very portable lab instrument: DSO Nano by Seeed Studio scope with upgraded third-party firmware (Paul). Great folks to work with, I highly recommend Seeed Studio. You can go directly to their site by clicking on the title to this post.

Mechanical Delay Device

Out of a high current-50 amp-relay rack likely used to control large motors. This device, actuated by the gray bar at lower left, introduced an adjustable delay of approximately one second after the solenoid is powered up. This is a pneumatic device with a knob, top rear, to change the rate at which air escapes. The motion controls a switch, top left. We have six of the large three-phase relays.

Rectifier

Selenium plate rectifier out of a very old-tube based-photo studio flash unit.

Oven Controlled Oscillator

A remarkable find, a 5 Mhz oven controlled oscillator that works great! Excellent reference and calibration source.

BS2P

We recently upgraded to a BS2P Stamp microcontroller with support for I2C and seven segment displays. In this photo, D3 wrote code to write and read-back from an I2C eprom on the breadboard and display the results on a LCD display scavenged from a printer. He also successfully connected a larger 4 line display with back-light from a first generation hand-held GPS.

iButton Water Temperature Test

The iButton inside the brass chamber was suspended from a tree branch just below the surface of the Peeper swamp for 48 hours starting at 8pm. The following day, it was very warm with the air temperature rising above 90 degrees. Both the night before and night after were much cooler as was the second day. Temperature sample rate was 5 min/sample (horizontal scale is 5 minutes/tick mark). Information about iButtons is available by clicking on the title of this post which links to the Maxim-IC site.

iButton Deep Water Chamber

This is a simple brass chamber containing a temperature recording iButton mounted on a foam-core insert. The orange tape indicates the end most tightly secured; both Teflon tape and heavy rubber gaskets internally are used. Tonight, we suspended it just beneath the water surface in the swampy area behind our house with the device set to take temperature samples every 5 minutes.

Stamp Example

David had the good fortune to receive an unexpected and exceptionally generous gift last night from Jim, brother of a good friend, of a Stamp Micro controller kit. He has been very busy coding away to control a servo motor, LEDs, button switches, seven segment displays, stepper motors, and more.

Components Oracle Data Base

Now with over 200 entries, David is building an Oracle 10g database, called ICSS, running on an Ubuntu server itemizing integrated circuits and other components extracted from all sorts of equipment found at the swap shed and elsewhere with associated datatsheets....an unformatted snapshot of one page below:

Part Number Description Qty

TEA2025B STEREO AUDIO AMPLIFIER
TIP120 POWER TRANSISTORS(5.0A,60-100V,65W) 1
TL074CN LOW NOISE QUAD JFET OP-AMPS
TL082CP Wide Bandwidth Dual JFET Input Operational Amplifier
TL084CN GENERAL PURPOSE QUAD JFET OP-AMPS 1
TL7705CP SUPPLY VOLTAGE SUPERVISORS
U1615 PNP Epitaxial Silicon Transistor 20V 10A 1
UDN2916B Dual Full-Bridge PWM Motor Driver 1
ULN2003AN High-Voltage, High-Current Darlington Transistor Arrays 1

The client browser runs on Koppix, Back Track or Slax booted from an iPod!

Magnetic Field

If you did not believe in the effect of a magnetic field on moving electrons....The 70's have returned....a magnet from a tweeter out of Ohm-H speakers

40 Years Ago...

I built this when I was a kid. The tube is a 6U5 with 1M resistors mounted in the rear. We assembled a power supply from parts harvested out of a very old PA system including a 6V4 full wave rectifier tube, transformer, and 16uf cap to provide B+. Remarkably, some many years later, the Magic Eye still works fine. The case partially open to permit access to wires and internal connections.

Laser out of a CD player

Unexpected image from a laser extracted from a CD player shown on a sheet of white paper. The infrared energy is visible only with a black & white video camera or video camera with night-shot capability. The focusing coil is controlled by a joystick interfaced through a bank of transistors.