[Claude Paillard] makes his own triodes (google translated) for short wave radios. The site doesn’t have a lot of details itself, but links to entire books on the history of radio tubes and manufacturing of them. [Claude] takes us through the entire process of building a triode in a 17 minute long video. Even if you aren’t into them, this is fascinating. From the looks of it, several of us might only be a pump or two short of being able to cobble one together.
[thanks Dieter]
When we saw this giant home vacuum tube, we thought it would go perfectly along side the giant LED lamp . Constructed from spare computer parts, a glass display dome and some EL wire, it is fairly convincing looking. If only he had shaped some characters with the EL wire, we could do a giant nixie tube project.
[jefffolly] published some straight forward plans for a passive volume control. It uses a resistive ladder built across the contacts of 12W rotary switches. Each resistor provides a 5dB difference, and he recommends using 0.1% tolerance resistors to maintain accuracy. The use of discrete resistors instead of volume pots means that the output is much more predictable. All of the RCA sockets were connected using oxygen-free copper wire.
[Des] sent in this really cool writeup on building a Regenerative receiver using VFDs. Regenerative receivers are basically short wave radio receivers that use positive feedback to more finely tune the signal. Though they can be built with modern components, [Des] wanted to try to make something that not only looked like it was made in the 30’s, but actually used the same technology. He utilized some VFDs in various places where vacuum tubes were needed. After building, [Des] found that the unit performed very well, better than his authentic 30’s radio that he compared it with. Those VFD’s seem to be everywhere recently. We did the story on using them as amplifiers, and and building display drivers for them too.
[vimeo= 2758525]
ArtFall allows you to draw on a whiteboard, then have small geometric shapes interact with your drawing like a barrier. Imagine a pachinko machine where you have to draw the pegs in. Not only can you draw barriers, but you can change the direction of gravity with either an iPhone or a Wiimote. The footage also shows some sound interaction as the pieces seem to bounce with the bass from some music. The effect is quite nice and somewhat reminiscent of the whiteboard pong we saw recently.
[thanks eric]
[Conundrum] shares with us his MyVu hacking experiences. The MyVu personal display seems like it would be a great foundation to build some decent 3d display goggles, it is fairly small and has a screen for each eye. This opens up the door to possibly driving them independently for 3d. Those giant helmets we used to use were not anywhere near as stylish as these. Apparently, some quick hacking can double your resolution or even possibly supply 3D imagery! The details are pretty sparse, but it appears as though he has gotten some of these mods functional and tested. Lets hope he posts some more information, we’re definitely interested. We normally wouldn’t post something with so little information, but we’re hoping this encourages him to give us more.
[thanks andre]
Breaking from his usually routine of winning at everything, [Glacial Wanderer] has posted one of his projects that didn’t actually work. It’s a Rube Goldberg style card shuffling machine. He wanted something that was visually interesting while still randomizing the cards. A blower would be mounted to the top to mix the cards similar to a lottery ball machine. The cards would then drop into a chute that would make sure all of the cards were oriented correctly before being presented to the user. After building the first prototype, several problems were apparent. The first of which was the fan not being strong enough. His interest was waning and it looked like the time he’d have to invest in fixes was growing quickly, so he decided to cut his loses. He still posted about the prototype in hopes that it could help someone else exploring this sort of machine. A video of the mechanism can be found below.
