Coachella Lamp

This little art piece might be just the thing to add that mad scientist look to your room. It’s called the Coachella lamp and it makes use of several throwback display devices. At the top an Argon discharge lamp puts out ultraviolet light. Protruding from each of the four sides you can see a set of decatrons. There’s also four Nixie tube bar graphs standing tall from each corner of the base. The final touch is the colored glow in the center which is provided by LEDs. We’ve embedded some video of the device after the break.

The lamp is powered by a wall outlet and controlled with an Arduino. We’ve seen deactrons used as timing devices and would love to see some clock functionality added to the lamp. Trying to decipher the time from the different Nixie displays would put this up there with some of those other hard to read timepieces.

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Don’t Put That EPROM In Your Mouth!

[Jeremy] had some chips on hand that included EPROM.  We’re not talking about EEPROM, we mean EPROM that need a UV light source to erase. Most people don’t want to drop a few hundred dollars on a dedicated EPROM eraser, there must be another way.

Boy, EPROM really suck. But so do pacifiers and he already had a solution for exposing those to UV. He pulled out his $30 UV pacifier cleaner and tossed the chip inside. Two times through the cleaning cycle and the data was gone. We’ve looked into using UV LEDs to do the job but some experimentation shows that it doesn’t work. These pacifier cleaners are cheap and easy to get a hold of. The real question is are you still using chips that require UV for erasing?