Vacuum Tubes: Shipping Through EBay Now Challenging?

January 20, 2018 by Jenny List 76 Comments

There is disquiet in the world of vacuum electronics, that something as simple as shipping a vacuum tube could now be very difficult to achieve. It’s a concern expressed among other places in a video by [Guitologist] that we’ve included below, and includes tales of vacuum tubes being impounded as either dangerous to ship, or not allowed to be shipped across international borders.

Upon investigation it appears that the common thread in all the stories lies with eBay’s Global Shipping Program, the centralised shipping service operated by the online auction giant. We reached out to eBay’s press office on the subject but have yet to receive a reply. It’s best to ask someone who ships a lot of tubes for comment when you have a tube shipping story, so we also had a conversation with TC Tubes. They’re a small company dealing in tubes, and as you might imagine they ship a lot of them (Their website is likely to detain you for a while if you are a tube-head). [Chelsea] from TC Tubes told us that they have encountered no regulatory barriers to tube shipping, and that their only bad experience has been yet again with eBay’s Global Shipping Program.

So it seems there is no cause for panic if you ship tubes, CE marking or RoHS rules haven’t come for your EL34s and your 6550s. Ebay have evidently got some kind of issue with tubes in their shipping operation, and perhaps you should ship by other means if you wish to avoid your tubes going astray. The consensus here among the Hackaday crew is that it could be as simple as uninformed employees not being aware of what tubes are because they aren’t as common as they used to be. After all, with over a hundred years of history behind them it’s not as though any potential issues with their shipping haven’t been comprehensively explored.

We’d still be interested to hear from eBay on the matter though, if they would care to comment.

Continue reading “Vacuum Tubes: Shipping Through EBay Now Challenging?” →

Home Brew Vacuum Tubes Are Easier Than You Think

May 4, 2016 by Dan Maloney 67 Comments

It all began with a cheap Chinese rotary vane vacuum pump and a desire to learn the witchcraft of DIY vacuum tubes. It ended with a string of successes – a working vacuum chamber, light bulbs, glow tubes, diodes, and eventually this homebrew power triode and the audio amplifier built around it.

[Simplifier]’s workshop seems like a pretty cool place. It must have a bit of an early 20th-century vibe, like the shop that [John Fleming] used for his early work on vacuum tubes. Glass work, metal work, electronics – looks like [Simplifier] has a little bit of everything going on. True to his handle, once [Simplifier] had a cheap but effective vacuum rig he started with the easiest projects – incandescent and gas discharge lamps. Satisfied that he could make solid electrical and physical connections and evacuate the tubes, he moved on to diodes and eventually triodes. The quality of the tubes is pretty impressive – stray gasses are removed with a bake-out oven and induction-heated titanium getters. And the performance is pretty solid, as the video below reveals.

Very impressive overall, and it’s not just the fact that he’s building tubes from scratch – we’ve seen that before. What shines here is that specialized equipment is not needed to make working and reliable tubes – just a MAPP torch, simple hand tools, and a low-end vacuum rig. Anybody could – and probably should – give this a try.

Continue reading “Home Brew Vacuum Tubes Are Easier Than You Think” →

Pneumatic Multiplexer

June 23, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 17 Comments

This is a pretty cool project [Sebastian Morales] is working on – a 3D printed Pneumatic Multiplexer. Large interactive installations, kinetic art and many other applications require large numbers of actuators to be controlled. For these type of projects to work, a large number of actuators equals higher resolution and that allows the viewer to be captivated by the piece.

The larger the system becomes, the more complex it becomes to control all of those actuators. [Sebestian] wanted to move a large number of components with a relatively low number of inputs. He thought of creating a mechanical equivalent of the familiar electronic X-Y matrix that can control large quantities of outputs using only a few inputs – in a more descriptive form, Outputs=(Inputs/2)^2.

He looked at chemical reactions that change liquids in to gases, but that seemed pretty complicated. Refrigerants used in air conditioning looked promising, but their handling and safety aspects looked challenging.

Eventually, he decided to look at using “air logic“. Air logic uses pneumatic devices to create relays, limit switches, AND gates, NAND gates, OR gates, amplifiers, equivalent to electrical circuits. Electrical energy is replaced with compressed air. His plan was to build a multiplexer whose elements would open only if the combination of pressure between both lines was the right one. As in electronics, NAND logic is easy to implement. A moving element creates a seal and only allows air out if the bottom line was low and the top line was high.

He had access to a high resolution, resin based 3D printer which allowed him to create fully air-tight systems. He started with prototyping a small 4×4 matrix to test out his design, and had to work through 6 to 7 iterations before he could get it to work. The next step was to create a larger matrix of 100 elements controlled by 20 inputs (10×10 matrix). He created Omnifarious – a kinetic sculpture demonstrating the concept of shapeshifting objects. The Omnifarious is a hexecontahedron which would be able to transform its surface to render different geometries via 59 balloons on its surface. Below, you can check the videos of his progress building the various prototypes and another video showing the Omnifarious sculpture.

Continue reading “Pneumatic Multiplexer” →