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You’ve seen Nixie clocks, but here is a Nixie clock with no semiconductors devices whatsoever:quote:A completely digital clock without any semiconductors. No ICs, no micros, no transistors, not even a diode! The only silicon is in the glass of the 40 glorious electron and Nixie display tubes! Built in 2005.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 09:13 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 02:16 |
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What's the heat output of that glorious monster?
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 09:31 |
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Boiled Water posted:What's the heat output of that glorious monster? My guess is somewhere between space heater and furnace. Jesus christ.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 09:39 |
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Look at all them tubes glow. The consumption of the heaters alone is almost one hundred watts.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 10:49 |
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Boiled Water posted:What's the heat output of that glorious monster? Ah, so that's what those audiophiles mean with "warmer sound" from their tube amps.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 10:51 |
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For comparison, here are a couple of Nixie clocks that use synchronous motors for timekeeping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MvupoHGV-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YajwGdbXV1w Here’s one made with discrete transistors and diodes (there’s one IC hiding in the upper right, a power transistor package): It has over 1300 components but “only” draws fourteen watts. It looks huge, but it actually has a smaller footprint than the all‐tube clock (14″ on the longest dimension vs. 18″), in addition to being much thinner. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 11:51 on Sep 19, 2016 |
# ? Sep 19, 2016 11:27 |
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Platystemon posted:The consumption of the heaters alone is almost one hundred watts.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 11:33 |
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Collateral Damage posted:Total or per tube? Total. The main counter tubes are 300 mA @ 6.3 V = 1.9 W, and there are eighteen of them. Some of the larger tubes are 1.2 A @ 6.3 V = 7.6 W. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 11:39 on Sep 19, 2016 |
# ? Sep 19, 2016 11:37 |
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Platystemon posted:Here’s one made with discrete transistors and diodes (there’s one IC hiding in the upper right, a power transistor package): quote:You will learn a thing or two building this clock.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 11:54 |
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hackbunny posted:OK, my bad, being vague in PYF. Ancient Greeks and Romans had goofy, non-positional numbering systems that weren't designed for mathematics. Look at this mess, it's even worse than I remembered: Yea even unto the present day, the Danish language is almost as bad. Granted, they use the same sane way of writing numerals as everyone else, it's the linguistic treatment that is insane. In English, you'd call the number 87 "eighty-seven". Unless you are Abraham Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address in which case you'd say "four score and seven". The Danes are worse, they'd say something which translates as "seven-and-fours[core]". But it gets even worse, because what of 97? It's "seven-and-half-fives", "half-fives" obviously being halfway between fourscore and fivescore.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 12:03 |
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There's a neat video of the concept with Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 12:08 |
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Groke posted:Yea even unto the present day, the Danish language is almost as bad. Granted, they use the same sane way of writing numerals as everyone else, it's the linguistic treatment that is insane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM1FFhaWj9w code:
Wasabi the J has a new favorite as of 12:19 on Sep 19, 2016 |
# ? Sep 19, 2016 12:17 |
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The French still don't use the "half-score" thing.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 12:51 |
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Groke posted:Yea even unto the present day, the Danish language is almost as bad. Granted, they use the same sane way of writing numerals as everyone else, it's the linguistic treatment that is insane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 13:16 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk0h1WcPMHI
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 13:18 |
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Collateral Damage posted:I guess one of the things you'll learn is what a pain in the dick it is to solder almost 3000 points. I love big solder jobs. I find them incredibly soothing, so this sounds like a wonderful project. If it would have been possible to find a career soldering, I would have done that. Instead, I have to put up with all the bullshit engineering that goes alongside it. I'm also assuming they're all through hole components, because gently caress soldering surface mount by hand. Hard to tell from some of the pictures.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 19:14 |
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Explosionface posted:I love big solder jobs. I find them incredibly soothing, so this sounds like a wonderful project. If it would have been possible to find a career soldering, I would have done that. Instead, I have to put up with all the bullshit engineering that goes alongside it. Yeah, that's definitely through-hole. I also find huge repetitive soldering jobs kinda meditative, so that looks like it would be awesome to put together. The one thing I miss about working at Radio Shack is that when we'd get in those little Velleman kits, I'd buy one with my discount and sit there putting it together at the counter (yes, we were that slow--you wonder why the company went bankrupt?). It actually helped us sell them, since we could point to the put-together one sitting there and upsell it to some dude who just came in for a cable or whatever.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 19:43 |
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Explosionface posted:I love big solder jobs. I find them incredibly soothing, so this sounds like a wonderful project. If it would have been possible to find a career soldering, I would have done that. Instead, I have to put up with all the bullshit engineering that goes alongside it. My first internship out of high school involved lots of PCB-population, and I too found it rather relaxing. I enjoyed surface mount more than through hole, though. Through-hole is all about flipping (the board) and clipping (the leads), while with surface mount you strip 5x 100pF caps out of a reel, then grab them one at a time with tweezers, position them, dab of liquid flux, and a quick touch of solder. It was so fast, and I felt like a loving craftsman
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 21:46 |
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Pham Nuwen posted:My first internship out of high school involved lots of PCB-population, and I too found it rather relaxing. For one project in school, we had to take a relatively complicated project (spanning three small breadboards) and transfer it to one single layer prototyping PCB. We had a small competition as to who could manage it with the fewest jumper wires (I was second with three, one jerk had one). I felt like a pro after three hours of planning my layout and even longer filling drat near the entire backside with solder pseudo-traces. I still have that thing saved somewhere because I can't bear to lose it.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 22:06 |
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Boiled Water posted:There's a neat video of the concept with Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc This was great.
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 22:38 |
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Pham Nuwen posted:My first internship out of high school involved lots of PCB-population, and I too found it rather relaxing. I did as well. Felt like an absolute boss soldering chips down by tacking the corners and dragging the solder across with lots of flux. (As a service tech for mobile phones in the late 90s). I soldered a few Ecigs not long ago; "easy, only 10 wires, this will take ten minutes max" I think... Holy poo poo, was I overconfident in my ability to do that quickly now /and/ have it look factory. But those skills will come back with practice. I'll buy an unpopulated keyboard PCB and spend some Zen time soldering cherry switches next, or a nixie tube clock kit I think. It's fun getting back into this. GRINDCORE MEGGIDO has a new favorite as of 23:12 on Sep 19, 2016 |
# ? Sep 19, 2016 22:59 |
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Platystemon posted:Total. I thought Nixie tubes needed well over 120vdc just to strike the arc?
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 23:27 |
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Do they make nixie tubes or is this one of those things where people are tearing apart old kit because they love the look of the things?
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# ? Sep 19, 2016 23:27 |
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There's a couple of Eastern European factories that still make a small amount of new new nixie tubes, but I think most people are ordering Soviet new old stock tubes via eBay instead of ripping apart old things.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 00:02 |
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wipeout posted:Felt like an absolute boss soldering chips down by tacking the corners and dragging the solder across with lots of flux. Aww yessss. Somebody would make a "soldering porn" youtube channel and just have hours of this. Spergs will be comforted by it.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 00:36 |
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Pham Nuwen posted:Aww yessss. Somebody would make a "soldering porn" youtube channel and just have hours of this. Spergs will be comforted by it. https://youtu.be/O-ymw7d_nYo
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 01:06 |
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Phanatic posted:I thought Nixie tubes needed well over 120vdc just to strike the arc? I only added up the cathode heater currents. Nixies are cold‐cathode devices, so they don’t have heaters. Nixies operate at circa 170 V, but at only a couple of milliamps. All six Nixie tubes together only consume about two watts. Dekatrons are similar, but with 400 V and 300 µA, so only 120 mW per tube. The rest of the tubes have currents through their anodes as well, I just didn’t bother to add them up. For the eighteen 5963 in the hours/minutes/seconds counters, the datasheet says typical operation is 5.1 mA and 150 V, but on average only half of them will be conducting at any given time, so figure 7 W for the lot. Compare that to 34 W for the same tubes’ total heater consumption and you can see why I only bothered with the heaters. Here’s the relevant page of the 5963 datasheet because old datasheets are cool. Notice that it’s dated 1955 and spec’d for computer service: Kwyndig posted:Do they make nixie tubes or is this one of those things where people are tearing apart old kit because they love the look of the things? As Elliotw2, they’re mostly unused tubes from Soviet warehouses. They produced them by the millions, as late as the early nineties. Planned economies have a few perks. You can buy new, artisanal tubes for $145 each (old Soviet tubes are $2–$10 for the common ones). That guy’s YouTube channel has some videos of how they’re made. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 02:24 on Sep 20, 2016 |
# ? Sep 20, 2016 02:11 |
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Thanks to the same deal, you can get all sorts of new-old stock G-M tubes from sellers in Russia, Ukraine, etc.. Even though I'm a Canadian nuclear engineer almost all of my own custom-made radiation detection equipment use Soviet parts because it's much cheaper than Western stuff.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 02:45 |
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http://i.imgur.com/Pyt344f.gifv Dekatrons in action at the National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park Platystemon has a new favorite as of 03:52 on Sep 20, 2016 |
# ? Sep 20, 2016 03:45 |
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Humphreys posted:I have had a play on one of these here in Australia. Someone didn't understand that "World Series" is a misnomer?
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 04:03 |
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Platystemon posted:http://i.imgur.com/Pyt344f.gifv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12LLJFSBnS4 "I don't even know what any of this stuff does. What's going on there? I don't know. Is it good that it's doing that? Occassionally it doesn't do that and I think that I should tell them, but often I just look away. And this one: flash, flash, flash. Wait for it. Nothing for a little while.... double flash!" Imagined has a new favorite as of 04:20 on Sep 20, 2016 |
# ? Sep 20, 2016 04:18 |
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Imagined posted:"I don't even know what any of this stuff does. What's going on there? I don't know. Is it good that it's doing that? Occassionally it doesn't do that and I think that I should tell them, but often I just look away. And this one: flash, flash, flash. Wait for it. Nothing for a little while.... double flash!" This is terrible for productivity. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! posted:The real trouble was that no one had ever told these fellows anything. The army had selected them from all over the country for a thing called Special Engineer Detachment—clever boys from high school who had engineering ability. They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in barracks. And they would tell them nothing.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 04:39 |
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I'm picturing a 50s-style Daft Punk using this as a sequencer.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 06:09 |
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Nice lesson, I will use that for my future wire splices. I spent a few minutes wondering what the hell "sawder" was, though. Some fancy tin / solder material reserved for pros? Oh.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 13:27 |
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I swear this was a thing but maybe I made it up in my kid brain Comp USA had a demo for this game that you controlled with your mind, supposedly. It was a first person game were you were skiing down a slope and you could slightly veer left or right. I think you placed your hand on some stationary mouse. 100% chance it was a gimmick but was this a thing?
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 13:59 |
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Nostalgia4Dicks posted:I swear this was a thing but maybe I made it up in my kid brain It was! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iPefnLfKlY
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 15:04 |
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There have been a few games that were controlled through EEG readings, but mostly as gimmicks. As far as I know there's not been any commercially successful "brain game".
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 15:04 |
Collateral Damage posted:There have been a few games that were controlled through EEG readings, but mostly as gimmicks. As far as I know there's not been any commercially successful "brain game". There was an experiment with direct mind control for a flight simulator, but it was done on a disabled woman who had cables jammed in her brain.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 21:26 |
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There's neuro boy but it isn't very good and wasn't very popular, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wETftaPopk
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 21:31 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 02:16 |
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The main problem with brain to machine interfaces is that brains and machines don't how to work that way by default, so you have to both train the operator and the computer program to do anything. Until that process can be streamlined to the point where you can put on a helmet or whatever and just play, 'brain games' are never going to catch on. It's not really an obsolete or failed tech, just one where the technology to make it actually work doesn't really exist yet. The 'easiest' way would be to use a universal schema that you train the operator on beforehand, so you'd have the computer already set up with a database of how their brain inputs commands that you could use. Kind of like a gamepad for your mind. Of course, since there are already perfectly good interfaces out there that don't rely on direct mind connections, that sort of research is going to be restricted to the disabled for a long time.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 21:47 |