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Platystemon: Feb 13, 2012; BREADS

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.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 09:13

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# ? May 27, 2024 18:46

champagne posting: Apr 5, 2006; YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

What's the heat output of that glorious monster?

# ? Sep 19, 2016 09:31

Intoluene: Jul 6, 2011; Activating self-destruct sequence!; Fun Shoe

Boiled Water posted:

What's the heat output of that glorious monster?

My guess is somewhere between space heater and furnace. Jesus christ.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 09:39

Platystemon: Feb 13, 2012; BREADS

Look at all them tubes glow.

The consumption of the heaters alone is almost one hundred watts.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 10:49

Stick Insect: Oct 24, 2010; My enemies are many.

My equals are none.

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.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 10:51

Platystemon: Feb 13, 2012; BREADS

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

Collateral Damage: Jun 13, 2009

Platystemon posted:

The consumption of the heaters alone is almost one hundred watts.

Total or per tube?

# ? Sep 19, 2016 11:33

Platystemon: Feb 13, 2012; BREADS

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

Collateral Damage: Jun 13, 2009

Platystemon posted:

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.

He also has a transistor version: http://transistorclock.com/

quote:

You will learn a thing or two building this clock.

I guess one of the things you'll learn is what a pain in the dick it is to solder almost 3000 points.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 11:54

Groke: Jul 27, 2007; New Adventures In Mom Strength

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.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 12:03

champagne posting: Apr 5, 2006; YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

There's a neat video of the concept with Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc

# ? Sep 19, 2016 12:08

Wasabi the J: Jan 23, 2008; MOM WAS RIGHT

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM1FFhaWj9w

code:

60's
.... Sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine.

70's
Sixty-ten, sixty-eleven, sixty-twelve, sixty-thirteen, sixty-fourteen, sixty-fifteen, sixty-sixteen.
Sixty-ten-seven, sixty-ten-eight, sixty-ten-nine.

80
Four twenties

Wasabi the J has a new favorite as of 12:19 on Sep 19, 2016

# ? Sep 19, 2016 12:17

Groke: Jul 27, 2007; New Adventures In Mom Strength

The French still don't use the "half-score" thing.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 12:51

hackbunny: Jul 22, 2007; I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

# ? Sep 19, 2016 13:16

champagne posting: Apr 5, 2006; YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

hackbunny posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk0h1WcPMHI

# ? Sep 19, 2016 13:18

Explosionface: May 30, 2011; We can dance if we want to,
we can leave Marle behind.
'Cause your fiends don't dance,
and if they don't dance,
they'll get a Robo Fist of mine.

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.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 19:14

Magnus Praeda: Jul 18, 2003; The largess in the land.

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.

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.

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.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 19:43

Pham Nuwen: Oct 30, 2010

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.

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.

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

# ? Sep 19, 2016 21:46

Explosionface: May 30, 2011; We can dance if we want to,
we can leave Marle behind.
'Cause your fiends don't dance,
and if they don't dance,
they'll get a Robo Fist of mine.

Pham Nuwen posted:

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

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.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 22:06

Mondian: Apr 24, 2007

Boiled Water posted:

There's a neat video of the concept with Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc

This was great.

# ? Sep 19, 2016 22:38

GRINDCORE MEGGIDO: Feb 28, 1985

Pham Nuwen posted:

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

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

Phanatic: Mar 13, 2007; Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Platystemon posted:

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.

I thought Nixie tubes needed well over 120vdc just to strike the arc?

# ? Sep 19, 2016 23:27

Kwyndig: Sep 23, 2006; Heeeeeey

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?

# ? Sep 19, 2016 23:27

Karasu Tengu: Feb 16, 2011; Humble Tengu Newspaper Reporter

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.

# ? Sep 20, 2016 00:02

Pham Nuwen: Oct 30, 2010

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.

# ? Sep 20, 2016 00:36

El Estrago Bonito: Dec 17, 2010; Scout Finch Bitch

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

# ? Sep 20, 2016 01:06

Platystemon: Feb 13, 2012; BREADS

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 �A, 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

BattleMaster: Aug 14, 2000

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.

# ? Sep 20, 2016 02:45

Platystemon: Feb 13, 2012; BREADS

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

Buttcoin purse: Apr 24, 2014

Humphreys posted:

I have had a play on one of these here in Australia.

Someone didn't understand that "World Series" is a misnomer? :classiclol:

# ? Sep 20, 2016 04:03

Imagined: Feb 2, 2007

Platystemon posted:

http://i.imgur.com/Pyt344f.gifv

Dekatrons in action at the National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park

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

Platystemon: Feb 13, 2012; BREADS

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.

Then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM machines�punching holes, numbers that they didn�t understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we�re doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to security and got special permission so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited: �We�re fighting a war! We see what it is!� They knew what the numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more energy released, and so on. They knew what they were doing.

Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn�t need supervising in the night; they didn�t need anything. They understood everything; they invented several of the programs that we used.

So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, we did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten times as fast.

# ? Sep 20, 2016 04:39

Gromit: Aug 15, 2000; I am an oppressed White Male, Asian women wont serve me! Save me Campbell Newman!!!!!!!

Platystemon posted:

http://i.imgur.com/Pyt344f.gifv

I'm picturing a 50s-style Daft Punk using this as a sequencer.

# ? Sep 20, 2016 06:09

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

El Estrago Bonito posted:

https://youtu.be/O-ymw7d_nYo

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.

# ? Sep 20, 2016 13:27

Nostalgia4Dogges: Jun 18, 2004; Only emojis can express my pure, simple stupidity.

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?

# ? Sep 20, 2016 13:59

Inco: Apr 3, 2009; I have been working out! My modem is broken and my phone eats half the posts I try to make, including all the posts I've tried to make here. I'll try this one more time.

Nostalgia4Dicks posted:

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?

It was!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iPefnLfKlY

# ? Sep 20, 2016 15:04

Collateral Damage: Jun 13, 2009

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".

# ? Sep 20, 2016 15:04

chitoryu12: Apr 24, 2014

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.

# ? Sep 20, 2016 21:26

Tunicate: May 15, 2012

There's neuro boy but it isn't very good and wasn't very popular,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wETftaPopk

# ? Sep 20, 2016 21:31

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# ? May 27, 2024 18:46

Kwyndig: Sep 23, 2006; Heeeeeey

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.

# ? Sep 20, 2016 21:47

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