I found 4 Russian IN-8 Nixie Tubes in a box at a yard sale last week. Before I invest in sockets and power supply parts I thought I'd check. Anyone have a Nixie device I can check these in?
Haven't seen nixie tubes (or even the word "nixie") in a coon's age. If you know what they are (and apparently you do, since it's your avatar) you should be able to build what you need yourself.
I saw "coons age" and busted out laughing!! Wild Wild West - Will Smith vs Loveless I built 1 makeshift socket and I built a DIY power supply. 3 work - 1 bad. So much for making a clock out of them!!! Now I'm trying to figure out what I can use 3 for? A count down days clock for Obama's Presidency? I can call it a "Nixed" clock??:lol:
Digit IC out to analog input = high $$$$ in parts I'm a cheap Frankenstein hack hobbyist. I salvage and then build. :mrgreen: I modified a disposable camera flash circuit, a 100k pot, and a 100k resistor to power the tubes for my test. Oh yea, ...... and my burnt up capacitor discharge rig! Who new those darn $5 camera's had that much power (300v) in them!! I didn't read the cap value before discharging. When I discharged the cap, for safety, it turned the resistor into a solar flare!! I even had a piece of debris stuck on the sheet rock wall that was still smoking. "It's alive, it's alive!!" :lol:
Been there myself, although I haven't built anything in a few years. Back in the day, when I lived in Silicon Valley, my second home was "WeirdStuff Warehouse" where I could pick up stuffed PC boards to disassemble for less than a buck each. Oftimes you could get several dollars worth of parts, if you were careful and knew how to de-solder. Alas, here in NC there is a distinct lack of electronic salvage stores. More's the pity. I do like to watch KipKay, though. If you don't know who he is, you should look him up (on YouTube). He's really good at salvaging parts to make neat little toys.
Yea, I haven't bought a capacitor, diode, resistor, mosfet, or etc. in years!! Ic's are about the only thing I've had to buy. My favorite hack site is http://hacknmod.com. I took a small $10 table top deep fat fryer and turned it into a "solder pot". I modified the 375 degree thermostat to 500 degrees by just breaking off the limit stop. I made a melting crucible that fit in the 1.5 qt. pot from an old 10# lead dive weight I had, so it didn't take much solder to fill it. I don't have to 'desolder' anything anymore. Lay the board on the pot and lift the components off with tweezers. A total of $14 for a $200 tool. PS: Last week I acid refined all the old chipsets, board slots, cpu's, and ram gold I've collected over the years . I got 10.2 grams of 24k gold from them!
:lol::lol: I cut the gold bearing pieces off the boards and toss them in a big box. Slots, ram, cpu's, jumper pins, and chips that have a wide gold line on one corner. The line tells you it has gold internally. I have an old 1985 intel stepper cpu on a daughter board. I should scrap it, but I just can't. Vintage CPU's are bringing big bucks on ebay strictly for their gold content.
Now I'd rather build furniture out of them! And their value would be greater.:lol: That gold I got was 3.5 years of collecting. All my future boards are going into a table like this. If I can find some more vintage stuff for the top I think the nostalgia in actually seeing it, in lieu of using it, would give me more enjoyment.
I'd do well with the cards of older cpu's. Back when the designation didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what it is. I think the industry complicated the designations intentionally so you didn't know what the heck you were buying!:lol:
Like knowing if the microprocessor starts with a 6 it's a great, powerful processor and much better than the ones that start with an 8. (Yes, I know this flies in the face of the fact that I don't like Apple and prefer PC, but that's prebuilt stuff. If I'm going to build, I'd rather build with a 6.) (Of course my favorite microprocessor is/was a SC/MP) It all started with "The Pentium" when Intel realized it only had a limited number of combinations starting with "80" and ending with "86" (80286, 80386, 80486).
What's impressive is the layout on the circuits! Being exposed wire, his wiring design had a lot of faults to avoid. I watched the vid 3 times and couldn't see a insulator anywhere?
