Savel brain dump in English!

In 2008 my programming skill was too weak, so I ordered nixie (neon glow tubes) clock kit. I had lots of ИН-12Б tubes in my stock, so I used them as my starting design. Tubes were connected to clock PCB with tube sockets, so I had option to swap and test some other tubes.

In this series of tubes there several special tubes like ИН-15 and other. They have various symbols instead of digits.

This clock set is based on PIC16F876 MCU, there is step-up power suply on board.

For more information check original web page in Lituanian language (comments have some interesting links).

Yeap, it was cool to have Nokia N8 in 2008. And it was cool to repair it… Original post from spring 2008:

This is consequences of certified repair of Nokia N80. Old metal case was damaged and was replaced. First of all it was not original part. Second- phones lost image on LCD screen. The other phone was bought and this one was left in the drawer. After some time “they” forced me to repair the phone.

It looks like, that certified technician crushed original flat cable with case and after some time it broke.

Red arrow show the damage. I bought new ribbon cable in eBay and replaced. It was very strange, that parcel came from USA, not China.

Big thanks for Mr. Rolf2 for being very lazy to repair this phone and sending me the link in youtube with instructions about this phone disassemble.

Wiki:

Dekatron (or Decatron, or generically three-phase gas counting tube or glow-transfer counting tube or cold cathode tube) is a gas-filled decade counting tube. Dekatrons were used in computers, calculators and other counting-related products during the 1950s and 1960s. “Dekatron,” now a generic trademark, was the brand name used by the British Ericsson Telephones Limited (ETL), of Beeston, Nottingham (not to be confused with the Swedish TelefonAB Ericsson of Stockholm).

I have several old soviet tubes A106. It is high speed, hydrogen filled dekatron. It is special tube to count or divide impulses. This particular tube is “very soviet”- it is unstable, sometimes misses pulses or jump two segments from one pulse. Maybe this happened because of very simplified circuit I’ve used to test?

It glowing everywhere because of long exposure when making photo. It was fed by 50Hz mains current and tiny dot run around 5 times in a second. And the color of the tube is absolutely different.

Here is the animation:

And here is the circuit diagram to test the tube. Warning! High voltage abroad. Schematics are very typical- voltage multiplier and pulse shaper. The only problem with hydrogen filled tubes is high working voltage.

This is another “filler” article from old blog posts. When I don’t have any fresh and interesting ideas, I just write short filler articles to show regular blog reader that I am still allive. For this English translation blog these articles are useless, but I need to translate everything as sometimes you can catch the system how my ideas are born.

Original article dated 11th of April, 2008.

All these player have same problem- dead lithium battery. Maybe not dead, but over discharged. Just recharge battery with external charger and you’ll have another useless gadget. I was using these devices as source for small lithium batteries, other small electronic components. It is pitty, but LCD screens are without any documentation and I throw them away.

I found 1G or 2G flash chips from Samsung inside, FM radio modules, small charging circuits and TD018THEJ6 LCD screens. Screen resolutions is very bad and now there is better alternatives.

Ometimes I need to desolder big chips from PCB- like motherboards controllers, GPUs and other “heavy equipment”. For this purpose I used big hot air gun without any thermocontrol. To check the temperature of the chip I need something simple. And this simple and cheap device was IR thermometer from some China seller.

It is not accurate device- as all this type instruments, it give “aproximate” result for viewing area, so to check spot temperature you need to place detector as near as possible.

For testing and calibrating I measured temperature in my fridge- minus 16°C. Boiling water in the kettle is 99°C 🙂 , inside my mouth 36° (if you are ill, it will show a bit more than regular thermometer. You must measure temperature inside human body, outside temperature is wrong).

Temperature reading are not very precise, especialy if you measure something glossy. I think that target must look more like “dark body” to prevent from reflections and wrong readings.

Temperature ranges for this cheap device are from minus 32° to +320°C.

There is useless laser to find target.

This article was written on 10th of April, 2008.