Collaborate Disseminate
When thinking of retrocomputing, many of us will imagine machines such as the Commodore 64 or Apple II. These computers were very popular and have plenty of parts and documentation …read more Continue reading Retro Computer Goes Back to the 1950s
[Stephen McNamera] found a schematic for a grid leak radio online and decided to throw together a few tubes on a piece of wood and see how it worked. As …read more Continue reading Grid Leak Radio Draws the Waves
[Nick Poole] shared his circuitous journey into the obscure world of homemade vacuum tubes on the Supercon 2022 stage. It began innocently enough when he saw [Usagi Electric]’s single bit …read more Continue reading Supercon 2022: Nick Poole Makes a Jolly Wrencher Tube
If you keep up with various retro vacuum tube projects, you probably have run across [UsagiElectric] aka [David]’s various PCBs that he makes on his own Bridgeport EZ-Track 3-axis milling …read more Continue reading A Guide to Milling PCBs at Home
There’s an unknown piece of military electronic gear being investigated over on [Usagi Electric]’s YouTube channel (see video below the break). The few markings and labels on the box aren’t …read more Continue reading Mystery WWII Navy Gear with Magic Eye
Unless you stay up all night and have a dozen printers going, it’s probably way too late to make one of these beautiful prop weapons designed by [Andrew] of The …read more Continue reading DIY Wunderwaffe and Others Make Up This Open-Source Arsenal
As those of us who work in electronics are grappling with a semiconductor shortage making common devices unobtainable and less common ones very expensive, it’s worth noting that there’s another …read more Continue reading Semiconductor Shortage? Never Mind That, There’s A Vacuum Shortage!
Vacuum tubes fueled a technological revolution. They made the amplification of signals a reality for transatlantic telephone cables (and transcontinental ones too), they performed logic for early computers, and they delivered that warm fuzzy sound for high fidelity audio. But they were labor intensive to produce, and fragile, so semiconductors came along and replaced tubes in almost every application. But of course tubes are still with us and some tube applications are still critical — you’ll find them used in high-power RF and there are even satellites that depend on klystrons. So there are still experts in tube fabrication around, …read more
[Blackcorvo] wrote in to tell us how he took a cheap “retro” guitar amplifier and rebuilt it with sub-miniature vacuum tubes. The end result is a tiny portable amplifier that not only looks the part, but sounds it to. He’s helpfully provided wiring schematics, build images, and even a video of the amplifier doing it’s thing.
The original Honeytone amplifier goes for about $26, and while it certainly looks old-school, the internals are anything but. [Blackcorvo] is too much of a gentleman to provide “before” pictures of the internals, but we looked it up and let’s just say it doesn’t …read more
Bill Shockley brought the transistor to a pasture in Palo Alto, but he didn’t land there by chance. There was already a plot afoot which had nothing to do with silicon, and it had already been a happening place for some time by then.
Often overshadowed by Edison and Menlo Park or Western Electric and its Bell Labs, people forget that the practical beginning of modern radio and telecommunications began unsuspectingly in the Bay Area on the shoestring-budgeted work benches of Lee de Forest at Federal Telegraph.
As the first decade of the 20th century passed, Lee de Forest was …read more
