Collaborate Disseminate
Most robots are built out of solid materials like metal and plastic, giving them rigid structures that are easy to work with and understand. But you can open up much …read more Continue reading Supercon 2023: Jesse T. Gonzalez Makes Circuit Boards That Breathe and Bend
3D printed materials have come a long way in the last decade or so as printers have become more and more mainstream. Printers can use all kinds of different plastics …read more Continue reading 3D Printed Engine Gets Carburetor
For most of us, vacuum tubes haven’t appeared in any of our schematics or BOMs in — well, ever. Once mass-manufacturing made reliable transistors cheap enough for hobbyists, vacuum tubes …read more Continue reading Reshoring Vacuum Tube Manufacturing, One Tube at a Time
Regardless of the mythical qualities that are all too often attributed to vacuum tubes, they are still components that can be damaged and wear out over time. Much like with …read more Continue reading Curve Tracer Design for Power Vacuum Tubes Testing
Before you could just put a drum machine app on your phone, or fire up Garage Band, there were breakthroughs like the Roland 808 drum machine. But that’s not where …read more Continue reading Antique Beat Box Showcases 1950’s Engineering Prowess
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!
For most of us, electronic technology comes in the form of solid state devices. Transistors, integrated circuits, microcontrollers. But for the first sixty years or so of the field existing, these devices either hadn’t been invented yet or were at too early a stage in their development to be either …read more
The vacuum tube is largely ignored in modern electronic design, save for a few audio applications such as guitar and headphone amps. The transistor is smaller, cheaper, and inordinately easier to manufacture. By comparison, showing us just how much goes into the manufacture of a tube, [glasslinger] decided to make a wire-element pilotron – from scratch!
To say this is an involved build is an understatement. Simply creating the glass tube itself takes significant time and skill. [glasslinger] shows off the skills of a master, however – steadily working through the initial construction, before showing off advanced techniques necessary to …read more
There is disquiet in the world of vacuum electronics, that something as simple as shipping a vacuum tube could now be very difficult to achieve. It’s a concern expressed among other places in a video by [Guitologist] that we’ve included below, and includes tales of vacuum tubes being impounded as either dangerous to ship, or not allowed to be shipped across international borders.
Upon investigation it appears that the common thread in all the stories lies with eBay’s Global Shipping Program, the centralised shipping service operated by the online auction giant. We reached out to eBay’s press office on the …read more
Continue reading Vacuum Tubes: Shipping Through EBay Now Challenging?