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Lenticular
Experimenting with the rural internet of things
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Flareme
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Baby spinach, ripe tomatoes, micro greens Thai basil and leaf lettuce, Gorgonzola. Add bacon crumbles and hard boiled egg and toss with dressing…
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Open hardware project - Vacuum tube tester
I have a problem in that now I have a fairly large collection of vacuum tubes. Most of them are 30 years old or more and, even if unused, some deteriorate over time. Now I need to sell some on ebay and most are of unverified condition. I need some way to test them.Looking at the available options:
1) buy a used vintage tube tester and maintain it. purchase price of several hundred dollars US. Maintenance is questionable.
2) buy a currently manufactured unit. If any are actually available they are expensive and require assembly and packaging. Some cheap China units are on ebay but have limitations on the tube types they can test.
3) build someone’s publicly documented tester e.g. from a DIY forum. Nothing quite there without some tweaking. many ongoing projects using line frequency and hardware functions. Some microcontroller based projects in the beginning stage but nothing documented.
4) start from scratch to build a general purpose microcontroller based tube tester as an open hardware and open software project.
I added this option because none of the first 3 seem like something I want to do. The hope is if I push ahead with an open project, some others will participate as they can use the resulting product.This could solve the problem for many of us in a collaborative fashion.
I decided to go with option 4, a new project from scratch with an open hardware and open software project. Since I already have a design in mind, I took a snapshot of my current thinking and posted it to the DIYaudio vacuum tube forum for peer review and to gauge the interest level.
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/tubes-valves/206787-micro-programmable-tube-tracer-tester.html
I’m now proceeding with more detailed design and construction of a prototype. I’m using a rapid prototyping concept called protovation to get something going quickly for conceptual proof and to involve others sooner.
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