2020 – Adrian’s electronics blog

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Avionics

Aircraft instrument teardown TCAS / TCRD LCD display unit

Adrian Smith
30/12/2020

I obtained for teardown via the wonders of eBay another aircraft instrument. This time it’s a Honeywell LCD display unit that can be used as a TCAS (Traffic Collision and Avoidance System) display or TCRD display. It is for older aircraft that do not have glass cockpits that need to have a TCAS system installed […]

4 min 0

General

A YouTube statistics counter for subscribers and views (2020)

Adrian Smith
22/12/2020

This month’s project; a YouTube statistics counter I made from spare parts I had laying around and also a good opportunity to play around with the ESP8266 module which is a WiFi chip that contains an 80Mhz 32bit CPU with some flash space free to run some additional code on. It has a USB bootloader […]

2 min 0

Oddball military hardware – GRF Control Panel

admin
27/11/2020

I bought some more crap; this time another eBay find which appears to be a control panel for a video processing unit that takes the recorded video from a Tornado jet’s onboard VHS video recorder (yes, really!) and exports it to another media format along with some video processing. It has several analog switches and […]

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Merlin Helicopter CDU update – serial port probing

admin
24/11/2020

I have been trying to see if the Merlin Helicopter CDU I wrote about in my previous article could be repurposed. I found that it has a number of serial ports which are a mix of RS485 and RS232 and was hoping that key presses would present something on the serial port(s) or the display […]

2 min 1

Merlin helicopter CDU teardown and power up demo. Three microprocessors inside!

Adrian Smith
08/11/2020

With lockdown continuing I bought some more military surplus aircraft avionics to mess around with to pass the time and try and figure out how they work of if they could be modified for some other purpose. This time I have a RAF Merlin helicopter CDU (Control Display Unit) to strip down and see if […]

1 min 0

General

Found a collection of old ceramic CPU’s. Exposing the dies

Adrian Smith
21/10/2020

I have a ton of crap I have collected over the years and I come across a bag of old CPU chips – early pentiums, some DEC alphas and some SUN ultrasparc chips that I had kept for some reason. There’s even the main VLSI chip from a Wang 2200 2nd generation system my dad’s […]

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More RAF Tornado parts – a look inside the bearing indicator display

Adrian Smith
30/09/2020

There are a lot of parts from the RAF Tornado on eBay due to them being retired from service back in 2019. I did a teardown on one of the avionics boxes on one of my previous posts which revealed lots of 1970’s silicon tech. Not very impressive by today’s standards but pretty cool to […]

2 min 0

Panavia Tornado Avionics LRU teardown

Adrian Smith
18/09/2020

Whilst browsing through Ebay for weird and obscure things that people sell I came across several sellers selling surplus military and old aircraft parts. Two particular aircraft seem to be the most popular; the RAF Tornado and the Nimrod with the former retired from service in 2019, the latter much earlier back in the early […]

2 min 7

1940’s National watch cleaning machine repair

Adrian Smith
16/09/2020

I was given this machine to repair & restore – a National Electric watch cleaning machine Model 1 which dates from the 1940’s. It was in a very poor condition, rusty and all electrical parts visibly corroded and the original fabric insulation on the wiring had rotten. This was a very dangerous machine even when […]

1 min 0

Projects

A small update to my dual colour pong clock

Adrian Smith
27/07/2020

I’ve released a small update to my arduino controlled dual colour pong clock project (V1.24) which fixes flickering on the seven segment display when the LED matrix is being updated. The change basically stops the matrix from updating when it’s blank as it does not need to. I also made some tweaks to the brightness […]

2 min 0

General

20V 1.5A bench PSU with ATtiny85 based electronic fuse

Adrian Smith
28/06/2020

I built a bench power supply for a relative which had to be low cost and I decided to use Bangood as my source of most of the parts to reduce cost. I purchased the case, relay module, DC-DC converter board, panel meter and the output banana jacks from Bangood and the rest came from […]

3 min 3

DSN-VC288 voltmeter and current meter review (in short they are shite)

Adrian Smith
25/06/2020

I bought one of the commonly available dual display panel meters with the part number DSN-VC288 which has three digits and shows voltage to 1 decimal place and current to 2 decimal places. It can measure 0-99.9V and 0-10A and features a red display for the voltage and blue for the current. There seems to […]