A blog of my electronics and microcontroller projects
General stuff
This is probably going to be the last aviation related teardown video but to finish this teardown series I’ve got something pretty cool; a black box from an RAF Nimrod MRA4 which was a failed project and numerous aircraft were built but were never delivered to the RAF and were later scrapped. This one does…
I’ve recently been experimenting with the ESP8266 modules and made a YouTube statistics counter as the first and experimental project. I used a NodeMCU for that which gave me no problems at all. However there is a smaller board, the Wemos D1 mini which on first impressions looks like a more ideal board for final…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…