General – Page 3 – Adrian’s electronics blog

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 […]

2 min 0

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 […]

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 […]

2 min 2

Bangood XL4016 adjustable voltage regulator first impressions

Adrian Smith
24/06/2020

I am building a basic power supply for a project and decided to try one of the XL4016E1 based regulator modules commonly available on eBay, Amazon and Bangood which is advertised as being able to handle an 8A / 200W load. I only need up to 2A for my project but at £7.99 it seemed […]

3 min 0

General

Convert cordless drill to lithium battery using RC lipo

Adrian Smith
15/06/2020

Surprisingly even now you can still buy power tools that come with NiCad batteries (not even NiMh) which are a poor choice of battery for power tools due to their memory effect and high self discharge rate. NiMh is a better choice of battery to use but I presume NiMh is cheaper hence why some […]

2 min 0

General

A scrolling message display using 3x 16×32 LED matrix modules

Adrian Smith
28/04/2020

This is another unfinished project; I started making a scrolling message display using the LED modules I used for my dual colour Pong Clock around 3 years ago. I managed to get it working to the point where a message can be sent via the serial interface (or a serially connected bluetooth module) and have […]

2 min 4

General

Scrapping a crap UPS and trying to make a bench PSU from the transformer. (Waste of time)

Adrian Smith
15/04/2020

My Trust UPS battery failed on me last year and I was meaning to replace it but the cost of a replacement battery is almost equal to the cost of a cheap brand new UPS from dubious brands. I’ve always used APC SMART ups’s as they are very reliable and never seem to go wrong […]

1 min 3

General

New LED pong clock version coming soon

Adrian Smith
31/12/2019

Well time certainly seems to fly and it’s the end of another year. It’s been a year since I finished my LED animated Pong clock which I initially started about 3 years ago and I’ve been working on an improved version using bi colour LED matrix modules I obtained from a scrap advertising LED board. […]