I recently acquired this rusty theatrical spot light.
It looked like, someone already repainted the thing at some point and as can be clearly seen on the second picture above evidently someone put a bulb of a too high wattage in it.
I removed the remains of the paint and applied new high-temperature paint.
The fixture uses a GY9.5 socket, which in by itself does not really help in figuring out the rating of the light.
Mettler K7T
My other laboratory scales and balances: Mettler B5, Mettler P1210, Sauter L10
I recently obtained this Mettler K7T laboratory scale from the late 1950s to early 1960s. It has a resolution of 100mg with a capacity of 800g.
Cleaning The internal mirror was fairly dirty, so I gave it a clean with isopropanol.
The case didn’t actually have any normal rust spots, this looks more like some corrosive chemical spilled onto there at some point.
Frequency Standard System: 32.768Khz Clock Divider Mk1
This is part of my Frequency Standard System.
This board is a direct implementation of the circuit outlined in this article by Gavin Watkins.
So there is not too much to say about it, the article explains the working. I used the unused gates on the 74AC00 as output drivers for the 50Ω BNC.
Stereomicroscope Ringlight Supply
As mentioned on my MBS-10 post the power supply of the ringlight I have for the former isn’t quite up the the safety standards I’d like. It was one of the cheaptest I could get and the quality of the power supply matches that. So I decided to built myself a new one!
It’s an unregulated 12-15V power supply with an adjustable current limiter consisting of a TIP41C transistor. I used a lot of hot glue to secure the front panel components, as they wouldn’t probably hold on the plastic panel.
SUN Netra X1 Capacitor Replacement
For the keen observer, the picture on my last post about the SUN Netra X1 showed a couple suspicious capacitors around the processor. Two of them already started venting, so I figured to replace them before the short out and damage the mainboard. I also examined all other capacitors, including in the power supply and those all still looked fine.
The broken capacitors in question are SANYO 1500uF/6.3V I replaced them with Würth 1500uF/10V capacitors (WCAP-ATUL 860040275011) which happen to have the same via spacing and diameter.
Upgrading a SUN Netra X1 with a SATA SSD
My old SUN Netra-X1 with an UltraSPARC-IIe+ lately had some bad sectors in it’s IDE hard drive, an old Seagate Baracuda 40GB. I found some IDE to SATA protocol converters online and figured might as well give it a try. Would be nice being able to put SATA hard drives or even SSDs into my old SUN machines.
Bingo!
wd1 at pciide0 channel 1 drive 0: <INTEL SSDSC2CW120A3> wd1: 16-sector PIO, LBA48, 114473MB, 234441648 sectors wd1(pciide0:1:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 I decided to do a reinstall of the system while I’m on it and booted bsd.
NiCd Charger for Mining Lamps
So I recently found this while clearing out the workshop of someone:
It is a charging indicator for mining lamp charger racks, in partcular for Oldham-Arras lamps. It still had the bus bar mounting clips attached to it. So of course with this sitting around, I decided to built my own mining light charger.
NiCd mining lights were charged using constant voltage, since they were used all ~20h with the charging requiring around 14-16h, so the time of the cells being charged and venting was kept fairly low.
WiFi MQTT Controlled 4x High Power Relay
Circuit Nothing much to say, it’s fairly standard. The relays are switched using BC517 darlington transistors. The unit is powered using a 230V to 12V AC/DC SMPS, the 5V for the ESP8266 board is derived from a standard LM7805.
I used a WEMOS D1 I desoldered from another project, unfortunately a couple of the output pins didn’t work (probably damaged an internal trace while desoldering). So I used some wires to connect the signals to the pins that are working.
Frequency Standard System: TCXO 10Mhz Mk1
This is part of my Frequency Standard System.
Oscillator VEB Narva 10Mhz The 10MHz TCXO itself is from east Germany made by NARVA. According to the data sheet it has a tolerance of ±2e-6, an aging of ±1e-6 and a thermal precision of ±3e-6. Given the timestamp of 1983 on it, it will have a deviation of approximately 3.7e-5 at this point.
The TCXO power circuit consists of a 555 timer with an ON-delay of a couple of seconds to ensure the supply has stabilized.
Frequency Standard System: Overview
So with the built of my watch amplifier recently I got to question myself on how do I get a stable clock reference signal?. So I decided to build a frequency standard system. Unfortunately I don’t have a Rubidium reference right now but I decided to build everything in modules, so I can swap any part of it with a better or improved variant once I obtain the parts to build them.