Projects & Such

Legacy Projects

Some of my old projects from back in the day, sadly I did not document that as well back then.

Once again an old project from over 10 years ago. I tried to make a discreet logic clock as I did not have access to microcontroler programming tech at the time. It was a fun project, however I have not ever finished this one.

One of my old projects from over 10 years ago now. I pulled a graphics equerliser VFD & driver chip out of an old HIFI when I was at school (yes that old) & reverse engineered it & turned it into a reudermentry portable one. Still have the project although I have not powered it up in literal years. It did not have a long battery life, but it was a fun project.

One of my early reverse engineering projects, I pulled this off an old SONY camcorder from the early 90s.

This CRT viewfinder was from an old VHS camcorder, this time I knew what I needed to do & played some Star Wars Demolition on the PS1 because why not.

So in the pre-uni months I was converting an Acorn Electron into a laptop. The machine ended up being featured by the late Total Biscuit due to me playing Granny's Garden.

The random early ventures into electronic projects. This is where I had my real start in building & designing my own stuff in my teenage years.

What do you do when you want a Geiger Counter but can't afford one. You build one.

Recent Projects

Projects I have done in recent years or am still working on.

I had a spare keyboard from a parts unit Toshiba T3100/20. Rather than have it sitting in the parts bin for an eternity. I wanted to put it to some use as it has a very nice tactical feel, turned out the keys are ALPS, so they are good key switches.

As expected this turned out to be a bitch of a project to put together.

This originally started off as a watch project, but I really did not have any interest in programing clock logic, something about it is just boring. So instead I got hold of some temperature & humidity sensors thanks to my partner. SO that is what I built instead.

So a friend in Scotland had been designing light cubes so I used his design modded it a bit to make The Gay Cube. This I think was done around Pride season.

So a friend reverse engineered one of these LED matrix displays from an old fruit machine display. I thought the project was really cool & he sent over the code & I built my own unit. It was then looking though the code I saw a way to use less RAM & get more frames of animation out of the display.

There was only one thing to do with these extra frames of animation.

After messing with the LED matrix thanks to my Scottish friend I was inspired to mess with some more displays & it turned out these VFD moduals all pulled from old fruit machines were very hackerble. Plus they are VFDs, what is not to love.

Essentially a Acorn Electron laptop, but done right, in an 80s style with solid state storage for games & software. Pretty much came about as I had a spare motherboard I fixed up & also a nice 5 inch green screen CRT. So I had to do something like this.

I was depressed, it was COVID lock down, I needed something to stop me offing myself. It was a much needed project to get my sanity back. Mental heath needs as much care as your physical heath. This one helped a lot with my depression.

I had an old broken night vision camera that was army surplus. I then designed to depot the tube, turned out to be GEN1 image intencifyer. It had chronic screen burn, but was more of a proof of concept. Everything about it was homemade.

My second attempt at the night vision scope, this one would fix all the issues the first one had & was possible due to a very kind donation of one of my YouTube viewers.

This version of my night vision was to essentially use my 3D printer to fabricate a better case design, rather than using random shit I could find around the house to put them together. SO I went all out in masking everything as monuler & designed properly as possible. Even though the soviet tube I was using for the scope was not that good.

So original Acorn System 1's are really rare & also expensive when they come up as they were only manufactured in small numbers & there have been enough decades for them to disappear. Luckily they are made with really standard parts & also someone was selling PCB reproductions on eBay, they also were for the Sinclair MK14 so i picked that up with some of the MK14 ROM chips as they are a non standard type.

So Delta built a test rig to safely blow shit up on mains power. So I am making my own so I can safely blow ship up with mains. I am using a lot of parts from a fuse board as they make a good base to build off of.

So I obtained a C63.396.209 Soviet EL display off of eBay. Time to make some more set dressing for the house.

I have always loved these since I first came across them. I have a particular reason that inspired this to happen, the subject might end up being posted on this site at some point. I added two unique features, the first being a Nixie tube in the nose. The other being round displays on the ears.

So I have always loved Red Dwarf since I discovered it in my teenage years. In summery its a SiFi British comedy from the 80s & 90s.

Two of the minor characters in the show were two service droids known as Skutters. These would be seen every so often in scenes usually involving taking the piss out of Rimmer. They are involved in a number of different gags though out the TV show. I have always wanted to build one, so I am. With the help of my partner of course.

So I have always loved the way these tubes look & the fact they cause quite a few other things around them to glow. There name is quite ironic as it is impossible to make any light source that is black. Also these came in handy for curing my partners UV resin.