Fresh off the press – some photos of the Oscilloblock – Summer Dusk edition in its new home! The owner is clearly a huge Nixie tube and neon aficionado, but this is his very first CRT clock. What a fitting environment!
Recently I received a most intriguing request: I was asked to build a self-contained, super-bright X-Y display unit with 3-inch CRT, for use in an “HUD“. Hmm…
Fortunately, I didn’t need to guess any further. As I was once an avid flight simulator enthusiast, I quickly hit upon the correct meaning: Head-Up Display. This is a mechanism that overlays instrumentation or map data onto the view looking forward from the cockpit, so that the pilot doesn’t have to look down to see this information.
Wikipedia has a great introduction to HUDs and their history, but Mike’s Flight Deck has the definitive tome for flight simulator enthusiasts who want to actually build an HUD. According to Mike, the system employs various optical paraphernalia, but at the heart of the mechanism is what lies closest to my own heart – a CRT Display!
An Oscilloclock 3-inch X-Y-Z display unit, optimized for use in an HUD(more…)
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall… Humpty Dumpty had a great fall…
…and so the great nursery rhyme goes! But here at Oscilloclock labs, we’re not talking about an egg (which, one theory goes, represented the defeated King Richard III). We’re talking about a beautiful old CRT, savagely shaken and shattered during international shipping. What a waste. But oh, what a great chance to see the insides close-up!
This broken CRT missed its chance to live again in a nice VectorClockLooking down the barrel. Imagine you are a phosphor molecule, with projectiles from this gun hitting you at the speed of light!(more…)
Fresh from Oscilloclock Labs – a new VectorClock creation, commissioned for the office of a world-famous film and television director:
Tek 520 VectorClock – S/N 002 (image published with permission of the owner)
This unit is based on an original Tektronix 520 vectorscope, which is the predecessor of the 520A that was used in the first VectorClock, described here. This custom conversion employs several key enhancements, and performance has never been better!
What do you do on a mundane business trip to London?
Why, shopping, of course! But if you were the humble proprietor of Oscilloclock.com, you would do much more than that… You would seek to expand your vintage electronic empire!
And so it was that I found myself hunting old electronic devices on Portobello Road one fine Saturday morning. Unfortunately, the game there was far and few between; only two relatively mediocre valve radios, in even more mediocre shape, at far more than mediocre prices…
Fortunately, my colleague was going to save the day. “Pop out to Cambridge for a visit – I’ve seen a few antique shops here,” said he. And after the hour train journey and a wee but of walking, we stumbled onto a veritable gold mine – Robbie’s.
