SparkFun Forums

[I2CMASTER]

Who thinks gas-filled and vaccum tubes would be a great prouduct or a kit to build your own could be a great idea!?! It would be great for guitar Amps and radios.

[dattaway]

I have a fascination for old (old!) hearing aid tubes:

http://www.radiomuseum.org/tubes/tube_ck512ax.html

Great excuse for playing with high voltages to do the smallest things.

[BrianS]

Tubes were always great for certain things. I bought old hallicrafter shortwave radios and rebuilt them just to play around with tubes again. Great sounding audio they have. I also bought a 1970's fender twinreverb guitar amplifier just to be able to get that tube sound with my guitar.
I guess they don't make tubes as good as they use to now. So finding good New Old Stock on Ebay seems the thing to do to bring life back into the good old electronics.
Maybe a good guitar preamplifier kit or stereo preamp or power amp using readly available tubes would spark new interest. The sound is much better then solid state devices.

Brian

[redwire]

I've made a bunch of tube gear, it's a lot of fun and easy to experiment with. You can't beat a good tube amp for fun and sound.
Most kits are silly expensive, like Velleman's mediocre (cheap) designs.

With tube gear you need higher voltages, usually 250-500VDC so you need transformers, which cost a bit http://www.hammondmfg.com/claspg.htm
If you slip up and short-circuit stuff, the tube doesn't care but at those voltages you can get hurt and nobody wants a bunch of dead noobs

SparkFun could do a simple few watt guitar amp, like old Fender practice amps with 6V6's or 6BQ5's. But I'm not sure what their guidelines are for projects... I'd like to see a few serious audio projects here. They can be a lot of fun, especially when you get bored banging your head programming a microcontroller and just want to listen/play some music 8)

[SFE-Mike]

Great idea! A tube amp, or tube radio, or nixie project would indeed be very cool here. I'll suggest it to the PTB.

"Real radio glows in the dark"

[Muris]

Hey guys, I just finished my Nixie clock project.

It displays time, date and temperature with DS18S20. It is based on ATmega328P and important role plays the TLC59401 from TI.com. The schematics and firmware are available for download.

I hope you like it
http://www.elektronika.ba/786/warm-tube ... xie-clock/

[SFE-Mike]

Beautiful job and writeup! I love the LEDs in the base of the tubes...

This gets me motivated to get out the older nixie-tubed test instruments I've been saving up...

[Muris]

Thanks!
Well, I can't wait to see your Nixie project

[coyote20000]

Muris,
Are you going to make a kit?
(wink wink)
I like how compact it is.

Dave

[Muris]

Yes, I am planning to
Soon I hope!