Will's Blog

I came across a Bell & Howell 2143 XL, a quick search on ebay showed that this thing had little to no value. Its from the 1978-1980 's and is an impressive mess of electronics and machinery. This particular device is video only. Here it is:

I came across a battery charger for some heavy duty animal shears.  The thing had a nice heft to it.  Inside there were a couple relays, a barrel jack, some big caps and a bunch of ICs which I haven't looked up the part numbers for. After opening it up it was apparent the failure was a diode that somehow cracked in half.  There were magic smoke stains on the underside and everything. Here it is, as always click the pictures for higher resolution and additional pictures:

Today was Free Day at SparkFun and like many geeks around the world I had a shopping cart prepared in advanced (last night to be specific). At 11AM EST the floodgates were opened and the SparkFun servers ground to a halt as thousands of people attempted to claim a $100 prize.

WARNING POTENTIALLY HIGH VOLTAGE INVOLVED EVEN WHEN DISCONNECTED, DO NOT ATTEMPT IF YOU ARE UNSURE WHAT PARTS ARE DANGEROUS Using the portable TV in my last post I did a simple hack to convert the tube into a really really crummy oscilloscope. Most likely all it will be able to do is tell me whether the voltage is positive or negative, but thats all I really want it to do.

Received a Magnavox BH3908 portable TV recently. I've always wanted to take apart a TV but didn't want to worry about dangerous voltages and tube disposal. Well this one runs off of 12v and the tube is very small, so hopefully neither of those will be an issue! Its small size also makes it a great candidate for one of those fancy CRT -> Oscilloscope hacks I've been wanting to do. Here it is:

As far as I can tell this was a pretty standard tape deck. These things have a bunch of DC motors but not much else. The potentiometer was pretty small but I harvested it anyway. Finally there were a few motor driver chips, some op-amps, push-button switches and transistors I pulled off. Here it is: