Electronics projects | Microcontroller projects | Teardowns | Reviews | Tutorials | Random tech babble
As part of a collaboration project through contact with a member of Instructables who had seem my large LED clock project I made some serial driver boards for his project adapted from mine which uses 4″ high LED displays and uses the decimal points as the colons with alternate digits inverted. These driver boards are…
A while back I got part of a communication console unit that was ex military. Not being able to find anything on it at the time I later found out it was part of the desk consoles used for Air Traffic Control for the RAF. I later bought two more units that were slightly different…
Here I have a PRS-2026C Data Retrieval unit which is part of the GEC-Marconi (formerly Plessey Avionics) ESD2020 system used for fault diagnosis and servicing of the Harrier GR5 and the AV8B aircraft. These are no longer used by the air force and find themselves onto eBay and other military surplus sites. I was donated…
I have had several enquiries via the contact me form where mostly users have been asking me for technical help on some of my articles where they have a similar device and wanted my help in helping them getting it to work or wanting assistance building one of my projects. To cut a long story…
In this teardown article I have a Russian ARK-22 radio compass control box which was part of the avionics and miscellaneous items I was donated for my YouTube channel. I have not taken any Russian avionics apart before so this was an interesting find. It took a while to find some information on this unit…
More aircraft avionics to take a look at again. This time we have a Global NDB-2 which is an optional unit for the GNS-500A navigation system commonly fitted to private business jets. This unit is a “databank” containing coordinates and other information for over 20,000 airports and airfields worldwide. It consists of a main unit…
This project came to being when I wanted a large multi digit 7 segment LED display but I was only able to find MAX7219 or similar based display boards with digit heights up to 0.56″. Not being able to find what I wanted, I decided to make a 6 digit clock (one of my earlier…
In a various spending spree of avionics I bought on eBay I have a radio control box for a Plessey PTR-1751 military radio, a common unit used in several aircraft including helicopters during the 1980s and 1990’s. The radio has 7000 channels across 25khz intervals as well as AM reception on 243Mhz for emergency use.…
I’d thought I’d share these cool retro 7 segment displays I obtained from an old aircraft radio. They are Wamco KW-104S direct view incandescent filament displays which are compatible with LED display driver code – just treat them like common anode 7 segment LED displays. Easy! You just have to bear in mind that they…
In this example I will show you how to multiplex a 7 segment LED display from a microcontroller such as an Arduino without placing too much load on the microcontroller pins as I have seen in some other examples. Quite a few tutorials I’ve seen are not really good practice for electronics design – some…
I was experimenting with load cells for a commercial project and thought I’d share one of the prototypes I built to test HX711 load cell modules. It’s built on Veroboard but I designed a PCB for it however never got it manufactured as you can buy one on AliExpress for around 3 Euros or a…
The project I recently bought a few LED displays as a job lot which were parts for fruit machines; the type you see in the local pub and after testing them I found that they had a nice bright red / orange colour to them and decided to use them for a large clock project.…