Savel brain dump in English!

Arrived big box for recycling and I found big stock of NOS (New Old Stock) radio vacuum tubes. It is the set for repairing some scientific devices. Now these tubes are used in cool hifi audio amplifiers. According to documents, the lamps arrived to USSR in 1977. Most of the lamps are manufactured in 1966. Made in Japan.

Here is the list of the lamps:
(model, manufacturer, quantity)

With boxes:
T66G, Toshiba, 10
12AX7, Matsushita, 30
6CA7, Matsushita, 6
12AF6, Ten, 6
6AL5, Toshiba, 19
12BH7, Toshiba, 10
GRA3, Toshiba, 4
5AR4, Matsushita, 9
6AN8, Matsushita, 9
VR150,, 4
5651,, 3
6N015, Apollo,5
CD25,Rodan,5
6V6GT,Toshiba,5
6BQ5, Matsushita,4
6V6,Ten,4
6DJ8,Matsushita,4
6AU6,Ten,5
12AU7,Ten,3
6X4,Ten,1
12AU6,Nec,2
12AT7,Nec,1
12AX7,Ten,4
6RA5,Nec,2
b-300G,Nec,1
ECF82,Tesla,2
12BH7A,Ten,9

Without boxes:
12AX7, Ten, 25
12AU7, Ten, 14
ECC83, Telefunken,1
Russian: 6N1P-E, 6N2P

We have small local network at home. As it is hobbyist LAN, the cables goes in various strange ways- on the trees, near power lines and etc. We are using FTP ant unshielded (!) UTP cable. In summer, we have few thunderstorms every year. And every year we have dead switches and LAN cards. One year, lightning even managed to burn mainboard in my computer.

Lets look ant the schematics of realtek based UTP switch:

And now look at the photos…

Look ant 75 ohm resistors…

And take a look to the color of shield near the damage. It is not the smut from the flame. It is color of over heated steel. This means that there was electrical arc between resistors and metal frame. The ports are dead, but the device’s other ports are working fine.
I think, that the unshielded cable was connected to these ports and after lightning stroke there was minimum 2..3kV overvoltage here. The blue 2kV capacitors are undamaged. It is not the direct hit! If it was direct hit of the lightning, there would be big black hole here. The overvoltage was from inductive interference from distant lightning.
Using used details from scrapped telecoms equipment I’ve made very simple protector. I am using it for more than year and there was few nice storms this summer. The switch was killed, but my computer’s LAN card is OK. In the next weblog message I’ll show the schematics. It is very simple and LAN is working at 100Mbit/s without any problem.

Schematics of the devices.

For some reason, I need more space on my windows desktop. Especially when I edit video, draw images or create and admin webpages. My computer, with integrated i915 graphics didn’t work with second PCI video card. So I was forced to buy PCIe (pci express) video card. My main criteria was silent cooler. So I bought the card with passive cooler and heat pipe. A heat pipe is a simple device that can quickly transfer heat from one point to another. They are often referred to as the “superconductors” of heat as they possess an extra ordinary heat transfer capacity & rate with almost no heat loss.

Radeon X700, 256MB, heat pipe, no fans.

It started with any problems, except that some metal “design element for lamers” is very near to other card. Also, after restart, windows swapped primary and secondary displays. But after some configuration tricks I have my new windows desktop:

Dual monitors on my table

As cellular phones become more wide spread and newly designed notebook computers and other portable information devices continue to be released, batteries are now required to be “very thin” in addition to having a large capacity and being light in weight. Panasonic is one of the first companies in the industry to successfully mass produce lithium polymer batteries. This new technology allows us to make lithium polymer batteries less than 4mm thick, thinner than
ever before!
Laminate exterior allows for a thickness of only 3.6mm
High energy density similar to Li-ion batteries (135 wh/Kg, 280 wh/l)

It WAS USB2.0 flash drive from Transcend. It was faulty from the beginning. Sometime the system freezed during work and after few of such hangings, the device is unrecognisable. As user lost documents of buying it was given to me. It is not working so I opened to see what is inside:

USB flash drive from inside

The small PCB contains one micro-controller from OTi (OTI002168, Ours Technology flash disk controller) and one flash rom from Samsung (K9F1208U0A). It is 64M x 8 Bit NAND Flash Memory with a spare 2,048K. This chip is interesting for some experiments as it uses only 8+9 pins for all address, power and data signaling.

The ROM and The MCPU

The other side is with 12MHz crystal, 2 transistors or stalisators (5->3.3V) and few pasive stuff.

Among the stuff prepared for recycle I found some electrooptical device:

Side view

On one side there is objective-lens: MIR-1; 2.8/37:

Front view

The other side is covered with big lens:

End view

There is small high DC voltage source (not shown in images). The output of source is about 5…7kV. When i powered the device I managed to see some green images. But the devices is showing only very bright IR wavelength light sources. It can’t be used as night vision device. Maybe it is not night vision monocular? Or maybe device is damaged.

Image of my lustre