Electronics, photography and small green things
I am now a proud owner of this Canon X-07 hand-held computer. I found it from an online auction for an unmissable price. It was advertised as pristine condition with original box and manuals. This machine is quite rare, but has seen popularity in Finland and France. I’ll try to document this computer as thoroughly Read More ...
A Nixie tube is an electronic device for displaying numerals or other information. It is a cold-cathode tube and similar to a neon-lamp. Applying power to one cathode surrounds it with an orange glow discharge.
Modern physics, especially radioactivity has always fascinated me. How can something that can’t be seen, smelled or otherwise sensed by human have such a large part in our perceivable universe, and at the same time be deadly to us organic lifeforms? It can be bit frightening due its properties, but it still is everywhere and humans have Read More ...
Updated the twenty ten theme and edited blog tittle image and wp-paginate parts in. If you encounter problems please comment.
A week ago I found Samsung SyncMaster 245b 24″ LCD monitor from trash. I tested it and it did barely power up. Blue led lighted in power button but nothing else. From the beginning I suspected powersupply, because its most common problem with LCD TVs and monitors. I opened display and started to examine the patient. Read More …
Now I know why I2C was not working in my nixie clock. Today I got an arduino nano from helsinki hacklab, and started to troubleshoot my circuit. Oddly RTC worked when I tried it in breadboard, and also in clock’s motherboard, when nothing else were connected. Also noticed that when nixie driverboard was connected, both of the i2c lines had weird resistance to 5v and ground. I once again removed driver board from case and measured. It was ok, of course. I didn’t even tough about cabling <.< Read More …
Yesterday I got a HD4850 card from post and happily installed it to my desktop computer. I noticed that my 15″ secondary monitor was not detected, but I ignored it until today. Working with two monitor is so much easier and faster, so I started to investigate problem. Read More …
I moved the old blog away, but it can still be found from http://ketturi.kapsi.fi/old_blog/. I am also doing some tuning to t wordpress, so if something seems odd or is not working, throw me a message pleas and I’ll try to make everything work. At this moment I’m fighting against a WP-paginate plugin for nicer paging.
I were somewhat surprised that Acer I found from trash didn’t support a 4GBb DDR2 memory, because computers with the same chipset and processor did support over 2GB RAM. I thought the bios version was really old so maybe updating it could fix this.
So the Nixie-clock isn’t working,.I don’t know why, but the AVR hangs when an I2C routine starts. RTC and I/O extender ic’s should be alright, because they are brand new from ESD tube. And yes, the pull-up resistors are also connected rightly and are 4,7k, which worked on the breadboard perfectly. I’m out of ideas how to make it work. My last resort is to try new AVR when it comes from ebay. If it will not work then, I don’t want to continue whole project <.<
Also, my 8800GT GPU card died today. 
Yes, something went horribly wrong and now it crashes every 5 minutes. Last spring I did reflow soldering because memory IC’s were detached from PCB. Maybe it’s now time to say good bye to an old friend and let it rest in peace. I will buy used 4850 for 50€ so wish me luck!
There’s something good, I found a broken and wet TravelMate 7520G 17″ laptop from the garbage one rainy day. It had broken LCD inverter cable which was an easy fix, and some coke on keyboard. I dried it, washed mobo with G20 dry cleaner (amazing stuff), changed the bios battery and it started to work \o/. Some days later i found another ACER 17″ with broken integrated GPU, which had same keyboard, so now I have a working high performance laptop (yeah I know, over 5 years old amd X2 64 TL-58, HD2400XT, 2GB PC2-6400 and 2x 160GiB WD blues is not even near high performance by todays standard(I could probably get faster netbook or tablet), but more than enough for me).
After a full day of work I have the electronics for the clock complete, or so I hope. And not a day without accidents; I spilled some Earl Grey to my Thinkpad T42’s keyboard, and now the m-letter is not working: I had to remap it to dead acute button. Now I need to get 300€ to buy thinkpad X60/x61(my X40 has a dead southbridge and writing with T42 without proper m-letter is very annoying). But back to the project.
Now I have the internals of the clock nearly finished. I fastened a mainboard to the bottom of the case because didn’t find the same L-mounts I used with the nixie control board. I also made a little board for the nixie psu. 
The mainboard is on the left. I originally wanted to install it the same way as control board but decided then screw it up to bottom of the case with spacers because this way it’s much more accessible. I positioned 170v psu to the bottom right corner with it’s own board in order to avoid shorts and interfere. Previously I somehow sorted 170v to 5v and burned all but russian K155ID1 IC’s. Soviet quality ;)
I am still waiting for a new atmega 16 (because the one in board seems to be broken too), and new usbasp programmer.
Finally I got time to continue the nixie clock. This week is the annual autumn break so hopefully I can make most parts of the clock ready. Writing program code is so time consuming that it is necessary to leave it for a later time. Yesterday I started to assemble the mainboard for the clock. It went mostly without any problems (I dropped my N900 phone which broke down and burned my fingers as usual), and I finished it tonight.
Last night I did some documentation about my eternity protect, nixie-tube alarmclock. My English is not so great, so it will be full of SYNTAX ERRORS. A friend of mine will be editing it later on though.
Edit: The earlier mentioned mysterious friend is already at work. Happy reading!
– Fin
Hello world! This is my first post to this WordPress- based blog. My original blog is terrible, coding sucks, layout is from the 90’s, and I started writing in Finnish, and never got around to translating the articles. So now I’m starting from a clean slate. Maybe this time I will get it right. Only time will tell.
Coming soon: I will try to make a dedicated page for my nixie clock, and maybe translate some old interesting articles from the old blog.
