A good friend drops by your place and, knowing that you’re an electronics enthusiast, asks for help with a new handheld gadget that suddenly stopped working. Eager to lend a hand, you check the batteries and try the reset button, but the device fails to respond. Next, you expertly pop the case and find a tiny circuit board populated with a dozen solid-state components. However, most of these components are unmarked. Moreover, a thorough search on the web fails to reveal a schematic. With your friend looking on, you suddenly feel dread and powerless to help. Sound familiar? It shouldn’t and needn’t be.
These nixie tubes are NL-5440A’s. The banana sockets were replaced with switches to set the hours and minutes. When the rotary switch on the left is set to OP, the clock is off, when it its set to AC, the clock is on (but can’t be set) and when the switch is set to DC, the clock it still on and you can set the time using the push buttons. The ohms adjust dial on the right controls the brightness of the blue up lighting (fully off to quite bright!).
Typical chemical batteries just don’t cut it when a device needs to run for years without fail. Enter the betavoltaics, or tiny nuclear batteries that harvest energy from radioactive sources such as tritium. Now a company called Widetronix has developed new betavoltaics that can run for up to 25 years and perhaps power tiny devices in everything from military hardware to smartphone sensors.
This shoebox-sized powerhouse would make Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor proud. Like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer, the robotic “Better Mousetrap” goes to the extreme to detect and destroy its target. “Many people have been trying to develop a ‘better mousetrap’ for years, so we decided to build one in the literal sense,” says its developer Jake Easton.
Credit: Widetronix
