80s Function Generator Is Both Beauty And Beast

You know how the saying goes — they don’t make them like this anymore. It’s arguably true of pretty much any electronic device given the way technology changes over time, though w…

Early CD Player Teardown

While CD players are nothing new today, they were the height of high-tech in the early 1980s. [w1ngsfly] shows us the inside of a Phase Linear 9500 player from 1983. Not only does it have many comp…

Hacked Oscilloscope Plays Breakout, Hints At More

You know things are getting real when the Dremel is one of the first tools you turn to after unboxing your new oscilloscope. But when your goal is to hack the scope to play Breakout, sometimes plas…

Waveform Generator Teardown Is Nearly Empty

We always enjoy [Kerry Wong’s] insightful teardowns, and recently, he opened up a UTG1042X arbitrary waveform generator. Getting inside was a bit of a challenge since there were no visible sc…

Voice Control For A Vintage Heathkit Radio

Most modern ham rigs have a voice activated transmission (VOX) mode, although we don’t know many people who use it often. When a transmitter is in VOX mode, it starts transmitting when you ta…

Danish Vintage LRC Meter Reveals Inside

Modern test equipment is great, but there’s something about a big meter with a swinging needle and a mirror for parallax correction that makes a device look like real gear. [Thomas] shows us …

Vintage Particle Counter Is A Treasure Trove Of Classic Parts

If you need a demonstration of just how far technology has come in the last 40 years, just take a look at this teardown of a 1987 laser particle counter. Granted, the laser-powered instrument that …

Royal Typewriter Gets A Second (or Third) Life

Usually when we are restoring something with a keyboard, it is some kind of old computer or terminal. But [Make it Kozi] wanted an old-fashioned typewriter. The problem is, as he notes, they are no…

1950s Switching Power Supply Does It Mechanically

When you hear about a switching power supply, you think of a system that uses an inductor and a switch to redistribute energy from the input to the output. But the original switching power supply w…

Inside A Hisense TV Repair Attempt

Many of us misspent our youth fixing televisions. But fixing a 1970s TV is a lot different than today — the parts were big and tubes were made to be replaced. Have you torn into a big flat sc…

Tiny Signal Generator Revealed

There was a time when test equipment was big and heavy. Those days are gone, and [Kiss Analog] shows us the inside of a Uni-T UTG962E arbitrary waveform generator. The device is truly tiny. You mig…

Folding Solar Panel Is Underpowered

If you hang out on certain kinds of sites, you can find huge-capacity USB drives and high-power yet tiny solar panels, all at shockingly low prices. Of course, the USB drives just think they are hu…

A 1960s PLC Gives Up Its Secrets

When it comes to process automation, the go-to part in most industrial settings is a Programmable Logic Controller, or PLC. These specialized computers will have a modern microcontroller running th…

In Praise Of Old Meters

We are spoiled with multimeters today. Even the cheapest meter you will get these days is almost surely digital with a tremendous input impedance. But a few decades ago, meters were almost always a…

Half Power Bank, Half Spot Welder

There was a time when every gizmo on AliExpress also had a big white LED so it could also work as a flashlight, but maybe the power bank is the new flashlight. [Aaron Christophel] has a battery spo…

Teardown Of Two Russian Missile Sensors

Recently [Michel] received two packages from Ukraine containing some salvaged Russian electronics that once belonged to (presumably) a 9K38 Igla, Vympel R-27 or similar infrared homing missile, as …

Teardown Of FGM-148 Javelin Missile’s Guidance Computer

You know it’s a good teardown when [Michel] starts off by saying to not ask him where exactly he got the guidance section of an FGM-148 Javelin from. This shoulder-launched anti-tank guided m…

Up Close And Personal With A MEMS Microphone

If you’ve ever wondered what lies beneath the barely visible hole in the can of a MEMS microphone, you’re in luck, because [Zach Tong] has a $10 pair of earbuds to sacrifice for the cau…

It’s An Audio Distortion Analyzer, Just Not The One You Were Hoping For

An audio distortion analyzer is a specialist piece of analogue test equipment that usually costs a lot of money and can be hard to track down on the second hand market. Finding one is a moment of l…

Repairing An HP Power Supply

One of the interesting things about living in modern times is that a confluence of the Internet and rapid changes in the electronics industry means that test gear that used to be astronomically pri…