[Usagi Electric’s] Bendix G15 Gets DC Power

[Usagi Electric] is breathtakingly close to having his Bendix G15 vacuum tube computer up and running. This week he is joined by a new friend, [Lloyd] who is restoring a G15 as well. [Lloyd] used t…

Plight Of The Lowly Numitron Tube

In the 60’s and 70’s there were many ways to display numeric data. Nixie tubes, Vacuum Florescent Displays (VFD), micro projection systems, you name it. All of them had advantages and d…

A Tube Tester Laid Bare

There’s still a mystique around vacuum tubes long after they were rendered obsolete by solid state devices, and many continue to experiment with them. They can be bought new, but most of us s…

A Tube Guitar Amp For A Modest Budget

There’s a mystique among both audiophiles and musicians about vacuum technology, thus having a tube amp still carries a bit of a cachet. New ones can be bought for eye-watering prices and old…

The Height Of 1960s Dental Electronic Technology

If you’ve ever been to the dental surgery and found yourself requiring some gum surgery, the chances are you’ll have found your dentist wielding an electronic probe to cauterise the fle…

Flipped Transformer Powers Budget-Friendly Vacuum Tube Amp

If you’ve ever wondered why something like a radio or a TV could command a hefty fraction of a family’s yearly income back in the day, a likely culprit is the collection of power transf…

Vacuum Chamber Gets Automation

[Nick] does a lot of custom work with vacuum tubes. So much so that he builds his own vacuum tubes of various shapes, sizes, and functions right on his own workbench. While the theory of vacuum tub…

GLASNOST Is A Computer That Makes Transparency A Priority

We live in a world where most of us take the transistor for granted. Within arm’s length of most people reading this, there are likely over ten billion of them sending electrons in every dire…

Spy Radio Setup Gets A Tiny Power Supply For Field Operations

[Helge Fyske (LA6NCA)] may not be an actual spy — then again, he may be; if he’s good at it, we wouldn’t know — but he has built a couple of neat vacuum tube spy radios in t…

The PDP8 That Never Was: Hollow State Logic

[Outer World Apps] noted that there was no PDP-8/V made by DEC — a variant that used vacuum tubes. So he’s decided to make one using about 320 6J6A tubes. He’s got a plan and a fe…

Spy Transceiver Makes Two Tubes Do The Work Of Five

Here at Hackaday, we love following along with projects as they progress. That’s especially true when a project makes a considerable leap in terms of functionality from one version to another…

Tiny Three-Tube Receiver Completes Spy Radio Suite

In our surface-mount age, it’s easy to be jaded about miniaturization. We pretty much expect every circuit to be dimensionally optimized, something that’s easy to do when SMDs that riva…

Tube Amplifier Uses Low Voltage, Sips Battery

Much like vinyl records, tube amplifiers are still prized for their perceived sound qualities, even though both technologies have been largely replaced otherwise. The major drawback to designing ar…

Reshoring Vacuum Tube Manufacturing, One Tube At A Time

For most of us, vacuum tubes haven’t appeared in any of our schematics or BOMs in — well, ever. Once mass-manufacturing made reliable transistors cheap enough for hobbyists, vacuum tube…

Two-Tube Spy Transmitter Fits In The Palm Of Your Hand

It’s been a long time since vacuum tubes were cutting-edge technology, but that doesn’t mean they don’t show up around here once in a while. And when they do, we like to feature t…

Curve Tracer Design For Power Vacuum Tubes Testing

Regardless of the mythical qualities that are all too often attributed to vacuum tubes, they are still components that can be damaged and wear out over time. Much like with transistors and kin, the…

Supercon 2022: Samy Kamkar’s Glowing Breath

Sometimes the journey itself is the destination. This one started when [Samy] was 10 and his mom bought a computer. He logged on to IRC to talk with people about the X-Files and was WinNuked. Becau…

This Scratch-Built X-Ray Tube Really Shines

On no planet is making your own X-ray tube a good idea. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to talk about it, because it’s pretty darn cool. And when we say making an X-ray tube…

Retrotechtacular: The Forgotten Vacuum Tube A/D Converters Of 1965

In any era, the story of electronics has very much been about figuring out how to make something happen with what’s available at the time. And as is often the case, the most interesting devel…

Hackaday Prize 2022: Glass Tube Solar Thermionic Converters

Typically, if you want to convert solar energy into electrical energy, you use either photovoltaic (PV) cells, or you use the sunlight to create steam to turn a turbine. Both of these methods are w…