Classic Calculator Goes RPN, With New Brain

In the era of the smartphone, an electronic calculator may seem a bit old-hat. But they continue to hold a fascination in our community, both when used for their original purpose, and as objects fo…

Don’t Look Up, Or You’ll See The Time From This VFD Projection Clock

Ceiling clocks were a bit of a thing back in the days when clock radios were a fixture of nightstands. The idea was to project the time onto the ceiling so you’d only have to roll over onto y…

A VFD Dot Matrix Makes This Cyberdeck Special

We’ve had cyberdecks as part of the scenery for long enough now that there are a series of common elements that appear across many different builds. The Raspberry Pi, for instance, or the mec…

Jet Engine Tachometer Turned Into Unique CPU Utilization Meter

When you’ve got a piece of interesting old aviation hardware on your desk, what do you do with it? If you’re not willing to relegate it to paperweight status, your only real choice is t…

More Drill Press Mods: Adding A VFD Means No More Belt Changes

A decent drill press is an essential machine tool for almost any kind of shop, and marks a significant step up in precision compared to a hand drill. The ability to drill square, true holes is one …

This Retro Game Console Puts Vacuum Fluorescent Display To Good Use

Small in size, low-resolution, blocky segments, and a limited color palette — all characteristics of the typical vacuum fluorescent display, any of which would seem to disqualify them as the …

A Loving Look Inside Vacuum Fluorescent Displays

Everyone knows we’re big fans of displays that differ from the plain old flat-panel LCDs that seem to adorn most devices these days. It’s a bit boring when the front panel of your widge…

Audio Amp Puts VFDs To Work In An Unusual Way

It’s safe to say that most projects that feature a VFD emphasize the “D” aspect more than anything. Vacuum fluorescent displays are solid performers, after all, with their cool bl…

VFD Character Display Turned Into Audio VU Meter

Humans love visualising music, whether it’s in the form of an inscrutable equation drawing squiggles in Winamp, or a simple VU meter pulsing with the beat. This build from [mircemk] is of the…

Using Arduinos To Drive Undocumented Displays

For those of us old enough to remember the VCR (and the difficulty of programming one), the ubiquitous vacuum fluorescent display, or VFD, is burned into our memories, mostly because of their brigh…

Captivating Clock Puts Endangered Displays On Display

When you have a small stock of vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs) straight out of the 1976 Radio Shack catalog, you might sit around wondering what to do with them. When [stepawayfromthegirls] foun…

Upcycling A VFD

A lot of electronics wind up in landfills, and when [Playful Electronics] saw an old cash register heading for the dump, he decided to give its VFD display a new life as an Arduino peripheral. Whil…

Upcycling A VFD

A lot of electronics wind up in landfills, and when [Playful Electronics] saw an old cash register heading for the dump, he decided to give its VFD display a new life as an Arduino peripheral. Whil…

Repurposing the VFD unit from an old Epson POS display using Arduino | Arduino Blog

For many makers, it’s always fun to take some piece of old technology and give it a new lease on life, especially when the item in question was destined for the landfill. This is what prompted Alastair Aitchison — better known on YouTube as...

Reverse Engineering A Topfield VFD Front Panel

Hackers love the warm glow of a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD), and there’s no shortage of dead consumer electronics from which they can be pulled to keep our collective parts bins nicely s…

Vintage Displays Hack Chat With Fran Blanche

Join us on Wednesday, August 11 at noon Pacific for the Vintage Displays Hack Chat with Fran Blanche! In terms of ease of integration and density of the information that can be shown, it’s ha…

Z80 Family Reunion Discovered In Old PoS Card Swiper

[Ben Heck] found an old card-swipe point-of-sale box at the Goodwill store, took it home, and tore it down to see what was inside. He found a completely serviceable single board computer based on t…