Younger me made weird stuff (older me still does)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 มิ.ย. 2024
- It's fun to visit past projects from decades ago, and see what sort of stuff younger-me was making back then. This is a little rechargeable light I carried in my toolbox for a while.
It used very early white LEDs that look a bit tame by modern standards, but were cutting edge back then. Note that NiMH cells are not like lithium cells. They can handle trickle charging for reasonable durations due to the chemistry recombining end of charge outgassing back into electrolyte.
The circuit also has a weird anomaly that looks like it was either a crackpot idea or a mistake.
But on the whole, I give the circuit an 8 out of 10 for functionality. While a bit cramped inside, a lot of shaped insulators had been inserted for good electrical separation.
If you enjoy these videos you can help support the channel with a dollar for coffee, cookies and random gadgets for disassembly at:- www.bigclive.com/coffee.htm
This also keeps the channel independent of TH-cam's algorithm quirks, allowing it to be a bit more dangerous and naughty.
#ElectronicsCreators - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![อาจารย์ยอด : ลุงแว่วเล่าเรื่องผี [ผี]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Fd2Qsy4dqpM/mqdefault.jpg)
No SOS mode. No strobe. No flashing blue-red lights.
Also, screwed together? Young Clive was clearly not up with modern practices of adding tons of stuff you'll never need-and one useful thing-into a flashlight that is utterly impossible to disassemble without piercing the tiny explosive pack inside.
Regarding the "tiny explosive pack inside"...
I mean, the battery cell is already there. 😁😉
Also no USB charging. (not even a power brick)
😲
Pardon me ? Young Clive WAS clearly up with modern practices of adding tons of stuff you'll never need. That 5.1V zener comes in very handy ! He was a bit like that man that went through the desert with a 10 pound rock in its back pack. Some one asked him "Why are you carrying that rock with you ?" He answered: "That's for danger. As soon as I see danger, I throw it out so I can run faster".
He uses nightcore tip in some of his videos, which is easily disassembled and does not have useless features, though.
I’m very impressed at young Clive being able to squish all that circuitry into such a small case! I’m also getting to that age where I have to reverse engineer my own stuff to try to work out what I was thinking of 🤣
Me too I tried to reverse ingeniering my old Pic c code and it was very difficult without comment.
@@labiadh_chokri I hope I never need to do this as well, cause I know I didn't comment anything and made some incredible sequence of "if" statements that would make anyone's mind numb on a glance. Mine included.
@@labiadh_chokri The two questions I ask most often are "Why did I come in here?" when I go to the kitchen, and "What was I thinking?" when I'm looking at code I wrote six months ago.
I have to do that if I leave project for more than a week ^^'
My memory is terrible but luckily I'm decent at taking notes.
You too? I had no idea I was such a genius? It's sad that nobody needs such expertise any more, I worked for Rockwell-Collins, ie the flight instrumentation for Boeing, you needed to be good to work with them, even if they were pricks! Now, my skills are not required, 0.001 production success does not support the guy that can fix the odd failure. And let's face it, I'm definitely odd?
How you squeezed the circuit into the enclosure without causing a short is impressive.
At first I read the thumbnail as "exploding an old project." 😀
I came across one of my early projects (late '70) where I turned a car cassette player into a "walkman" for skiing. I even sewed a padded case for everything which was worn on one's chest while skiing. Next to a modern iPod, it seems an insane design. I do not miss cassette tapes. I do have some excellent mix tapes; ELP, Doors, Pink Floyd, LZ, and Dire Straights dominates.
Kudos to young Clive for creating a useful tool for himself when likely nothing else like it existed, especially in such a small form factor!
Was younger clive drinking heavily in his early days 🤣
No. Strangely low alcohol consumption. It increased when I moved here.
You are lucky to get a video ID that sounds like a model number - maybe even a suitable one for this light.
Yeah FK05-D-KABY definitely sounds like a flashlight model.
Wow.
The mention of RME in Howard Street took me back fifty years.
Used to love that shop, and with all the surplus electronics, it had its own unique smell....
Reminds me of Active Surplus here in Toronto that sadly shut down a few years back. That place had such an awesome smell and the most amazing selection of random stuff!
If I was to select a housing, I would have added 3 cm on each side, because I hate to pack my toys like you did. Respect, mate. Squishing all the stuff in is an achievement, for sure.
I love finding projects made in my younger days. I was far more patient then and my construction methods were so neat and organised.
I've not idea what you are talking about, but I find it amusing.
really cool to see that you also shoved everything into a box without mounting anything
well, nothing fell out did it!
I did absolutely dangerous things when I was teenager (no consideration for wire size for example) it's a miracle I didn't burn down with my room.
Edit: Maybe the high internal resistance of the battery also limited the current to the LEDs?_
Mass plate cell, easily capable of 10A current pulses for a second or two, till it depolarised and dropped the current down to a few mA, and started to get rather hot, followed by splitting the plastic sleeve, growing in height by around 2mm, then venting off potassium hydroxide at high temperature and some steam, as the cell vents split. NiCd, the original flaming cell.
Yeah I have a tendency to oversize my wires now. But looking back at my old stuff you'd think the world ran on breadboard wires.
@@terminsane Did some with 48SWG wire, because i had it around, and could not fit anything heavier. The rest is salvaged phone wiring.....
This reminds me of young Bo’s inventions. You’ve taken some of them apart. It always makes me smile, thank you old friend 🙏
It's always hilarious to hear you say "one moment please", especially since it's completely unnecessary. 😅
I love it
im waiting for the day clive has a small projectile toy(ie, canon, g*n, bow and arrow, rocket, cat, water g*n, rubber band launcher etc etc) and says watch your eyes and isnt talking about the light
kid, you'll put your eye out!
I politelly disagree - it's necessary!
Also, he said "schematic" instead of "shematic" and my heart cried.
Every great channel needs a slogan.
@@PappaBear_yt Absolutely! It's Character which a lot of channels lack
I am so glad you are back from that ban. That whole thing is outrageous. Love from Washington State.
Why was he banned?? I've missed something!
@@chasejdmartin Naughty words, or at least things YT AI bots thought were naughty words, because they really cannot understand Scottish accents, and fall over completely on Scouse as well.
@@SeanBZA weird, in previous video he said that it was because he slightly burned his beard in a video, not by an accident.
@@SeanBZAincorrect
What else do you expect from a platform that is run by ESG, woke censorship.
In high school: I was hard wiring a 24 volt DC power supply at home,and powered it up,and no output. My hand touched the filter capacitor and found it blazing hot.
I LOOKED at the leads end and then moved it away-That's when I heard a gunshot and my room was covered in foil streamers!
After that day,I triple checked my work and continued on to have a successful life (with both eyesight) in electronics.
A couple years later,I bought my first Protoboard from the "Shack" and still use it 47 years later.
I had a tube type portable TV do the exploding capacitor trick to me while troubleshooting. It wasn't even an electrolytic capacitor, just the oily paper type. It opened up like one of those party crackers and scared the crap out of me, but now the problem was obvious!
So compact ~ I am impressed ~ well done young Clive 👍🏻
"I used to make weird stuff. I still do, but I used to, too." 😁
Ahhh, mitch is the best.
i do love circuits that have been assembled with no PCB. they put me in mind of a 1950s wireless set. i really enjoyed this vid, the Clive's work archaeology aspect was fascinating.
And we all wait for the result once Clive presses that Fun button on his Hopi.
awesome video 👍 . disassembly of old diy projects , looking forward to see more.
Younger me always built things that were meant to be used as weapons like tasers and motion activated electric grid security panels. The motion activated thing i spent too much time on and went through many iterations.. was for an accessible security panel that was outside the area it was guarding so you could use a remote to disarm the panel to get access to physically disarm the areas security system.. but then tbey came out with smart phones and easily obtainable bluetooth and wifi chipsets so the panel could be remotely activated and deactivated without any need for it to be physically accessible at all.. when building it and testing it though i learned a lot and that squirrels are very curios and delicate creatures..
I used to make various torches in those black project boxes (here they were called zippy boxes) one had toggle switches to swap between 9V worth of AA cells and a single 9V battery for an emergency bit of light when the main battery was flat. A 12V halogen downlight bulb in one with a dimmer circuit, and normal (at the time, quite tame) white LEDs for longer run time. Was fun to make these, but not terribly cost effective. Sadly as I had limited funs all these early creations I pulled apart to harvest the components so I no longer have them. So I enjoyed you being able to look back on your earlier creation in this video :)
The opening of this kind of reminds me of Gune from Titan A.E. when he is trying to figure out what he built in his sleep that has a highly unstable material in it...and a button.
6:10 So, I heard correctly!
Kink Palculator! 😂😂😂
Way to go, Clive! 👍🏻👏🏻💪🏻🍻🍻
No fly's on Our Clive,eh... But ya can see where the leds are. So Cool. More please!
I built two 9 volt powered oscillator circuits that were low cost TDR boxes, you plugged into a scope and a coax cable to determine the health and characteristics of the coax, and one person asked what it was good for, and could not understand basic electronics and decided they were just junk, until I found a shorted coax in an aircraft with one.
You put that zener diode there because you could...haha.. thanks Clive.
Like you tried to make the tiniest rechargeable flashlight possible with the batteries and chargers at the time.
Also that small project box was the cheapest one on sale at Maplin as well.
now we know where the Chinese got their ideas from 🤔
The trip down, memory lane. Is the most beautiful thing we can do on this subject. The subject of life, the subject of what makes you (as an individual) tick. The thing that makes us, us 😊. Everybody "knows" almost nobody understands.
Could you possibly explain some of the most common design ingredients, such as "capacitive dropper" or "buck regulator" (particularly how they work) sometime? You did a great video on resistors, capacitors, and the basic components, but I'd like to see a video on some of the simple "building block" recipes.
I have an old Lightsaber prop made mid 90s with a PIC in it that lit up and played the right start up, hummmmmm and shut down sounds. With some kind of EPROM (not EE!) to hold the samples. Pretty sure I have the code still somewhere. I remember trying to get the brightest red LEDs I could at the time and they are nothing compared to what we have today. The biggest issue was getting a speaker that would be small enough to fit in the handle and sound good enough. I think I used some kind of headphone driver probably driven well past it's ratings! It had Ni-Cad batteries in it with a simple 3.5mm audio(!) socket as a charge port. I still have it and it still works but I replaced the AA Ni-Cads with smaller normal AAAs since I don't exactly play with the thing much now. The glowing tube was made from overhead projector transparencies scotch taped together with a plastic drink bottle neck and cap to screw it on.
I love Young Clive. So innocent, so naive. You have come a long way, as have your viewers.
I find it interesting sometimes to go back to projects I did when I was younger. It is a bit of history, but also shows how we learn and grow on our journey forward. There are things that we did when young that we woul likely do differently now.
I'll just see if this is discharged - with my thumb!
GOD I love Clive. (I know it was safe, but it's the way we all do this stuff that makes me roar with laughter.)
Big Clive reviews & pulls apart weird stuff found in Big Clive's toolbox in unexpected swerve to channel!
I found an old project, a "ghost knocker". It used an hbridge to move a dc motor back and forth, with a dowel attached that would knock on the wall randomly every few hours. It would do my dad's knock. I hid it in the basement wall at my dads.
So did you actually freak him out with it?
@@bluelightningnz i second
I'd say you're well named, then.
I Wouldn't be surprised if you had an emp bomb in the cupboard 😂😂❤
Sorry for my adhd I ment an EMP generator device pmsl love u Clive
I still come back everyday hoping for the teardown video of that pink calculator!!
The red and green LEDs in series make me think this was designed at Christmas time. BTW, I like the "kink palculator".
You should totally rebuild it, with old-looking but modern LEDs, and perhaps a CR123 or similar battery inside.
I remember making an ioniser back in the dial up days when you sold kits with a PCB when most hobbyists were using Vero. It worked for donkeys years .
Was it the very small Minion? I built a few of those.
About 3" x 2" x 1" if my memory is accurate, It used to fizz satisfyingly and was always covered in black dust
I miss the old figure 8 philips power connectors. Just the right size for projects.
And often came with a changeover switch, handy for battery powered applications.
I first found out about Lithium Ion Batteries in 1986 while employed at a new company that made Multichannel Analyzers for student medical instruments. They were for memory backup. I was told how dangerous they were if broken open (moisture in the air could cause them to *_burst_* into flames). They were only 3/4 inch or less in size! 😆
Due to the weird way my mind works, the glove keeps making me think about David Carradine in Death Race 2000.
Glad you're back 😊
Huh, what a strange coincidence. I had been going through your back catalog a bit, and just watched the video on the light that inspired this one a day or two before this one came out. Weird!
Be proud of your younger achievement - life should be a ladder of discovery and understanding.
It's amazing when you go routing through your tool box's, at the odds and ends you find that you made for a specific little job. Especialy when you know that you'll never see an austin maestro again.
Bring that into an airport
Lovely video, Clive
I came across a project I had made in my teens. I had no memory at all of what on earth it was for. So I disassembled it to work it out.
I still have little clue what it was for (variable rapid on-off switching of 5v for something but what? I have no clue.).
What I did discover was that my soldering was so much neater back then.
Very cool old project, I really liked that little flashlight
😆 I've done the same thing as you a few times myself....
Run across something I made 2 decades ago, and completely forgot about. Take it apart, scratch my head a few times, and mutter to myself, "What in the HELL was I thinking here??" 😂
Brings back good memories for sure... 👍
It’s fun to look at past projects and see if they still work! Also to remember the reasons for wiring it up in such a way.
Interesting review of your history Bless you and family DVD:)
Back to the future Younger Clive playing with the mind of Older Clive.
Hope your hand is getting better. Glad you got the Hoppi out again. Mine is weird because the connector block sticks out so fat you can’t get a UK plug in it without using a deathdaptor 😂. Great video as usual.
3:40 "the chinese principles of minumum components design" a series in 10 volumes for students and seasoned engineers ahahahah
Welcome back, Old Big Clive!
Sometimes I find stuff that PastMe made, and I am in awe. Other times, I hide the evidence.
Clive personal builds are the best content. Im still using joule thieves everywhere!
I'm now convinced you are indeed Chinese and that's why you take such liberty exposing dodgy circuits.
This also reminded me of my younger years when I built a couple rechargeable torches for my sister a couple of decades ago. My sister complained how they didn't last more than a few months and relied on standard dry cell torches instead. I used to tell her that she was overcharging the thing and she told me it was too much work to babysit my contraption.
Hey Big Clive!!! Old School here. I've got one for you. I took 13 microwaves apart. Took the transformers out, cut off the top windings. Replaced it with the heaviest welding wire in them. Connect them to 24 sets of 6 ( computamite : FAH 792-1LP 35000 MFD 25 W.V 40 V. SURGE CORNELL DUBILIER 65 C 6630) so there's a lot of capacitors 144 of them. So I put it in a nice neat box. Took the positive wire to the right hand grip and the negative to the left hand grip. I had a hard time hiding it. But I think I did a good enough job so I can find out who our bike thief is. What do you think? It's the only alarm I think would work. You'll probably never read this or respond. But USA has hope.
I think you might have found it easier buying an electric fence energiser. Although even that has liability.
It's fascinating trying to work out the thought process of our younger selves with things like thid.
In fact, last Tuesday must have been interesting, but I'll be buggered if I knew how that day started.
You know that you might be an old(er) maker when you can be surprised by the construction of a device that you made!
The zener is for protecting the leds when the battery is oc on defect. Otherwise there will be the full net voltage on them.
With how expertly packed that circuit was, I'm surprised nothing was shorting.
Lots of shaped plastic separators.
Young Clive's stuff is still better made than a lot of the new Chinese stuff.
I made a Jacob's Ladder 20 years ago, used it for classroom demos. I stuffed the whole thing in a bubbler tube base, including an auto coil, with the electrodes extending into the tube. That thing was loud and made a lot of ozone. Looking at it now, it seems primitive but it held up to this day.
That reminds me of very old school point-to-point wiring. Usually a metal chassis with tube sockets and big caps and a bunch of phenolic strips with solder lugs underneath that the smaller components are soldered to.
Tag boards are still available for roughing up circuitry.
Makes me wish I kept my old stuff I've made
Great job by young Clive. I guess maybe this was made before young Clive did his military service in the Scottish Army, gaining access to the nuclear MRE heaters they issued...8^) Cheers!
I would have guessed it was a prototype powersaving device you were going to release to the masses but could never get the kickstarter funds.
British made plastic enclosure still in production now 👍🏻
He calmly reverse engineers the circuit while I stare in amazement.😊
This reminds me of the (definitely not legal in the UK) FM transmitter I built into a tic tac mint box, for in-helmet communication between motorcyclists. It worked just fine but I never got round to doing the receiver/amplifier bits.
That looked like a great design. Given the poor brightness of LEDs back that, that's probably why you drove them hard. They were replaceable. At least it wasn't as simple as my LED safelight for my darkroom. That was 20 red LEDs connected directly to a 9v battery.
i love mystery devices too. As a kid I wanted to make loads, didn't have the tools or money
Now I still want to make loads, I do have the tools, still not the money, but I'm like: "Why would I do it though..." and then I give up.
Back in the day (30 years ago), I replaced the NiMh coin cell memory battery in a Pitney Bowes Fax, using the coin cells salvaged from a "PP3" 9v battery. Saved us an expensive service call, and worked very well indeed.
Brilliant packaging.
Still better than most 50000W 120000 lumen lights sold on Ebay/Aliexpr
Thanks :)
Clive should write little notes in his projects so when he opens them up again in 20 years, he'll get some young Clive Philosophy, lol....
Hope you are well, I just saw the news of an apparent fire at lithium recycling factory in Glasgow 😮❤
Interesting thing, its well stuffed into the case. I think reworking it would be nice, but its very limited in use. nice build 2x👍
Nice the kinky pinky was given a good fingering calculating stuff. ☺
I remember those days.
Just how tiny can we make this, who needs a pcb anyway.
James Bond's single watch battery bugging device with a telescoping antenna, magnetic tracking device, etc. 😆
RME wow the Aladdin's cave of stuff, remember visiting that place as a teenager, I was too young and missed all the Ex army stuff that all the locals raved about.
I remember the big tables in the middle of the shop covered in surplus switches and big components. Radio stuff I never knew what they were at the time . The windows were full of all sorts , radios , speakers, bits of amps .and all around were the arse end of table lamps, old cloth insulating tape and the smell...Bakelite and dust.
8:28 I love these small flashlights.
Yep. I have a lot of those black project boxes that I forgot what they were for. LOL! Good thing with microcontrollers now is you have to save the programs to run them and the connected I/O modules are a dead giveaway for their purpose.
pushin them a lil hard. LOL...
pretty much had to overdrive them things to get any useful light back then.
I must say, that robust mains charging port with low voltage all inside makes all the sense in the world to me. This is what I'd like instead of flimsy USB cables and connectors.
It is quite satisfying to have a new look at something you worked on long ago. You realise how much you didnt know then, but still managed to make it work. I'm afraid that so many of the basics are being forgotten because really complicated stuff is too easy to come by now. My dad was an electonic engineer by trade so there are lots of circuits hanging around. One interesting one was a bug zapper. It was made out of an old tube amp best I can remember, 600VDC and probabably 100ma or more, way too much for purpose, heinously effective on rodents as well! Peeuuuweeee. The gotcha part was copper foil tape laid in parallel strips with a gap between around the circumferance of a sheet of plexiglas. If you stepped on it in the middle of the night it would blacken an 1/8 inch diameter. hemispheric plug of foot flesh. I only had to do that one time. If a bug closed the circuit by bridging that gap between foils, most of the time they would be instantly vaporized, but occasionally they would make a resistive enough initial contact that they would slowly fry until completely preserved as a carburized framework. I still come across that thing occasionally and breifly consider replacing the electrolytics to put it in working order, but, well that thing really is dangerous. No pulse, straight across high energy DC.
I have hanging on the wall next to me a pair of flashing LED glasses my brother made for halloween 50 years ago. It was an accident that worked, but only with a nearly dead 9VDC alkaline battery. When the LED's lit, it would yank the voltage down low enough for the LED's to quit conducting and go off. That would allow the volatage of the battery voltage to recover enough for the LED's light again, accidental flasher.
Please do more videos like this
The most bonkers gadget I made in my youth days was an electrocution shock device. I run two very fine wires down the banister rail connected to a transformer with an accumulative voltage circuit, longer I held the button the higher the voltage, the human hand completed the circuit and worked very effective keeping my Sisters out of my bedroom modified after I just taped the button down.
Good to see a device which solves medical issues (5:27).
In the words of the great and forgetfull Professor Farnsworth: “You can’t expect me to honor what year-ago Professor said! That guy was young and foolish!”
I so often find 'old' circuits that I built in my younger, wilder years. Very little though went into it. Neither much safety...
Great flashback, thanks Clive!
Still a neat little circuit.