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 🤣
@@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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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!
Flashlight brightness isn't the be all end all. Most of the time you just need a little more light than ambient. Otherwise what you're working on is so bright that when you look away to grab a tool you're blind for precious frustrating seconds. Gotta love the guy that walks in and turns on his fancy bright flashlight, blinding the whole room.
I've similarly got a little pile of assembled circuits from the '80s that I can't remember what they do, but also also documentation (wiring diagrams with each connection marked off in pencil showing I'd soldered it) that shows I built other stuff - that I cannot find!
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 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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I have to say that my very first home-make circuit was a reverb circuit I got from Olson Electronics. I bought the reverb spring and a diagram of the circuit was with it. So I bought and scrounged the parts and made a home-made sharpie's drawn circuit board and built it. And holy crap it worked first time... I was beyond hooked and the rest is history... Don't know whatever happened to that circuit. But that success was the reason I got into electronics as a career!
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.
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.
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'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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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!
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.
as a kid i made a box with parts from an old disposable camera inside. somehow i got an analogue gauge to work with it so you could see the charge level of the main capacitor too. its purpose was to charge up an external bundle of capacitors to then rub their leads against metal surfaces to make a bunch of sparks, like a rechargeable firework. worked great. doesn't quite have the level of practicality yours does, but it was a novel idea i think lol. (and a little dangerous)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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'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... 👍
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! 😆
I have a lot of electronic projects as I'm cleaning up and I have no idea what I was thinking either. So if I had to guess the intention was RED was either the charging or the a low battery and GREEN was a charged indicator... the Zener would have been the indication that the charge was good? But what happens in some cases is that the project doesn't work as planned and the components get repurposed. I remember that happening to me. So then, perhaps, the Zener could be an overvoltage protection (best effort with the components on hand) and the two LEDs in series was acting a voltage dropper and current limiter?? It's a neat box to play with , but just for fun... like you said as anything useful, it's not really.
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.
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.
I remember that emergency light project, and the Ni-Cad based mains-rechargeable incandescent light from RME too, still gives me the heebiejeebies seeing mains going into a small battery, but I think that's just my overly-cautious brain at work having been taught so often that you don't connect batteries to mains, but, apparently that was wrong, in a way, a battery without dropper circuitry will of course be very unhappy... :P
Ah yeah, the early white LEDs. I remember that they weren't particularly bright for their time (until Philips finally got the galls to release the white Luxeon LEDs that were much brighter than the 5mm LEDs during that time, a few years after Radio Shack finally released the 5mm LEDs which I figured out were Nichia's early white LEDs). We have gone a rather long way ever since the early dawn of Gallium Nitride LEDs, now we have insanely powerful LEDs like Nichia 319AT I am using in my flashlights I assembled together. That's a lot of light outta tiny 3mm SMD LED; around 500 - 700 Lumens at 1.9 Amps - it could be 1,000 Lumens, who knows? I can't find the LED calculator I used years ago.
Young Chris was recently reminded that he built a logic probe into the case of a small felt tip pen, the diameter of which was just barely big enough to get a DIL chip into and a 3.5mm jack socket in the end for the power lead. It still works great, but if I took it apart now (about 30 years later), I strongly suspect it wouldn’t go back together….
I think you meant to put the zener across the battery as a form of overcharge protection, although it would have stopped it from getting to full charge.
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.
Not built particularly early given the rapid electronics battery and white LED's, I'm trying to remember when they became affordable consumer hobby parts.
I'm thinking white LED's didnt show up till late 90's I remember a multimillion dollar challenge for the first blue LED that would make full color digital displays possible, RGB. Remember the blazingly bright LED on the Sony Playstation? Every kid had to have a melatonin disruptor in their bedroom that would help them stay awake for days playing a game. I dont think white LED's were possible until the blue was conquered. And then there was Cree.
@@laserflexr6321 1996 but the cost would have been out of the question for many, Rapid were founded in 1979 so it would likely have been some years that.
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.)
Since the day mobile phones have led flashlights in them I stopped using dedicated flash lights as the batteries are always flat when you need them. And phones are always charged (at least, I put it in the charger every night). Motorolas have a nice build in feature, 2 shakes turns it on or off. You can do it with any phone and an app. I've also experimented with portable DIY flash lights though but in the end charging them is the main issue. Still have one of them with a 220V led light that I demolished and ending up with a 12V led module that I stuck onto a CNC machined piece of aluminium with matching case CNC'd out of wood. A buttom to switch on/of and an MCU for the boost converter from 3x AAA bateries to 12V. It's got 4 brightness settings.The brightest setting could easily light up a room.
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. ☺
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 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.
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. 😆
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.
Young Clive playing about with LED’s, this must have been right after the absolution button and the Cyber Kitty. Have to have some fun now and then right?
Approximately how old was Young Clive when he built that light? Clearly it did what it was intended to do so there’s that. Years ago I had one of those “dustbuster” styled emergency flashlights intended to be left in a socket charging, which lit up when the power went out. IIRC it used early NiMH cells. It also did what it was intended to do- we bought it when the Arizona grid was experiencing occasional brownouts and blackouts due to a gigantic transformer that was dying- after it was replaced (with much news coverage of its trip from Washington state) we didn’t need the emergency light. I haven’t looked- are there modern versions with lithium chemistry cells?
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?
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.
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!
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.
A "typical Frank" eons kewler than the "average Joe" [sorry Joe] lol
At first I read the thumbnail as "exploding an old project." 😀
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.
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!
Flashlight brightness isn't the be all end all. Most of the time you just need a little more light than ambient. Otherwise what you're working on is so bright that when you look away to grab a tool you're blind for precious frustrating seconds. Gotta love the guy that walks in and turns on his fancy bright flashlight, blinding the whole room.
I've similarly got a little pile of assembled circuits from the '80s that I can't remember what they do, but also also documentation (wiring diagrams with each connection marked off in pencil showing I'd soldered it) that shows I built other stuff - that I cannot find!
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.
@@TechHowdenCliveCo™️ Model FK05-D-KABY
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 love revisiting old projects and puzzling over why I did it that way.
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.....
So compact ~ I am impressed ~ well done young Clive 👍🏻
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..
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.
This reminds me of young Bo’s inventions. You’ve taken some of them apart. It always makes me smile, thank you old friend 🙏
really cool to see that you also shoved everything into a box without mounting anything
well, nothing fell out did it!
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 🤔
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.
Was younger clive drinking heavily in his early days 🤣
No. Strangely low alcohol consumption. It increased when I moved here.
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.
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 used to make weird stuff. I still do, but I used to, too." 😁
Ahhh, mitch is the best.
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 look at things I built 20yrs ago. I think " wow I sure was smart back then"
I have to say that my very first home-make circuit was a reverb circuit I got from Olson Electronics. I bought the reverb spring and a diagram of the circuit was with it. So I bought and scrounged the parts and made a home-made sharpie's drawn circuit board and built it. And holy crap it worked first time... I was beyond hooked and the rest is history... Don't know whatever happened to that circuit. But that success was the reason I got into electronics as a career!
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.
And we all wait for the result once Clive presses that Fun button on his Hopi.
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.
I love Young Clive. So innocent, so naive. You have come a long way, as have your viewers.
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 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'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.
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 :)
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.
"Fuck knows..." Love it
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.
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!
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.
as a kid i made a box with parts from an old disposable camera inside. somehow i got an analogue gauge to work with it so you could see the charge level of the main capacitor too. its purpose was to charge up an external bundle of capacitors to then rub their leads against metal surfaces to make a bunch of sparks, like a rechargeable firework. worked great. doesn't quite have the level of practicality yours does, but it was a novel idea i think lol. (and a little dangerous)
The red and green LEDs in series make me think this was designed at Christmas time. BTW, I like the "kink palculator".
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.
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.
Be proud of your younger achievement - life should be a ladder of discovery and understanding.
Maybe the green LED was supposed to be on the other side of the battery connected through the zener to negative as a charge full indicator?
The zener is for protecting the leds when the battery is oc on defect. Otherwise there will be the full net voltage on them.
You put that zener diode there because you could...haha.. thanks Clive.
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.
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!
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.
DW01 is designed to let wake-up pulses from the usual charge ICs through in order to safely bring up a deep discharged cell.
Very cool old project, I really liked that little flashlight
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.
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.
The batter would have quite a high internal resistance. Old white LED's might have quite a high forward drop too.
Back to the future Younger Clive playing with the mind of Older Clive.
Sometimes I find stuff that PastMe made, and I am in awe. Other times, I hide the evidence.
No fly's on Our Clive,eh... But ya can see where the leds are. So Cool. More please!
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've not idea what you are talking about, but I find it amusing.
Clive personal builds are the best content. Im still using joule thieves everywhere!
😆 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... 👍
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! 😆
I have a lot of electronic projects as I'm cleaning up and I have no idea what I was thinking either. So if I had to guess the intention was RED was either the charging or the a low battery and GREEN was a charged indicator... the Zener would have been the indication that the charge was good? But what happens in some cases is that the project doesn't work as planned and the components get repurposed. I remember that happening to me. So then, perhaps, the Zener could be an overvoltage protection (best effort with the components on hand) and the two LEDs in series was acting a voltage dropper and current limiter?? It's a neat box to play with , but just for fun... like you said as anything useful, it's not really.
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.
With how expertly packed that circuit was, I'm surprised nothing was shorting.
Lots of shaped plastic separators.
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.
I remember that emergency light project, and the Ni-Cad based mains-rechargeable incandescent light from RME too, still gives me the heebiejeebies seeing mains going into a small battery, but I think that's just my overly-cautious brain at work having been taught so often that you don't connect batteries to mains, but, apparently that was wrong, in a way, a battery without dropper circuitry will of course be very unhappy... :P
Ah yeah, the early white LEDs. I remember that they weren't particularly bright for their time (until Philips finally got the galls to release the white Luxeon LEDs that were much brighter than the 5mm LEDs during that time, a few years after Radio Shack finally released the 5mm LEDs which I figured out were Nichia's early white LEDs).
We have gone a rather long way ever since the early dawn of Gallium Nitride LEDs, now we have insanely powerful LEDs like Nichia 319AT I am using in my flashlights I assembled together. That's a lot of light outta tiny 3mm SMD LED; around 500 - 700 Lumens at 1.9 Amps - it could be 1,000 Lumens, who knows? I can't find the LED calculator I used years ago.
Try Diode Gone Wild, Dany has a nice set of calculators on his site.
Young Chris was recently reminded that he built a logic probe into the case of a small felt tip pen, the diameter of which was just barely big enough to get a DIL chip into and a 3.5mm jack socket in the end for the power lead. It still works great, but if I took it apart now (about 30 years later), I strongly suspect it wouldn’t go back together….
I think you meant to put the zener across the battery as a form of overcharge protection, although it would have stopped it from getting to full charge.
Due to the weird way my mind works, the glove keeps making me think about David Carradine in Death Race 2000.
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.
Welcome back, Old Big Clive!
Not built particularly early given the rapid electronics battery and white LED's, I'm trying to remember when they became affordable consumer hobby parts.
I'm thinking white LED's didnt show up till late 90's I remember a multimillion dollar challenge for the first blue LED that would make full color digital displays possible, RGB. Remember the blazingly bright LED on the Sony Playstation? Every kid had to have a melatonin disruptor in their bedroom that would help them stay awake for days playing a game. I dont think white LED's were possible until the blue was conquered. And then there was Cree.
@@laserflexr6321 1996 but the cost would have been out of the question for many, Rapid were founded in 1979 so it would likely have been some years that.
You should totally rebuild it, with old-looking but modern LEDs, and perhaps a CR123 or similar battery inside.
One of your best videos. bigclive criticizing bigclive! Hell! Your younger self had what he had. No shame in it.
Hope you are well, I just saw the news of an apparent fire at lithium recycling factory in Glasgow 😮❤
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.)
Glad you're back 😊
Since the day mobile phones have led flashlights in them I stopped using dedicated flash lights as the batteries are always flat when you need them. And phones are always charged (at least, I put it in the charger every night). Motorolas have a nice build in feature, 2 shakes turns it on or off. You can do it with any phone and an app.
I've also experimented with portable DIY flash lights though but in the end charging them is the main issue. Still have one of them with a 220V led light that I demolished and ending up with a 12V led module that I stuck onto a CNC machined piece of aluminium with matching case CNC'd out of wood. A buttom to switch on/of and an MCU for the boost converter from 3x AAA bateries to 12V. It's got 4 brightness settings.The brightest setting could easily light up a room.
The zener diode keeps the max voltage across the LEDs to 5.1 V. Therefore Imax = (5.1 - 3) / 27 = 0.077 A. Which means 0.0388 A per LED.
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. ☺
A man, ahead of his time...
WHO HAS A CAMERA WITH **VERY VERY LIMITED ZOOM RANGE**
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.
4:26 I think an M&Ms minis tube would make a great cheap case for that! Magnifying lens on the light end and aluminum tape for a reflector. :)
very reminiscent of my dad’s early college projects 😮
Maybe the Zener was meant to go across the battery as additional protection against overcharging?
Maybe you wanted to connect the zener parallel with the battery, so that it stops charging at 5V. Just speculating.
He calmly reverse engineers the circuit while I stare in amazement.😊
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.
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. 😆
Bring that into an airport
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.
Young Clive playing about with LED’s, this must have been right after the absolution button and the Cyber Kitty.
Have to have some fun now and then right?
You know that you might be an old(er) maker when you can be surprised by the construction of a device that you made!
8:28 I love these small flashlights.
Approximately how old was Young Clive when he built that light?
Clearly it did what it was intended to do so there’s that.
Years ago I had one of those “dustbuster” styled emergency flashlights intended to be left in a socket charging, which lit up when the power went out. IIRC it used early NiMH cells. It also did what it was intended to do- we bought it when the Arizona grid was experiencing occasional brownouts and blackouts due to a gigantic transformer that was dying- after it was replaced (with much news coverage of its trip from Washington state) we didn’t need the emergency light.
I haven’t looked- are there modern versions with lithium chemistry cells?
There are lithium versions.