Here's what Numitron tubes in an actual product look like

so you thought I was a little mean to the patron huh yeah okay I was but one thing that I didn't mention at all in the video which I definitely needed to was that they would not be naked as they are in my clock they would be behind a control panel and I pointed a couple people to the eBay listing for this thing and then decided you know what I'm just going to buy it because this is an actual product that has patrons in it and as you probably can already see they are behind a filtered panel and sitting inside this machine this is actually a dark room timer uh so this is what you would use to power your enlarger to do exposure adjustments and these tubes have the decimal point so I can showcase that so without further Ado let me just turn it on it might help if it's plugged in turn it on that is what the new Metron would look like in an actually produced product now I'm going to Tinker around with the exposure a little bit here uh actually I don't know if I really need to oh that's not right I wonder if I cooked no probably some wire shorted together on the socket well too bad so the first thing I want to mention is that to me that does not even parse as the number 888 that just looks like two strange boxy figures now that's why I set this to 88 to show you what this looks like but if I pick other numbers okay this seems to appear as a functional seven segment display but on 88 I don't know to me I'd have to know that that's supposed to be a display and sure enough hopefully you can see the tubes are not installed straight one's leaning to the left one's leaning to the right I'm going to open this up because I'm also curious to see what this looks like on the inside uh and to see if I can figure out when exactly this thing was made because it's very clearly very low production um and I wonder how much it costs cuz this is a digital a digital timer and you can see if I move this down to 8 seconds if you hit operate it counts down what it's actually doing is it's sending power out to the outlets on the side through a transistor which is somewhat interesting there's a transistor just sitting on the back of it I don't know if that's the main transistor if that has something to do with its power supply we will look at that in a moment but what I want to do first before I open it up I want to get you closer in and look at some of the issues that are present even with this in a built device okay so the first thing that I'm going to focus on here and actually let me change this to a different let's just go with yeah sure 40 43 why not oh right let me also turn on the uh decimal point that's the decimal point so now this would run for 4.3 seconds you do a quick countdown so I know I'm zoomed in here but that does not even work in my brain as a decimal point it's like for little X3 and the number it's just if the tubes could be closer together maybe that would work and I'm going to let I'm going to look to see if maybe they could be closer together but even if they were touching that's just a bad decimal point but anyway what I wanted to show you was if I move the camera up and down you see all that glare those lines that we're seeing are really making it hard to even identify the numbers and just so you can see that's not coming from the numbers that's coming from the room lights so this isn't really necessarily a problem with the with the technology but the fact that these are tubes and they reflect light the way they do can present a lot of strange glare problems um let me actually remove this filter which oddly enough if I were making a dark room timer I would have made this filter Amber or red something that would be safe for photo paper yet it's green don't know why that happened so even with the filter removed that glare is still there although now it's more obvious that it's coming from the room lights but this is a this is a simple problem with the fact that these are perfectly round tubes now that's not necessarily unique to patrons any tube that looks like this is going to have this glare problem but we already knew that uh when we look at the the Nixie tube format the in12 tube which has a flat face we had already figured this out um RCA just stuck these in a tube that they happen to have so or to say they happen have the manufacturing lines for and also while I have this open so you have a brightness comparison I'm overdriving my clock a little bit to help boost the brightness of the filaments but hopefully you can see that that is actually quite a bit brighter but that glare problem is significant and let me uh now turn well first I'm going to put the filter back on all right so I've moved the camera so you can get a different angle here so you can see the glare that the tubes themselves are causing if I turn this off you'll see that there's very little room light hitting the tubes there's a little bit but if I keep this display tilted down it's not there but if I turn it on those lines that are showing up there and there are just the reflection of the side of the tube that could be taken care of by you know putting a divider in between them I suppose but the issue that I have is that it kind of gives these ghost segments which make it hard to understand or hard to know for sure what number it's showing uh for instance that's six if the angles lined up right lift the camera up a bit here that kind of looks like an eight at a glance and it's all just the glare from this other number if I move it to seven you can see that even the right filament is being reflected in almost the same spot but that glare is a major problem with using tubes like this and not doing any sort of side shielding and interesting fun fact the tubes that I bought to make my clock they all had pieces of electrical tape taped onto the sides specifically I imagine to prevent this from occurring I actually wrote a bit about that being a thing in the factory but I looked at other eBay listings and I found no evidence of that ever being done so while the tubes I bought were sold as New Old Stock uh they probably weren't either that or whoever was using them did that tape ahead of time but I'm absolutely certain they did that to solve this glare problem because it's not super easy these numbers are just not super easy to parse and you can see that even behind the filter that issue with the filaments Illuminating the background is still there it's not as obvious because of the exposure right now let me brighten the image up also go ahead and refocus so right now the camera is exaggerating it from what it looks like in person let me try to see if I can match what my eyes are seeing that looks about right so there's a halo effect around all the filaments which just makes it a little bit harder to actually parse what they're supposed to be so really my whole thing about making fun of RCA for building this product it's not that it's a bad idea it's that the execution is just so slap Dash and there's a lot of problems that they didn't seem to think through that this tube would have so the flat packages that came later of course they're so much better than these tubes and I don't know if RCA would have had the capacity to build them like that but certainly they could have designed the tube with some internal shielding you know if they had just put you can actually see how on the the side they have that little uh almost looks like a pentagon there's these little wings on the side if they had just extended them forward enough to actually well and filled the whole side to actually prevent the light from the filaments from leaving the tube sideways then this glare wouldn't be a problem but they didn't do that so we have these weird reflections of the light on each display making it hard to actually read the tubes um oh also just since this is a good thing to point out I didn't mention in the video because I figured it was pretty self-explanatory but just pointing it out here the way that these render sixes and nines the bottom and top segment are lit on this clock they're not and that's just a matter of how the BCD decoder chip works so the chips in this clock render the six like that and the nine like that whereas the ones in this device are actually putting the top and bottom segments are that's just personal preference I don't know which one I like the the way that my clock is doing it without those top segments I think is an interesting an interesting look it kind of looks more old-fashioned uh but yeah it it it's nothing to do with the tubes it's just the driver and again let me put on that decimal point I mean that technically works but it don't look good I'm going try to get you as big of an image as I can oh right and I should point out just the fading of the segments that you see in my clock you do see it here but it's less pronounced running at the correct voltage you can see the segments light up a lot faster it's still an interesting look though I will give you that if we go back to that's just normal speed what happens if I oh interesting that gives us a clue of the logic going on in here wow I I'm very curious to look at what's inside this thing which is what we will do right now so not really going to know the best way to get into this but the feet are fastened and they're fastening through these braces here so I think I need to remove these screws before really anything can happen but hopefully it just slides out of there I have done absolutely no research into the history of this company this uh AP Electronics Incorporated when I think of AP I think of advanced placement tests it's a US High school/ col thing I took AP US Government and his or AP Gov yeah and AP stats AP stats was a fun class and then if you get a good enough score on the AP test most colleges will accept that as college credit uh that appeared to do nothing useful great all right well let's then start with the back panel here it it it looks like the front is entirely inset so it would seem to me that if I remove these screws all of the innards will just slide out that's what I'm hoping for well no that just removed the back plate wow this looks very very much like a kit and it smells awful in here I really wanted to get the top off but because the power outlets are on the side that might be easier said than done well okay I the control panel is attached to the sides it looks like that didn't get me as much as I would have liked I think I need to just why is the whole bottom panel is trapped by the sides so I mean if I just bend it and there was much rejoicing jeez that is put together in a very weird way all right so what are we looking at here um first these are really interesting components it says. 22 microfarad plus 100 ohms so are these what are these there's a transist mounted right next to each of them too uh you can't probably see that those are probably then the power transistors that are actually driving the outlets let's see there's they have a they're switching the neutral that's fun yeah so there's a line going from this green wire there to that white wire there to the outlet so these um I don't know oh you couldn't see what I just pointed out so there's a green wire on one leg of the transistor which is going to this point on the board which is then going to there which is then going to the power outlet so these are the um actual switches effectively and I'm just curious about this component what that's called I'm assuming it's there to smooth out the signal for the transistor or something to do with that but very very um very interesting one thing we can now see with the board removed is that the tubes the actual Patron tubes were not socketed they are just soldered onto the board so the people who put this together had about as much care keeping them aligned as RCA did they could probably I don't even know I don't know if they could be bent into place but also that way you can see the actual print on the back RCA Patron but really I just wanted to see if I could figure out how old this thing is oh wow it's using the uh if I remember from the data sheet I believe these are the driver chips that RCA made I'm apparently too close for it to focus on that bottom chip there I'm pretty pretty confident that those are the driver chips that RCA made and I mean they're right next to the tube so what else they would be I don't know um but if that's a date code of this 22nd week of 1970 then this is very very early stuff there's a TI chip here it's 7036 this might be 71 though on this chip here but early '70s for sure when the newron actually made any sense and I just wonder how many of these things were made this board is is delightfully crude I should I need to get to the other side of that but I want to show you if I didn't point out before the uh filter cap I'm guessing that's what that is something whoa whoa whoa whoa try again something happened there I don't know what but something happened this is in a silicone sleeve or some sort of insulating sleeve but that that seems burnt right through so I've been trying to look up these ic's and uh the this is not my forte by any means but I can tell just from the data sheets I found that this is incredibly basic stuff um which is not surprising given when how old this thing is and what its simple task is but this guy here the SN 7473 n that that came up as two independent JK flipflops with individual JK clock and direct clear inputs uh what you need flip flops for on a circuit board I don't know I usually use them at the beach that's a joke um this here the these are the driver chips for the patrons those are the actual RCA chips what was that again I'd looked this all up but I kept moving the camera really terribly so I'm just re-recording that these are four synchronous 4 bit up down counters so they are probably just keeping track of the they're doing the counting based on the numbers that you input that might be a clock Crystal I haven't looked at it yet but it's got to have a clock somewhere right oh no there's H there's another one those might be old transistor cans I'm not sure how it's generating its clock but then again it could also be using the line voltage which would make sense so we got those flip-flop counters this spra or sprog I don't know how that's pronounced it is 7492 a there isn't really like any information on it I found an eBay listing and the eBay listing said there's no information on it so that's fun um and then there's these other two TI chips what was it SN 7490 n this came up as a decade divide by 12 or binary counter it had it was one I think it was divide by 12 based on the particular thing but it's a doing some division actually you know what if it's divide by six just realized something divide by six for the 92a and ls92 no this is 90 divide by five for the 9A well I was thinking if this divides by six it could be get taking the 60 htz input and making that into 10 Hertz which we need for the tenth of a second but I'm not sure uh again this is not my forte but fun fact apparently you should be pronouncing that fort I will not be following along because nobody does that so oh yeah and I already looked at this this is just a nand gate this is like so early in the IC world that like this is a two input nand gate I think it was yeah two input nand gate so this is incredibly rudimentary logic circuitry but I mean of course it is it's just it's basically just a countdown clock but it's kind of amazing when you consider that when the patron when these two were relevant you needed all this stuff just to count down 99 seconds and control a couple of power outlets with it uh but I do want to take a look at the bottom side of the board this board is delightfully crude I mean clearly this is handmade all right and then the the other thing that's really interesting the the input if you didn't notice it's this weird encoder Dad here and it appears to be outputting BCD because there's only four wires or is it four and a common yeah there's a common Bridge together so I'm guessing that this encoder is spitting out the BCD input for the actual number and then the logic is running directly on that really really interesting but I want to take this board off so we can look at the underside there is what looks to be a printed circuit board but a lot of this stuff on the top I mean these traces here that just looks like I don't know what happened here unless it's just a ton of solder because this looks to be a printed line there all swoopy but I want to look at the other on the underside well that was perhaps not worth the effort but it is pretty it is very pretty again this is this sort of like early electronic stuff as far as how this is actually put together not not very familiar with but this I mean you can clearly tell this was hand drawn and I don't know if you do like a if you just do this on paper you can mask directly onto a board I don't know what the state-ofthe-art was back then uh so please you you tell us and me whoever you are in the comments but yeah the the tubes were soldered right here this is where the patrons are they could have been closer together so I wonder why they went with the spacing that they did I would definitely have put them closer together but you know in this case I can't blame the patron tube for looking so crooked cuz it was the fact that it's soldered to the board and whoever did that soldering just uh didn't really check alignment that that critically and I mean it could be fixed if this was all redone but that's a lot of effort yeah well that's it uh hopefully I make my money back from buying this thing because this was too expensive but I thought okay I can show an actual thing that had patrons in it and uh if nothing else it'll be interesting to peek inside and see see the circuitry that powered this thing it is unsurprisingly quite rudimentary um but for its time probably seemed pretty amazing now the question that I have is do I want to bother putting this back together cuz uh it did not come apart all that nicely I don't know it's almost more interesting as a Showcase of the technology inside it rather than the box that's in I'll think about it I could use a more precise dark room timer but also yeah I don't know usually when I did it I just timed by hand anyway I'll just end this video because I'm just going to keep going on like this forever if I don't bye

Channel: Technology Connextras

Views: 66,078

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Id: XgzL05Gojfw

Length: 26min 51sec (1611 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2024