On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 10:10:48AM -0500, [email protected] wrote:
>
> I would put a capacitor across the battery in series with a resistor with
> the neon bulb across the capacitor. The capacitor would gradually charge
> up at a speed determined by the resistor until it reached the ionization
> point of the neon bulb, which would turn on discharging the capacitor.
> This would repeat resulting in a flashing neon bulb.
Wow, what a trip down Memory Lane! A neon oscillator was one of the first
half a dozen electronic projects I ever built... and I'd completely
forgotten about it up until now.
> I would use a big neon bulb, the kind with normal household threaded base.
> It had a nice electrode arrangement and looked snazzy. I would paint the
> cigar box black with the bulb sticking out the front and a sign "Warning:
> RADAR Burglar Alarm"
[laugh] That's awesome. It reminds me of the first project I ever built
that I actually got paid for - man, was I proud of myself, at the ripe
old age of 14! - was an alarm system for the apartment manager in our
building. The design was... um... let me be frank here: it was horrible.
It was worse than horrible. :))) I hooked up the output of a 6-volt
transformer to a 6-volt mechanical buzzer, then put a normally-open reed
switch *in parallel* with the buzzer - which meant that when the door
was closed and the magnet was next to the switch, it pulled in and put a
dead short across the transformer output, thus silencing the buzzer. I
mounted the whole thing in a red-and-white "project box" that Radio
Shack sold at the time (mid-70s). Sure it ran a little hot and the
tranformer vibrated a little bit, but... aren't electronics supposed to
do that? :)
Crazy thing: many years later, I happened to stop by that building. The
same manager was still working there, and remembered me - and when I
walked into his apartment, the same old red-and-white box was still
there, and still working, merrily buzzing away while the door was open.
Oh, and the guy was just as pleased with it as the day I installed it:
it did exactly what he wanted, and had been doing it for some 20-plus
years.
Man, they built tough transformers and reed switches in those days. :)
Ben
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