Homemade Wave Tube from T.V. [Published]

13579

Old post from when I first joined Zoklet, thought it would be relevant here.

I got bored today, and decided to finally do something with an old TV I had laying around with broken volume buttons.

Following this guide, I ended up a working, showy blue oscilloscope.

Pictures of how I got there:

What I started with

Trying to discover which coil was horizontal/vertical. The torn apart IDE hard drive was 13GB in size and is destined to become a Tesla turbine at some point.

Closeup of the last picture. Alligator clips for the win!

Looks like I've got something...

I hooked up my Ipod to a amp I removed from a broken boom box. Works well to adjust the thing

Just playin' some music...

Sawtooth wave in Audacity.

The small amp and makeshift dummy deflection coil.

All it really involved was some wire switching, and finding a replacement deflection coil to act as a dummy (This tv had a protection circuit). This took the most time, as every coil of wire I had simply got too hot and had strange effects on the wave.

I ended up using the degaussing coil I got out of an old dell monitor I took apart, this worked perfectly. The resistance was almost exactly the same as the coil it was actually supposed to go to.

I'm just screwing around in Audacity looking at square/sine/sawtooth waves in different frequencies at the moment, pretty fun to play with.

Altogether it was pretty easy to make, looks cool, and has impressed a few friends. I think my work here is done...

Katzenklavier

It's called a wave tube, not an oscilloscope. Oscilloscopes are precision instruments, this is just a party light. It's cool nonetheless. I've made one on a camcorder viewfinder CRT before. The screen was the size of a penny.

Try hooking up both the x and y coils to the audio amp. By playing diferent frequencies you can make lissajous figures.

13579

Katzenklavier wrote: »

It's called a wave tube, not an oscilloscope. Oscilloscopes are precision instruments, this is just a party light. It's cool nonetheless. I've made one on a camcorder viewfinder CRT before. The screen was the size of a penny.

Try hooking up both the x and y coils to the audio amp. By playing diferent frequencies you can make lissajous figures.

Never heard of the term wave tube before. I know an oscilloscope is for precision...Hmm. Learn something new every day.

I might try hooking the other coil up to it too then, next time I take it apart (Got a few 'upgrades' in mind).

Katzenklavier

Hook one up to each channel. It'll give you more control. Another fun thing to do is to try and just ditch the TV circuitry and drive the tube standalone. A flyback driver isn't too hard to make, and if you don't care about brightness, the only things you would have to do are power the heater; then the focus grid via rheostat.

Also, it's called a wave vessel. I remembered wrong.

Dfg

Bump, I am going to Reddit this thread. OP, can I change the title to:
Homemade Wave Tube from T.V.

Can you center the images as well.

13579

Dfg wrote: »

Bump, I am going to Reddit this thread. OP, can I change the title to:
Homemade Wave Tube from T.V.

Can you center the images as well.

Done and done. Anything else you think should be changed?

Unknown

Amazing! Really, this is really awesome.

bornkiller

Serves me no purpose @ all but still awesomely :cool:

Dfg

Taken from: DIY
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