Night Vision Scope From Scavenged Parts

Caydel writes "Greg Miller appears to have built a Night Vision Scope out of an image intensifier tube, and parts he found mostly in dumpsters. Also on Greg's site: Flyback transformers, coil guns, plasma globes and Tesla coils made from dumpster materials." You get the feeling he's not also writing product safety manuals on the side.

Comments

Insurgents in Iraq

[barrkel]

I wonder if this will be used by various guerilla groups to try and even up the technological battleground.

Re:Who throws out an image intensifier ????

[Lavaeolus]

Seems that nobody does. From the article:

I did have to buy the main component, the image intensifier tube, because I think it's pretty unlikely that I'll come across one in the dumper.

One of the lenses and the IR LED's were also purchased, not scavenged.

Re:I beg you pardon ?!?

[reezle]

So you are saying we need to be protected from his ideas?
Us whacko's will give it a try and kill ourselves because we aren't quite smart enough to recognize the dangerous bits like you have?

Let me guess. You're from the government. And you're here to help.

All the fear from the doomsayers

[panurge]

Is misplaced. I went into science because we had a superb physics teacher in high school (he'd left a job as a research engineer basically because, I think, it was too limiting, and he ended up as the schools science adviser for the council.)

Among the stuff we used to work with were high voltage induction coils, the odd home-made low pressure gas discharge device - a good way of checking your vacuum technique - low power radioactive sources for playing with simple cloud chambers and trying to deflect alpha and beta rays with a watercooled electromagnet - and extracting short half life radionucleides from samples of yellow cake. (I did have enough sense to know that you don't breathe thorium oxide dust and that you handle uranyl nitrate carefully.) That and getting a signal big enough to light up a small bulb across the lab using a klystron. And he would let us get on with this stuff unsupervised - something about kids need trust in order to learn.

Nearly 40 years later I am not only still alive but still building stuff, probably because those early experiences gave me the confidence to try things.

Being quite ruthless, anybody who tries stuff around HV and microwaves and doesn't have the brain to spot when things are going wrong, probably needs to be removed from the gene pool anyway. And anybody who tries and has the brain and initiative to stick at it will learn something. We can't all expect to make our livings for the next twenty years by either recording not very good music and selling it for inflated prices, or suing people who actually have a business. Buying geek toys is no substitute for making them, and things that just go bang or send projectiles a long way are not the only way to have fun with physics.

Re:I havent RTA, but....

[t_allardyce]

because when someone aquires a rare part, the first thing the geek in them says is "duuude i could build an X with this!"

find this stuff in a dumpster?

[AviLazar]

Hm which research facility does this guy leave near? People generally do not have this kind of hardware....and what are the chances thta if someone does he happens to be there on the day they put it in a dumpster?

Re:I beg you pardon ?!?

[hairykrishna]

Bah. Everything fun is at least a little bit dangerous. Nobody's making you build one and you're fairly unlikely to come to harm because some "wacko" (to use your terminology) has knocked up a Tesla coil in his garage.

Same go's for playing with old microwave ovens. Just for the record, by the way, even if he screws up royally he's not going to get cancer from his microwave- non-ionising radiation you see. He could cook himself though- that'd probably suck.

I think this kind of nanny "but you might hurt yourself" attitude is going to harm future science education. Already it's at the point where you can no longer do a bunch of demonstration experiments in the classroom. Big sparking things, stuff exploding- that's what provided the hook to get me into physics.