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

cool

[secretsquirel]

But can it see through clothes?

And I thought I was geeky...

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is one mullet and a bra-strap-propelled rocket away from his own 80's series.

coral cache

[supersuckers]

It's angelfire, so bandwidth limit probably won't take long to be reached...
http://www.angelfire.com.nyud.net:8090/80s/sixmhz/ infrared.html
Also, this project was from May '03.

CORAL Cache Link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.angelfire.com.nyud.net:8090/80s/sixmhz/ infrared.html

I managed to get most of the pages in before the /.ing

Hack A Day

[wolveso]

Hack A Day's story referencing Miller's night-vision project can be found here;
http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000107028849/

Lots of similar DIY projects, including peltier beverage coolers and linux-powered weather balloons, can be found at;
http://www.hackaday.com/

He should go into hiding...

[Interfacer]

because the department of homeland security will be knocking on his door pronto.

Excuse mr, you have just won a free vacation to the beautiful island of Cuba. do not bother to pack your stuff. everything has been arranged for you.

after that they have to start watching landfills and monitoring scavengers's behavior. "Excuse mr hobo, where do you think you are going with that rusted coathanger? not planing an attach on the pentagon, are we?"

Reaction from the stars

[LiquidCoooled]

Paris Hilton was said to be very interested in this device.

Hang on, thats not news is it.

This is news?

[Caradoc]

I built a IR scope in 1988 (in high school) from a surplus tube, a transformer from an old monitor, and some surplus optics.

It won me a $500 scholarship from the Army, which paid for my freshman Biology textbooks when I got to college.

This is news?

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.