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Open Source Russian Vacuum Fluorescent Tube Clock
ptorrone writes "Hacker extraordinaire Ladyada (whose open source hardware projects we have discussed before) has just published a complete how-to, with design document, on making your own open source Russian vacuum fluorescent clock. The vacuum fluorescent tubes aren't as dangerous as (high-voltage) Nixie tubes, and there seem to be more of them available in the world. If you're not interested in building a clock from scratch, you can also pick up a kit version. All the schematics, source code, and files are available on the project's page."
A long time ago I redirected my child interest in destroying and rebuilding electronics to tinkering with virtual constructs.
So I shouldn't be interested in "hardware hacking"; however, too many hours of fallout, too many zombie movies and too many post apocaliptic novels have given me a degree of interest in that part of the engineering poetry.
Time to go find an open source rifle made from old car parts.
IMHO this has more geek points.
Here's a gadget that is cool (from a geek point of view), that you can make yourself (provided you have the skills, you should as a geek), that makes other geeks go "ooooooh" in envy and awe, that glows in flurescent blue (that by itself is already enough) and you dismiss it as something you wouldn't want.
Please drop your geek card in the shredder by the door on your way out, will ya?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's not retro; it has a CPU in it. Look at this all vacuum tube digital clock where all the logic is tubes. 103 tubes.