Younger me made weird stuff (older me still does)
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- It's fun to visit past projects from decades ago, and see what sort of stuff younger-me was making back then. This is a little rechargeable light I carried in my toolbox for a while.
It used very early white LEDs that look a bit tame by modern standards, but were cutting edge back then. Note that NiMH cells are not like lithium cells. They can handle trickle charging for reasonable durations due to the chemistry recombining end of charge outgassing back into electrolyte.
The circuit also has a weird anomaly that looks like it was either a crackpot idea or a mistake.
But on the whole, I give the circuit an 8 out of 10 for functionality. While a bit cramped inside, a lot of shaped insulators had been inserted for good electrical separation.
If you enjoy these videos you can help support the channel with a dollar for coffee, cookies and random gadgets for disassembly at:- www.bigclive.c...
This also keeps the channel independent of RUclips's algorithm quirks, allowing it to be a bit more dangerous and naughty.
#ElectronicsCreators
No SOS mode. No strobe. No flashing blue-red lights.
Also, screwed together? Young Clive was clearly not up with modern practices of adding tons of stuff you'll never need-and one useful thing-into a flashlight that is utterly impossible to disassemble without piercing the tiny explosive pack inside.
Regarding the "tiny explosive pack inside"...
I mean, the battery cell is already there. 😁😉
Also no USB charging. (not even a power brick)
😲
Pardon me ? Young Clive WAS clearly up with modern practices of adding tons of stuff you'll never need. That 5.1V zener comes in very handy ! He was a bit like that man that went through the desert with a 10 pound rock in its back pack. Some one asked him "Why are you carrying that rock with you ?" He answered: "That's for danger. As soon as I see danger, I throw it out so I can run faster".
He uses nightcore tip in some of his videos, which is easily disassembled and does not have useless features, though.
How you squeezed the circuit into the enclosure without causing a short is impressive.
I’m very impressed at young Clive being able to squish all that circuitry into such a small case! I’m also getting to that age where I have to reverse engineer my own stuff to try to work out what I was thinking of 🤣
Me too I tried to reverse ingeniering my old Pic c code and it was very difficult without comment.
@@labiadh_chokri I hope I never need to do this as well, cause I know I didn't comment anything and made some incredible sequence of "if" statements that would make anyone's mind numb on a glance. Mine included.
@@labiadh_chokri The two questions I ask most often are "Why did I come in here?" when I go to the kitchen, and "What was I thinking?" when I'm looking at code I wrote six months ago.
I have to do that if I leave project for more than a week ^^'
My memory is terrible but luckily I'm decent at taking notes.
You too? I had no idea I was such a genius? It's sad that nobody needs such expertise any more, I worked for Rockwell-Collins, ie the flight instrumentation for Boeing, you needed to be good to work with them, even if they were pricks! Now, my skills are not required, 0.001 production success does not support the guy that can fix the odd failure. And let's face it, I'm definitely odd?
Kudos to young Clive for creating a useful tool for himself when likely nothing else like it existed, especially in such a small form factor!
At first I read the thumbnail as "exploding an old project." 😀
I came across one of my early projects (late '70) where I turned a car cassette player into a "walkman" for skiing. I even sewed a padded case for everything which was worn on one's chest while skiing. Next to a modern iPod, it seems an insane design. I do not miss cassette tapes. I do have some excellent mix tapes; ELP, Doors, Pink Floyd, LZ, and Dire Straights dominates.
A "typical Frank" eons kewler than the "average Joe" [sorry Joe] lol
Was younger clive drinking heavily in his early days 🤣
No. Strangely low alcohol consumption. It increased when I moved here.
I look at things I built 20yrs ago. I think " wow I sure was smart back then"
I did absolutely dangerous things when I was teenager (no consideration for wire size for example) it's a miracle I didn't burn down with my room.
Edit: Maybe the high internal resistance of the battery also limited the current to the LEDs?_
Mass plate cell, easily capable of 10A current pulses for a second or two, till it depolarised and dropped the current down to a few mA, and started to get rather hot, followed by splitting the plastic sleeve, growing in height by around 2mm, then venting off potassium hydroxide at high temperature and some steam, as the cell vents split. NiCd, the original flaming cell.
Yeah I have a tendency to oversize my wires now. But looking back at my old stuff you'd think the world ran on breadboard wires.
@@terminsane Did some with 48SWG wire, because i had it around, and could not fit anything heavier. The rest is salvaged phone wiring.....
I found an old project, a "ghost knocker". It used an hbridge to move a dc motor back and forth, with a dowel attached that would knock on the wall randomly every few hours. It would do my dad's knock. I hid it in the basement wall at my dads.
So did you actually freak him out with it?
@@bluelightningnz i second
I'd say you're well named, then.
If I was to select a housing, I would have added 3 cm on each side, because I hate to pack my toys like you did. Respect, mate. Squishing all the stuff in is an achievement, for sure.
"I used to make weird stuff. I still do, but I used to, too." 😁
Ahhh, mitch is the best.
Like you tried to make the tiniest rechargeable flashlight possible with the batteries and chargers at the time.
Also that small project box was the cheapest one on sale at Maplin as well.
now we know where the Chinese got their ideas from 🤔
In high school: I was hard wiring a 24 volt DC power supply at home,and powered it up,and no output. My hand touched the filter capacitor and found it blazing hot.
I LOOKED at the leads end and then moved it away-That's when I heard a gunshot and my room was covered in foil streamers!
After that day,I triple checked my work and continued on to have a successful life (with both eyesight) in electronics.
A couple years later,I bought my first Protoboard from the "Shack" and still use it 47 years later.
I had a tube type portable TV do the exploding capacitor trick to me while troubleshooting. It wasn't even an electrolytic capacitor, just the oily paper type. It opened up like one of those party crackers and scared the crap out of me, but now the problem was obvious!
Wow.
The mention of RME in Howard Street took me back fifty years.
Used to love that shop, and with all the surplus electronics, it had its own unique smell....
Reminds me of Active Surplus here in Toronto that sadly shut down a few years back. That place had such an awesome smell and the most amazing selection of random stuff!
I love finding projects made in my younger days. I was far more patient then and my construction methods were so neat and organised.
You are lucky to get a video ID that sounds like a model number - maybe even a suitable one for this light.
Yeah FK05-D-KABY definitely sounds like a flashlight model.
Flashlight brightness isn't the be all end all. Most of the time you just need a little more light than ambient. Otherwise what you're working on is so bright that when you look away to grab a tool you're blind for precious frustrating seconds. Gotta love the guy that walks in and turns on his fancy bright flashlight, blinding the whole room.
So compact ~ I am impressed ~ well done young Clive 👍🏻
Could you possibly explain some of the most common design ingredients, such as "capacitive dropper" or "buck regulator" (particularly how they work) sometime? You did a great video on resistors, capacitors, and the basic components, but I'd like to see a video on some of the simple "building block" recipes.
really cool to see that you also shoved everything into a box without mounting anything
well, nothing fell out did it!
It's always hilarious to hear you say "one moment please", especially since it's completely unnecessary. 😅
I love it
im waiting for the day clive has a small projectile toy(ie, canon, g*n, bow and arrow, rocket, cat, water g*n, rubber band launcher etc etc) and says watch your eyes and isnt talking about the light
kid, you'll put your eye out!
I politelly disagree - it's necessary!
Also, he said "schematic" instead of "shematic" and my heart cried.
Every great channel needs a slogan.
@@PappaBear_yt Absolutely! It's Character which a lot of channels lack
The opening of this kind of reminds me of Gune from Titan A.E. when he is trying to figure out what he built in his sleep that has a highly unstable material in it...and a button.
Younger me always built things that were meant to be used as weapons like tasers and motion activated electric grid security panels. The motion activated thing i spent too much time on and went through many iterations.. was for an accessible security panel that was outside the area it was guarding so you could use a remote to disarm the panel to get access to physically disarm the areas security system.. but then tbey came out with smart phones and easily obtainable bluetooth and wifi chipsets so the panel could be remotely activated and deactivated without any need for it to be physically accessible at all.. when building it and testing it though i learned a lot and that squirrels are very curios and delicate creatures..
I Wouldn't be surprised if you had an emp bomb in the cupboard 😂😂❤
Sorry for my adhd I ment an EMP generator device pmsl love u Clive
6:10 So, I heard correctly!
Kink Palculator! 😂😂😂
Way to go, Clive! 👍🏻👏🏻💪🏻🍻🍻
This reminds me of young Bo’s inventions. You’ve taken some of them apart. It always makes me smile, thank you old friend 🙏
Bring that into an airport
I've similarly got a little pile of assembled circuits from the '80s that I can't remember what they do, but also also documentation (wiring diagrams with each connection marked off in pencil showing I'd soldered it) that shows I built other stuff - that I cannot find!
What the heck is this? It's a device designed by younger Clive to create a time loop by making one of older Clive's subscribers write What the heck is this?
And we all wait for the result once Clive presses that Fun button on his Hopi.
It wouldn’t be 6v from the battery because of the 5.1 zener
I remember making an ioniser back in the dial up days when you sold kits with a PCB when most hobbyists were using Vero. It worked for donkeys years .
Was it the very small Minion? I built a few of those.
About 3" x 2" x 1" if my memory is accurate, It used to fizz satisfyingly and was always covered in black dust
I'm really confused, and usually I'm not by your videos... What's taking it from 240(?) 220(?)V to 6V?
The red capacitor rations a portion of current through each time the AC supply changes polarity.
Maybe the green LED was supposed to be on the other side of the battery connected through the zener to negative as a charge full indicator?
You put that zener diode there because you could...haha.. thanks Clive.
6:08 Is it some kind of inside joke that you call the pink calculator the "kink palculator"?
More of a catchphrase than an inside joke, but yeah, a running gag.
This reminds me of the (definitely not legal in the UK) FM transmitter I built into a tic tac mint box, for in-helmet communication between motorcyclists. It worked just fine but I never got round to doing the receiver/amplifier bits.
I'm now convinced you are indeed Chinese and that's why you take such liberty exposing dodgy circuits.
This also reminded me of my younger years when I built a couple rechargeable torches for my sister a couple of decades ago. My sister complained how they didn't last more than a few months and relied on standard dry cell torches instead. I used to tell her that she was overcharging the thing and she told me it was too much work to babysit my contraption.
I have an old Lightsaber prop made mid 90s with a PIC in it that lit up and played the right start up, hummmmmm and shut down sounds. With some kind of EPROM (not EE!) to hold the samples. Pretty sure I have the code still somewhere. I remember trying to get the brightest red LEDs I could at the time and they are nothing compared to what we have today. The biggest issue was getting a speaker that would be small enough to fit in the handle and sound good enough. I think I used some kind of headphone driver probably driven well past it's ratings! It had Ni-Cad batteries in it with a simple 3.5mm audio(!) socket as a charge port. I still have it and it still works but I replaced the AA Ni-Cads with smaller normal AAAs since I don't exactly play with the thing much now. The glowing tube was made from overhead projector transparencies scotch taped together with a plastic drink bottle neck and cap to screw it on.
The red and green LEDs in series make me think this was designed at Christmas time. BTW, I like the "kink palculator".
I'm just an amateur .but I ask a stupid question anyway . Isn't that zener shorting the voltage away from the leds as soon as its higher than 5.2v? Maybe you wanted to protect your valuable project from burning the leds? Maybe the leds had a max volt rating ??
Great job by young Clive. I guess maybe this was made before young Clive did his military service in the Scottish Army, gaining access to the nuclear MRE heaters they issued...8^) Cheers!
Due to the weird way my mind works, the glove keeps making me think about David Carradine in Death Race 2000.
Hi Big Clive, I have been trying to find a charging circuit, for button cell batteries, which I am sure was on one of your project pages, but I cannot now find it. Can you please help, cheers allan.
ruclips.net/video/z-fEVy8qblw/видео.html
Cheers Clive from allan in Scotland.
You know that you might be an old(er) maker when you can be surprised by the construction of a device that you made!
I find it interesting sometimes to go back to projects I did when I was younger. It is a bit of history, but also shows how we learn and grow on our journey forward. There are things that we did when young that we woul likely do differently now.
That looked like a great design. Given the poor brightness of LEDs back that, that's probably why you drove them hard. They were replaceable. At least it wasn't as simple as my LED safelight for my darkroom. That was 20 red LEDs connected directly to a 9v battery.
awesome video 👍 . disassembly of old diy projects , looking forward to see more.
"Fuck knows..." Love it
Hey buddy, is it possible that young clive believed that the internal resistance from the coin cells would keep the current draw low enough to never give the LEDs more than 20ma?
as a kid i made a box with parts from an old disposable camera inside. somehow i got an analogue gauge to work with it so you could see the charge level of the main capacitor too. its purpose was to charge up an external bundle of capacitors to then rub their leads against metal surfaces to make a bunch of sparks, like a rechargeable firework. worked great. doesn't quite have the level of practicality yours does, but it was a novel idea i think lol. (and a little dangerous)
I've not idea what you are talking about, but I find it amusing.
Younger me couldn't make anything (older me still can't!).
Actually, I bought a Chinese Valve Pre-Amp Kit. I assembled it, and it worked perfectly first time! ... So, I'm not as useless as I thought?
You made LED flashlights before LED flashlights were cool.
5.1v zener parallel with the LEDs, was younger you thinking that would limit the voltage across the LEDs to 5.1v and that would limit to a acceptable maximum current thru the LEDs? (not a great circuit, but the younger Clive may have made an oopsie.)
I'm still wondering why we -electronicians- all do the same stupid thing : once we unplug the device and discharge the caps, we still put our fingers on it, just to 'check' 😅
Nickel Metal Hydride! What the H*** is that?! I use Nickel Cadmium. I did just wake up under this tree and I now have this "ZZ Top" growth of beard. Hmm...👽🤨😉
LifeProTip... Don't put that in your suitcase and try to fly. Ask me how I know. (Homebuilt blu-ray laser pointer in my case. similar casing)
The zener diode keeps the max voltage across the LEDs to 5.1 V. Therefore Imax = (5.1 - 3) / 27 = 0.077 A. Which means 0.0388 A per LED.
When I was a kid I used to have one of those electric Plasma balls, I found if you put a coin on top of it you could get a spark to jump to your finger and you could smell the ionisation. Unfortunately I found out if you put your fingernail on it it was incredibly painful and it left a burn on the skin under my fingernail 😂
Sometimes I find stuff that PastMe made, and I am in awe. Other times, I hide the evidence.
I first found out about Lithium Ion Batteries in 1986 while employed at a new company that made Multichannel Analyzers for student medical instruments. They were for memory backup. I was told how dangerous they were if broken open (moisture in the air could cause them to *_burst_* into flames). They were only 3/4 inch or less in size! 😆
Hey bigclive I want to ask cos I can't seem to get a straight answer or suggest I'm looking to upgrade my escooter the pure air 3 pro it has a 10000mha battery 40v and a 500w moter that peeks at 750w so I'm wanting to know if I were to put a external battery pack in parallel what would be best ? Do I put a second 10000mha? Or something smaller like 500mha? And advice to wire it up? Obviously needs to charge externally and fused I'm really open to all and anyone
Huh, what a strange coincidence. I had been going through your back catalog a bit, and just watched the video on the light that inspired this one a day or two before this one came out. Weird!
I have to say that my very first home-make circuit was a reverb circuit I got from Olson Electronics. I bought the reverb spring and a diagram of the circuit was with it. So I bought and scrounged the parts and made a home-made sharpie's drawn circuit board and built it. And holy crap it worked first time... I was beyond hooked and the rest is history... Don't know whatever happened to that circuit. But that success was the reason I got into electronics as a career!
If learning electronics forbids you from making weird project -and violating ISO safety standard- then what's the point?
Sort of thing wee me would build in little knowledge and no google world as a teen. Moved on quick. Designed and built a mono cctv camera at 17. 8080 based ‘computer’ by 18.
I miss the old figure 8 philips power connectors. Just the right size for projects.
And often came with a changeover switch, handy for battery powered applications.
I save all my LTspice and KiCad files in their unique file directories. Then I forget them! But if I remember the path to the files I've forgot the operation. I end up very critical of my old circuits....
If I came back as an electronic component, the worse ever would be a modern LED, it must be Hell, over fed, over heated and over whipped and no one gives a shit😆
Gaz Yorkshire
I came across a project I had made in my teens. I had no memory at all of what on earth it was for. So I disassembled it to work it out.
I still have little clue what it was for (variable rapid on-off switching of 5v for something but what? I have no clue.).
What I did discover was that my soldering was so much neater back then.
One of your best videos. bigclive criticizing bigclive! Hell! Your younger self had what he had. No shame in it.
Well, at least your old projects fail with some decency, mine tend to go bang when I plug them in after so many years, "ohh, I wonder what this does, hmm, a plug, eh, what could go wrong...?"
mine also had ni-mh, but AAA size. 4 nichia white leds in series with a 34063 boost converter for constant brightness.
cost of parts in year 2000 ? astronomical !
The batter would have quite a high internal resistance. Old white LED's might have quite a high forward drop too.
I'll just see if this is discharged - with my thumb!
GOD I love Clive. (I know it was safe, but it's the way we all do this stuff that makes me roar with laughter.)
It's 1:33 AM and a drug addict is screaming outside my window. It's got nothing to do with this video but I felt like sharing.
Maybe you can fit some street lithium with a protection circuit so it doesn't overcharge.
Young Clive playing about with LED’s, this must have been right after the absolution button and the Cyber Kitty.
Have to have some fun now and then right?
Big Clive reviews & pulls apart weird stuff found in Big Clive's toolbox in unexpected swerve to channel!
This reminds me of a joke by stand up comedian named Mitch Hedberg....
"I used to do drugs... I still do; but I used to, too!"
I think you meant to put the zener across the battery as a form of overcharge protection, although it would have stopped it from getting to full charge.
You should market it as an ebay alien detector. Made in China .IOM.😂 Like the Japanese who built a city called usa just so they could say it was made in USA.
I used to make weird stuff. I still do, but I used to, too
this is an interesting idea for an inside the box Circuit panel light, that's always charged. Given a normal 2x3 foot box size, instead of the 2 leds for directional light, what sort of strip would you recommend to put in there?
Aye Clive.... Looks like this one goes into the "thought museum" coz it's maintenance costs are quadruple what it costs to buy another more betterer one ;)
Ah yeah, the early white LEDs. I remember that they weren't particularly bright for their time (until Philips finally got the galls to release the white Luxeon LEDs that were much brighter than the 5mm LEDs during that time, a few years after Radio Shack finally released the 5mm LEDs which I figured out were Nichia's early white LEDs).
We have gone a rather long way ever since the early dawn of Gallium Nitride LEDs, now we have insanely powerful LEDs like Nichia 319AT I am using in my flashlights I assembled together. That's a lot of light outta tiny 3mm SMD LED; around 500 - 700 Lumens at 1.9 Amps - it could be 1,000 Lumens, who knows? I can't find the LED calculator I used years ago.
Try Diode Gone Wild, Dany has a nice set of calculators on his site.
that ac dropper cap looks like a type maplin used to stock for a while,😉 i bought a fair few of each value for valve radio repairs, the 400dc ones were i think rated for 200ish ac max? lucky it hadnt exploded! never knew who the maker of them was
To be fair, the zener would have capped the voltage across the LEDs. I agree it might have been better to put it across the cell, or the switch, but... 🤷♂
i love mystery devices too. As a kid I wanted to make loads, didn't have the tools or money
Now I still want to make loads, I do have the tools, still not the money, but I'm like: "Why would I do it though..." and then I give up.
Reverse engineering of Your own creations?! Yeah, I sometimes do it myself with my old code (I'm a software developer), and also sometimes I have no clue why I have done it this or that way 🤣
Maybe young Clive put the zina (?) in as a joke for when older Clive looks in it. 😆
I just uploaded a short of a fancy electric kettle that has a keep warm function.
But it demands you opt-out of keep warm after pouring instead of opting-in for round 2.
I guess im here trying to get your attention, because Im sure i wont find anyone that i can get to care about it irl 😂.
Hope I'm not alone in thinking this is in fact, dumb.
I guess im going to put it next to its power station after im done with it...
I built two 9 volt powered oscillator circuits that were low cost TDR boxes, you plugged into a scope and a coax cable to determine the health and characteristics of the coax, and one person asked what it was good for, and could not understand basic electronics and decided they were just junk, until I found a shorted coax in an aircraft with one.
Still better than most 50000W 120000 lumen lights sold on Ebay/Aliexpr
Jeez, how old are you, 150 ? 😅🙈 .. and your beard is still brown and flammable.. good for you !
Symbol of a Schottky, not a zener ? Young Clive was 'getting into things'...
interesting little device younger me also made strange stuff and still do but younger me made things explode !
Clive should write little notes in his projects so when he opens them up again in 20 years, he'll get some young Clive Philosophy, lol....
I don’t know what it says about me.. but when you introduced said mathematical engine I thought you said
“ let’s work it out with the ‘kink calculator’ “