Playing with Neons (NE2 and MTX90)
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- Опубликовано: 10 июл 2024
- This is an episode I’ve been wanting to do for a while, because I absolutely love neons! Sure they’re gorgeous to look at and a modern LED can only dream of putting out such a good looking glow, but they’re also have some incredibly unique characteristics that we can exploit to build some really, really cool stuff. So tag along as we learn how neons work and what makes them special, as well as builing some circuits to test them out.
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Intro Music adapted from:
Artist: The Runaway Five
Title: The Shinra Shuffle
ocremix.org/remix/OCR01847
Thanks for watching!
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
1:13 Size comparison
3:10 What is a neon lamp?
5:03 How do they work?
6:52 But what makes them really special?
8:33 Some applications for neons
9:27 A few examples to play with
12:54 Scoping the astable multivibrator
14:52 Enter the MTX90
15:58 What’s going on here?
18:50 It’s a thyratron!
19:45 Can the MTX90 multivibrate?
20:38 Scoping the oscillator
22:46 Bunny! 
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"Inches and MM, Fahrenheit and Celsius... it's all too complicated"
Pressure: "hold my enormous collection of units in common usage".
I kinda like atm as it can be converted and is easy to reference in ones preferred system. as long as u assume STP at least.
@@jhoughjr1 I like psig simply because it's what I use all day every day
Many thanks for the fascinating video! As a small child (under 5) I was absolutely hypnotised by neons and imagined them as fire trapped inside a glass bulb.
Those neons may have outlived their radioactive helper gas. That was commonly used to ensure there was a stable starter source of ionization. Often they used some radioactive nickel metal. Some military T/R tubes (basically neon lamps) used Krypton 86 gas. The gas has only like a 13.6 year half-life so the original concentration is down to a tenth or less of the original.
Agreed. A strong UV lamp directed at the tubes might help.
He that's a good idea. Or some X-rays! But ofcourse you don't wanna be anywhere near those.... Not so healthy. @@bytesandbikes
In the '70's, Radio Shack put out a kit in a little 'breadbox' which had 7 or 8 neon lamps flashing in a semi-random or 'chase' pattern using the method you described with caps of various values controlling when they would flash. It ran on a 9-volt battery and would run for days on one battery. It used a little dc-to-dc converter circuit to create the HV (you could actually hear the very faint whine of the converter in a quiet room). I had one. It was so cool! I wish I still had it. Maybe some intuitive person out there can re-create that and market it. I would buy one!
I have an article from RCA Review, from the 1930s where they described telephone exchange equipment, and there was one which used neon memory to record and process the dialed number. It used modules of 4 bits BCD for each digit.
Ooh that’s a nice chunk of neons for a phone number (16-28 neons I’m guessing)
I remember MTX90 being used as a "Red Eye" On/Off indicators on tube based TV and Radios in the early 1970s.
I've been in to electronics my entire life (since i was 5) and i never knew Neons could be used in this way, fascinating.
A wild (and probably incorrect) thought occurs to me that you could build a kind of neon sign that also doubled as a basic computer. Kinda hiding in plain sight. I've no idea what it would do but it would make a cool plot device 😂
It has been done, with Neon latch logics. Especially as either a weird processor (which is going to be a tad slower than hard vacuum tubes) and / or as a part of early RAM memory to hold the data for monster vintage computers back in the day. Harwell WITCH is one of such examples of computers that uses Neon lamps of any type as a part of digital logics - in this case, Neon gas filled Dekatron tubes used as a RAM memory component which you can actually physically see the machine codes so you can also change the coding if you need to. And yes, some hobbyists also have been playing with the Neon lamp digital logics, with this clock as a good example: ruclips.net/video/F4v7IDIYiNQ/видео.html
In a similar way to how a CRT was used for memory? CRT memory was a thing. Not sure if it was considered random access though.
Yes, CRT memory is random-access, since you can move the beam to any spot you want. It also needs to be periodically refreshed, so it's a form of DRAM. And reading is destructive, so data read needs to be written back, like magnetic core memory.
New genre invented: Thermionpunk, where the transistor was never invented and all computers are tube or bulb based
@@blueberry1c2 isn’t that pretty similar to the already existing fallout universe?
"Not enough to kill you, but enough to wake you up."
I like to describe that as the circuit making sure that you're paying attention.
Neon tubes used in digital way is so cool, glad to see more of it on youtube.
Definitely would enjoy additional videos surrounding the variety, setup, and application of nixies or other neon type tubes in future circuit projects.
Neons are a wonderful invention.
I loved it. For years I wished to build simple a CPU using neon lamps.
But they can be triggered by radiation, RF signals, etc too.
Trocotrons and decatrons are a more sophisticated variation on the principle of a gas discharge commuters;
Can I ask? Is it possible to use the neon astable multivibrator as a clock oscillator for vacuum tube computer? I'm a newbie.
@@Raz82000 In theory it is. But if you are already using tubes a double triode on an astable multivibrator would be more reliable.
Understand that early tube computers were not von Neuman style: they were more domain-specific machines that used ring counters with each tube representing one digit (yes very wasteful), imitating the mechanical machines they substituted. The programming was hardwired. I am not sure about ENIAC but Colossus worked this way. The "clock" was not an essential part of the process. Von Neuman architectures or even Harvard architectures and binary processors were a much later creation.
My old analog O-scope has neon tubes inside it, where you cannot see them. They were used electronically somehow. Probably one of the ways you showed.Great video!
@21:55 i wonder if your twitchy time base isn't an artifact of aliasing with ambient (electric) lighting? May work different in the dark. i also wonder if these are still even a part of the modern EE toolbox where the kiddies use a 32 bit micro to flash an indicator. So you share the low pressure gaseous love .. Awesome dude! Side note .. these puppies also used as flame detectors in boilers and binary-coded-decimal decoders .. before the SN7441!
My thought, too, especially if illuminated by old style AC mains powered fluorescent lights which flicker at 120 Hz (twice the mains frequency).
If I remember correctly there was a self-build organ described in an electronic magazine (Radio Electronica 1959) that used neon tubes. It was called Neonvox. That was way back in the past, but I remember I even had a working one for a while. I bought one from a electronics shop that was in the middle of a complete overhaul. That must be around 45 years ago. Memory is a bit hazy about that. They where infamous for their instability and tone drift, but some musicians used them extensively. I remember having a lot of fun time trying to tune that monster and get some dead keys (and thus oscillators) working again. Sadly I left the thing behind for a nephew to have fun with it when I had a big movement to another city. Good times...
Way back, in a previous life, I needed a microwave detector to tell me when the magnetron of a microwave oven I was working on was actually producing microwaves. After a thoughtful elimination process, I ended up clipping the leads of a neon bulb, and put the naked bulb in the oven, and voila! It flickered when there were microwaves. This has to be the simplest circuit I ever designed.
Love your enthusiasm, cool to learn about something new....even if its old. 😄
I think neons may have ignited my fascination with electronics, staring at the night light from my crib.
Yes, I’m quite sure of it 😃
Incredible insight to neon bulbs. Thanks!
So cool! Thank you so much for making all these joyful & entertaining videos!! ❤️
I've always loved neon bulbs. Thanks for sharing the knowledge on other uses for them. 👍
Very interesting subject! Thanks! I sometimes repair old Conn ST-11 Strobe Tuners. Each one has three paralleled neon bulbs which are modulated by the incoming audio signal and light the back of a spinning translucent strobe disc. The concept works very well. Because currently available neon bulbs aren't that bright, I'd like to replace them with and LED's but not sure if I can make them behave like a neon bulb in the circuit. Same story with neon strobes in old turntables.
Yes, you absolutely *can* do that. They're not using the "funky" characteristics of the neon bulb in the tuner, just its ability to turn on and off quickly and cleanly. LEDs are very good at that too. (Note: white LEDs use a phosphor in them, so they might not be as suitable, as the phosphor might be a bit "slow" and wash out the pulses, kind of like how incandescent filaments may be a bit too slow at heating/cooling to capture fast signals like the ones in your tuner. So use a nice high intensity non-phosphor LED and you'll be golden (just about any color other than white.))
Oh, I forgot to mention in my previous reply: you don't even need to modify your circuit much, just use a suitable resistor in series with your LED to drop the approximately 100V to the voltage your LED wants to see. (I'd expect a resistor on the order of 47K would work to let your LED work with about 2mA of current.)
Some organs even used neons in their audio circuits as frequency dividers. I heard that the Seeburg Ray-o-lite games used neons to produce the hit sound. I hear you can also make oscillators that use them as well.
Yup, the early philicordas did!
That's some interesting uses for neons. I just love the neon glow though.
" So hopefully I sparked a little bit of interest......". I see what you did there!
This was a really cool video. Brought me back to my electrical engineering days in university. I'd love to see more videos like this talking about more things neons can do.
Neon glow lamps are fascinating! In a circuit with flashing neon glow lamps, however, the sudden discharge of the capacitor damages the electrodes (sputtering), which quickly blackens the glass bulb. If you want to operate a neon glow lamp flashing circuit permanently, always install a resistor (e.g. 33 kΩ) between the capacitor and neon glow lamp, this slows down the discharge and prevents sputtering. The duration of the light pulse increases to about 10 mS. I've been running a circuit with flashing neon glow lamps, at 5 Hz, as a test for 13 years. After 114,000 hours and 2 billion ignitions, those glow lamps with a discharge resistor are as good as new. Those without a discharge resistor were already black after a week.
I've always loved those little NE-2 neons, since my first job in electronics back in 1973. Great video! I actually have maybe a hundred of them in my shop just waiting for something to do!
Great litle component! Fascinating!
Well that has to have been the coolest video on neon bulbs I've ever seen! You, Mr. Carlson, and Hasseb electronics all with new videos on the same day! One of the neons looked just like the one in Mr. Carlson's tube tester.
Just riveting stuff!
So well researched and presented. This is a channel worth recommending to as man people out there.
It would be interesting to see how gas mixtures affect the stability of the oscillators and operating points etc.
Learned a couple of interesting things again! Thanks.
Very cool topic! I remember that HP used neon bulbs and photo- resistors as modulator and demodulator in their voltmeter. We can call it opto-couplers indeed.
Love the education, but just had a thought... Back in the day everyone was in better shape. Presumably because of better diets and exercise. I surmise that in fact most stayed in shape moving antique test equipment around =)
Wow! That was very informative. I have never spent any time with these little neons and did not know they were that useful. I have always shrugged them off as just a cheap little indicator lamp.
Given that neon is susceptible to light, I have to wonder if the instability is the 120Hz lights you're using as part of your production. What happens if you place them in a light-proof box?
They either won't light up, or just randomly flickering and flashing.
Yes the jitter does look like the timing varies, and with it being so periodic light flicker is the simplest. Either try to shine a bright torch on them, to give constant light, or put a box over to remove the light, and see if it changes the jitter to more random, caused by the breakdown voltage naturally being a statistical thing, and depending on the breakdown occurring at different spacings in the gas volume. Neons are naturally noisy in operation, they were the first wideband noise sources.
@@Dr_Mario2007 All the more reason to experiment! It could be "hum" from the lights or it might be a randomization in the breakdown. Easy enough experiment to do. If they don't fire, then an adjustment to the resistor value may be needed.
Or, maybe use daylight so that the neon will strike reliably.
@@russellhltn1396 Yes, you can actually do that, some people do that to balance the lifespan of the Neon lamps with ease of ignition in the darkness. At least like 5 - 20% less than the original recommended resistors depending on both voltage and original resistance would be enough to play with it without risks of popping the bulbs.
Loving you working with the HP 150A! Lots of work, but lots of satisfaction too.
Time to make a CPU and memory with these! A computer which internal state is 100% visible, how cool?!
I have used Neons Bulb to build a very low distortion sine wave and I have bought so much of that device but never discovered this side, thanks for suggestion I will try to play some digital circuit now :) I like your enthusiasm in discovery new knowledge good job !
Agreed. Those Neon tubes are cool. I too wish to own and play with them, minus the shock. ;)
Electronics is awesome. Vacuum tubes, neons, nixies etc. are awesome. Your bench top is the coolest ever. Great channel! Great job!
Every time I watch your channel I question if I should be implementing my processor in transistors or triodes and such. So cool. Makes me think of a brand new 1950s era mainframe.
Congratulations! You have reinvented the 1950's.
I'm sure you've seen them by now, but if not, you should have a look at MTX-90 touch keypads! They would definitely make for a fascinating user input device for the vacuum tube computer! I've got one that I used for a while controlling a desk lamp and turning on my computer. They're fairly simple and the orange glow feedback you get when pressing the buttons is beautiful!
I sent him an Ebay link to one for real cheap on Discord, don't know if anyone noticed though.
Fascinating video and very interesting topic!
That was fantastic!
Nice that the Wang came with jimmy hats. Very responsible.
Way-cool video. Thanks!
Tried a simple ring counter with a tube blocking oscillator as a trigger circuit a while back, kinda worked but I couldn't get enough neons with close enough values so they wouldn't fire reliably. New neons kinda suck for that. I might take it up again, gotta age the bulbs right and select them. Nice to see some love for neon from you, such fascinating little devices
12:32 this video is also so awesome!
I once built a mains supply failure alarm which charged a storage capacitor during normal use. When the power failed, the neon ran off that capacitor, oscillating at an audio frequency and driving a loudspeaker which could be heard clearly for several minutes throughout a house or small factory,
I'm super interested to see different logic gates made of these!
That is cool. I didn't realize that neons only lit up on the one electrode as I had only ever seen them used on AC before. I knew that they could be used as voltage regulators as I recently came across voltage stabilizing neon tubes for a project I am hoping to build.
Huh, that Gerrit guy looks kinda familiar...
Anyhow, great video on neons!
Gerrit Rietveld, perhaps? Hahahahaha!
Keep doing what you love man. New subscriber here and I'm looking forward for more of your future videos.
That's MTH-90 if you translate Russian to English, once I tried using this tube as vertical oscillator for my vacuum tube monitor project, it was really hard to get stable sync but in the process I discovered that you can get quite stable 12 khz frequency source...
Interesting video, and what a lovely cat.
"Let me get my oscilloscope" - pulls out huge HP CRT scope. Honestly, though, crt scopes are pretty cool. Analog circuits are really cool (and the engineering that went into that scope must've been insane), even though digital circuits have superceded them in size.
Neon's are fun and pretty. I got some off eBay that are different colors. also different voltage . I also like gas regulator tubes. like 0A2, 0B2 , 0C3 Etc. even the counting tubes like 0G3 decatrons are neat to play with . and the Nixie tubes are super neat.
i love nerding out
Thanks for your amazing videos!
Please talk about the decade counter if you haven't in the past, would love to see that connected to anything and making it work as it was intended... very similar (but older tech) than the clock counter Curious Mark had in the channel, I think it's hewlett packard too!
Another neon lamp commonly used as a voltage regulator (and occasionally as an indicator) in old military, test and radio equipment was the 991, which has a 3-conductor bayonet base. The Industrial Alchemy site has lots of info on these and various other neon regulators, indicators, counting tubes, gas discharge tubes and so on. You guys will geek out for hours over there!
Wow. That was cool.
The neon lamp oscillator is probably the simplest in existence
and it is quite useful(even some scope sweep circuits use it as a sawtooth source)
Neons are cool!
neon bulbs are so cool
I read years ago in a book about how they made Neon Signs blink and animate. Neon bulb logic was used. Just a bit more of an extrapolation than is demonstrated here would work for basic automation.
👍The metal to glass seals are impressive. Hard understand why doesn't leak over temp and time. Think the ic packages use to be nickel gold plated kovar and special glass frit.
I adore noble gasses, so I had to drop everything to see this lol
yeah.
That is pretty neat.
Neon memory!!! That you can see the bits in!!!
Such an interesting video. It's really opened my eyes to the possibilities, other than using them as cool lights. What is the lifespan like, compared to a normal triode
150v electrocution Medhi style, would love to see that blooper reel!
Thomas Flowers used Thyratrons as memory in the famous Colossus of WW2 Bletchley Park fame. It be kind of cool to replicate that with those MTX90's...
You cal also build an oscillator from a single neon indicator, the same way you did with the MTX-90. Resistor in series, capacitor in parallel.
I am using a few MTX-90 as input selector control (so that I can have push buttons, but no semiconductors) for my amplifier
You can try using series normal neon tube to mimic the thyratron. The anode or cathode are one terminal that is free. Then grid is a terminal that is tie together !
I’m experimenting with neons too
A neon computer would be cool!
6:31: If it hasn't happened already, it can only be a matter of time until Hollywood approaches David to rent out some of his working retro-equipment to feature in the movies. It's pure eye candy. Highly potent retro-equipment pr_n.
Was just about to go to bed and noticed you had posted... welp, I'll just delay those REM cycles for a bit.
I remembered that some disposable camera had tiny Neon lamp inside them - and other dangerous bits that makes Xenon lamp flash too. I used to experiment with the Xenon flash lamp driver board, including using a bit bigger electrolytic capacitor to make it flash a lot brighter (I wouldn't really recommend doing that, as there's a chance the Xenon flash lamp tube would detonate as each lamps have limits to how much amperage they can handle before they self-destruct in a bright bang). And the MTX90 is somewhat like SCR of the past, gas-filled thyratron were pretty interesting electronics components, along with the retro-future factors SCRs don't have. An idea; why not use MTX90 as a part of RAM memory bank? You can see the stored values in them whenever they're lit or not as long as the processor is doing something with the data stored on them. Thyristor SRAM setup is what I would aim for in the form of Thyratron so you can see the data if you want something that's worthwhile for as an educational piece. So why not?
Neons tubes are highly (light,static,radiation,heat) sensitive any of these four can ianize the tube without exceeding the breakdown voltage...
Wrap the tube with aluminum foil and cover it with thick layer of black paint and you will get perfect oscillator without jitter..
The jittery triggering might be caused by ambient light. Adding light will cause the neon to strike earlier and you might be picking up the 60hz mains frequency from your lights.
Awesome video , just learned a lot ! This is amazing properties i was not aware of this.. please could share some where to buy links ? And schematics for projects like a clock ?
Gold
With your neon oscillator circuits, what studio lighting are you using? Ambient light greatly affects the neon gas, if your lighting is modulated by 60Hz power, then that will modulate your oscillators.
If you have a look at early test gear that used neon oscillators etc, they were kept in the dark to improve stability.
You need DC powered lighting - or just film outdoors.
Hmmm, memory which can double as a digital dot matrix display. Will we see a vacuum tube computer playing a game like tic-tac-toe? Maybe Tetris?
I already bought 100 small neon tubes to be used as a massive 12x8 bits memory (plus 4 spare). Single bit per bulb should be possible. Do have to paint them black unfortunately.
I'm sparked !...cheers.
Another really fun video! Thanks man. I have a dozen or two MTX90 and I may just have to break them out and experiment. (Hey random question if you know.. what’s with the big solder balls on the leads? Mine have them too.)
They all have those solder balls and it might have something to do with the way they were supposed to be mounted originally (that was in pre-PCB era). If you type the part number in Cyrillic - "МТХ-90", you can find scans from the original catalogs showing those balls specified on the dimensional diagrams as "2mm diameter". I also think that having more repeatably similar lead lengths would help with getting more repeatable results in mass-produced circuits such as sawtooth signal generators in old vacuum tube TVs, where internal capacitance differences would matter.
Two neons in series with a center tap and strategically placed resistors perhaps you could make a signal amplifier.
Interesting that the wave shape of the bistable neons turned out to be a classic ADSR envelope, well at least an ADS since R was close to zero.
Ed leedskalnin made a magnet with 2 coils on 8 henry and one 16 henry. Pretty heavy coils.
The 2 coils wound on 2 aluminum cylinders.
This makes 2 lc circuits.
This fascinates me.
👍👍
Thanks! I've never thought of using neons like. Definitely going to look into this. Also, it would be really interesting to look at those waveforms with a spectrum analyzer. Maybe it's a lower frequency noise like ambient 60Hz noise. Are neon tubes sensitive to RF noise?
If you bias a neon with a really high series resistance (possibly in the giga ohm range) and make a loop of wire that ends in plates near the two internal electrodes (outside the glass envelope) and place everything in a light tight box the loop becomes an antenna and the bias on the neon makes a diode. Depending on the loop size and the size of the plates near the terminals you can detect signals into the ghz range. The neon barely has enough current to keep it striking and holding but an input signal on the loop will push it over the trigger voltage. The signal from the loop is capacitively coupled to the neon terminals.
@@therealjammit Interesting. So you can use a neon like an old school tube valve? That's really cool.
@@Unfinished80 That's what it is, except they use the breakdown voltage of a gas instead of using a control grid in a hard vacuum.
i would be interested in seeing some of the vacuum photon detectors or photo multipliers, never really understood how those work
FranLab did a RUclips video about photo-multiplier tubes a while ago.
That was fascinating! I wonder how fast those neons can be clocked. You have me thinking about making a multivib out of two mains-tester screwdrivers :)
A thought: How smooth is the DC from your power supply? The jitters on the scope look a bit like a beat frequency.
Aw jeez .. don't hold me to it because i was driving an '81 Ford LTD then .. but something in my old man brain recalls around 20 KHz? May be talking out the back end though. it's been some time. I may be way off dis-remembering.
The jitter .. as i posted above, my guess is ambient electric lighting rather than supply regulation.
@@JimTheZombieHunter I think you might be right. Or maybe it's both effects.
Something I've always wanted to play around with: With just high enough voltage to sustain current if undisturbed, could an external magnetic field be used to displace/stretch/disturb it and cause the tube to switch off? Not sure if this would actually work, but one easy test would be just to wave a nice strong magnet near a lit tube to see if with low enough of a sustain voltage it is able to be extinguished. If so, then it would seem there might be some interesting all-neon logic possibilities... maybe.
I've always thought it would be interesting to implement a very minimal neon computer as a chandelier of wires and bulbs and the only way I could picture making that work (due to the need for not/xor logic of some kind) is this hypothetical extinguishing mechanism, energize coil switches off the bulb if it is only receiving sustain voltage, can't kill if fed strike voltage. If that can be done (and I'm only speculating that it can... it may not work) then gates should be "easy".
would you mind formalizing/writing some of these circuits for two-conductor out somewhere public and archived, like github? I would love to experiment with interesting computation aspects of neon bulbs. Additionally, have you found any other really interesting two-pin neon circuits?
I recall finding a neon bulb in a car radio onec. At the time I thought it was odd.