With a like of blinky and glowey things, [Fran] has collected a lot of electronic display gadgets over the years. now she’s doing a few teardowns and tutorials on a few of her (and our) favorite parts: LEDs and VFD and Nixie tubes
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that somebody with hardware from a Saturn V flight computer also has a whole lot of vintage components, but we’re just surprised at how complete [Fran]’s collection is. She has one of the extremely first commercial LEDs ever made. It’s a extremely small red LED made by Monsanto (yes, that company) packaged in a extremely odd lead-and-cup package.
Also in her LED collection is a strange Western electric part that’s green, but not the green you expect from an LED. This LED is more of an emerald color – not this color, but more like the green you get with a CMYK process. It would be truly cool to see one of these put in a package with red, green, and blue LED, and could have some interesting applications thinking about the color area of an RGB LED.
Apart from her LEDs, [Fran] also has a huge collection of VFD and Nixie tubes. despite the beliefs of eBay sellers, these two technologies are not the same: VFDs are true vacuum tubes with a phosphorescent covering and work something like a CRT turned inside out. Nixies, on the other hand, are full of a gas (usually neon) that turns to plasma when current flows with one of the digits. [Fran] has a ton of VFDs and Nixies – mostly military surplus – and sent a few over to [Dave Jones] for him to fool around with.
It’s all extremely cool stuff and a great lead-in to what we hear [Fran] will be looking at next: electroluminescent screens found in the Apollo guidance Computer.
Videos below.