Mode Arcline, a blast from the past.

ok now every time you say clock im hearing cock and its making it very hard to pay attention

@15:10 i thought u said a nice solid cock for a second

Exactly the same tubes I used to buy in the late 80's, early 90's from Tandy in the UK. Zapped myself far too many times whilst powering those in my teens.

evilution

The tubes look awfully similar to the Russian IFK120 xenon tubes, ubiquitous in the soviet bloc conutries....

Interesting to see how it works, of course a micro controller would replace all the logic now. Reminds me of getting involved in some disco kit back in the 80's and just how scary the wiring could be. Everything just seemed to be at mains voltage!

Phil Collins

Oh Shit! I've just got this mental image of Clive in full disco attire...

Scott Miller

Hmmm... Big Clive and Disco? Pictures please. 😆

Lostngone

At the moment I'm about to start travelling with work, so it's not a good time to send items. But thanks for the offer.

Big Clive

Would you be interested in looking at an old Zettler ZF204-2 fire alarm controller unit?

Thanks Clive , really interesting. Scary some of the things we used to do in 70 & 80's. I had a small mobile disco business back 70 's & 80's and yes we used standard 3 pin plugs for everything, sometimes with very interesting results..

Richard Boyce

Not sure about that. If it was a series of tubes and a full scale set then it's possible.

Big Clive

In the Aliens: Resurrection movie when they evacuate the military ship when the aliens bust free of their cages, there are strobes that fire along the hallways to indicate where the life pods are. Is it possible the FX guys used some of these to create that chasing strobe effect? Because it looked way too linear, synced, and controlled for the usual "row of nails" trigger mechanism. This is also before LED's were really all that common (too expensive yet).

Dustin

I liked to use the schmidt triggers anytime I had remote devices and/or noisy environment. And love using one wire comms with different levels to multiplex things easily. (back before easy serial comms...) Nice smooth DMX adapter box, there. Easy to repurp for all sorts of things. I'm DMXing the church I 'tech' at, and might have a use for this concept. (Like powering the amps at the stage from the console...) Decades ago, needed to monitor 12 things at our remote field-lighting building at the airport. (FAA rules about standby power and sequencing created a need to verify the generator and dual mains feeds and status, as well as the switchgear's 120VDC battery bank and a few other bits..) Only had a mostly clean dry twisted pair of several miles to work with. Ended up using CMOS to cycle thru 16 inputs, triggering touch-tones if input hi. And one tone that was the watchdog/keep alive monitor. If the line went down it would time out and alarm. Any status change, it would alarm. Worked for several years 'til we had computerized bits installed. Never failed. I like 4000 series CMOS. Great for this kind of thing.. Nice vid, nice reverse-engineering. Thanks! Stubat

D. Stuart

Thanks. It's like learning a language. Listen enough and more of it starts to come together and make sense. Always appreciate your great way of explaining.

Over time it will all start to make sense. In this case it's using retro logic gates instead of the microcontroller that would have been used these days.

Big Clive

Very interesting but a tiny bit (ok, a lot) over my head in the details of what is going on in the various sections of the circuit. And yet .... I pick up more each time BC walks us through an interesting circuit.

Interesting explanation of this old unit's workings. I'm very impressed with your DMX interface too

Erik G

Very interesting