My new projects…

[ozcar]

No, I lied, they are not really new, although I did revisit one of them a few days ago.

I made the one on the left around 22 years ago (!), and the larger one on the right around 52 years ago(!!).

The older one was based on a design by Don Lancaster ( https://www.tinaja.com ), and published in the September 1967 edition of Popular Electronics, under the title “Spots before your eyes”. It uses four RTL ICs. At least, it was supposed to - the counters in my one insisted on getting into an invalid state that resulted in an incorrect display, and I added another RTL IC to force it to count correctly.

I modified the suggested construction, so that the “spots” that are not turned on are not visible – I quite like that feature. If you think the LED colours are a bit washed out, those are not LEDs, they are 6V 50mA incandescent lamps, with coloured cellophane over them.

Scanned pages of that old project are here: https://deramp.com/swtpc.com/PopularElectronics/Sep1967/PE_Sep1967.htm

The new one (well, the 22 year-old one), uses a PIC12C509 and a single transistor.

The switch on the older one is to “throw” the dice. The switch on the other is just to turn it on, to “throw’ it you shake or tilt it (no fancy mems sensor, just a good, old-fashioned non-ROHS <censored> switch).

Yes, I have seen the tiny versions, but I’ll leave those for people with better eyesight to construct.

[themadhippy]

Scanned pages of that old project are here

you can find the whole magazine as a pdf  at  https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/60s/67/Pop-1967-09.pdf, plus loads of other interesting publication