KiCAD and Vacuum Tubes (Valve)

[CatalinaWOW]

I finally found 7.0 close enough to my mindset to give it a solid try.  And the venue I needed at the moment was a schematic for a tube radio.  I found little tube stuff for KiCAD so decided to dive in and create it.  A few months later I have had to scale back my original goal of having symbol, footprint and 3D models for every tube in RC-25, the 1965 Receiving Tube Data Book.  After expanding to RC-30 the 1970 version that added industrial tubes, I just wasn't ready to draw all of those symbols.

For anybody who needs a specific tube I am including here the tools to create your own fairly easily.  As a result of all of this I am still not ready to fully switch to KiCAD.  It is still orthogonal to some of my thought processes, so I may stick with what I have been doing.

The material provided here is not guaranteed to be suitable for anything.  I have tried to eliminate errors, but there were many sources, with me not the least of them.  If you depend on perfection in any of this data be sure to double check everything you use.

The Excel spreadsheet contains a list of the over 2000 tube types covered along with associate base diagram, socket required, outline and a little additional basic data.  The other attachments in this and the next posts include symbols for the first few dozen basing diagrams in RC-25 to use as examples, jpeg files with all of the required basing diagrams, footprints for the sockets that I was able to find PWB versions, and 3D models for the sockets and the tubes themselves.  I did not find PWB sockets for some of the more unusual types.  Acorn and Nuvistor being the main examples.

Not all of the socket models include VRML versions.  Many days of troubleshooting has not allowed me to export VRML files for the B7G and K8A sockets (Miniature 7 pin and octal).  The less pretty .step versions will have to suffice.

[CatalinaWOW]

May not get this on to here.  I thought the attachments were sized to fit, but am getting errors.

[CatalinaWOW]

More

[CatalinaWOW]

Now the VRML

[CatalinaWOW]

Tube outlines come a chunk at a time.

[CatalinaWOW]

It ends at 40

[David Aurora]

That's a lot of work! Thanks for sharing, these could definitely come in handy

[CatalinaWOW]

More

[CatalinaWOW]

More

[CatalinaWOW]

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[CatalinaWOW]

More than halfway there

[CatalinaWOW]

More

[CatalinaWOW]

Almost there

[CatalinaWOW]

And that's all folks.

[CatalinaWOW]

That's a lot of work! Thanks for sharing, these could definitely come in handy

I appreciate the comment.  Even though I started out on tubes in the 1960s, I learned a lot I didn't know during this exercise, above and beyond what I learned in FreeCAD and KiCAD.  Also, I have gotten a lot of stuff off the internet so feel obliged to put stuff back.

[shabaz]

I don't know how you managed that, it's a stunning resource!!

I don't know much (anything!) about tubes/valves, but by coincidence, I've been given a load of car stereos to look at, and they contain a tube/valve inside. I looked to see what part code was written on it.. appears to be N5670W but I may have misread that.

Just out of curiosity I searched the Excel file, to look up "5670", and all the information needed was easy to locate in the sheets in that workbook. It showed me the pinout jpg file to look up too, and the KiCad footprint file, and the STEP and WRL files for the base and the tube.

I'm using KiCad 8, and it read the footprint and 3D models just fine, all rendered perfectly! This will be a great resource for anyone wishing to build with tubes/valves.

I'm tempted too, once I get around to learning a bit about them. I have a few random ones, I was hoping to make a little radio receiver with them if possible one day (I have one or two old tuning capacitors for that).

[CatalinaWOW]

I'm glad it is of use to you.  Interesting how the color render came out in your KiCAD.  Very different than how I set them, with gold plated pins in a ceramic shell for the base, and a smoky grey glass for the tube envelope.  Those are the materials in FreeCAD.  The step files should have similar colors, just with no transparency or specular reflections.   My tests actually look very similar in KiCAD and FreeCAD.

 I didn't bother to set the z offset for the tubes.  About 2.5 mm should seat the tube in the socket.

 

[CatalinaWOW]

I should give a lot of credit to the two most important sources I used to cross-check and fill in missing, illegible or just plain wrong data from the RCA books. 

Frank's Electron Tube Pages (https://frank.pocnet.net/)
and
Radiomuseum (https://www.radiomuseum.org/)

One of the interesting things in doing this was observing artifacts of the manual page layout techniques used in those books, the obvious places where a different person took over and some of the interesting decisions made in compiling those books.  For example most of the tube outlines are based on standardized glass bulb shapes, but the 29 outline series is where they just tossed all the oddball shapes that didn't quite fit anywhere else.  At least in the 1965 version.  Then in the 1970 version they added a few more to the oddballs list, but also added some whole new series for some that were no more different than some of the ones in the 29 series.

[retiredfeline]

Wow, that's amazing dedication. Good on ya! 

Somebody should put the library into an online archive for ease of access and checkout. (Don't look at me. I gave away my magic eye tubes decades ago. Sometime later the Ge transistors went too. I've vowed not to get involved with retro technology I don't already own, so no buying old gear or NOS, just NS for new fangled tech that I am bitten by.  )

[shabaz]

The colors are great (KiCad just turns any component green by default when it's highlighted).
EDIT: I just tried putting the footprint on a random circuit board and pressing the Raytracing button in KiCad. The result is perfect. Attached!