Fixing 1983 Soviet VFD clock Elektronika (unedited) 

Soviet microcomputers are the biggest in the world.

Lmao I was about to write this comment

Yes you are the best

xd

I wish random nixies started appearing in my capacitor box... :(

I like the elektronika clocks ,i have three of them.

I often find in the washing machine ...

Yep, love from London

maybe this will also help you: elektrotanya.com/elektronika_6-15_clock_sch.pdf/download.html

@@chodnejabko3553 that really helps, thanks!

That's what I like about old eastern bloc electronics.

show me what a "normal" electronic watch should look like .

I was thinking the same thing lol

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-J3MbTVntKbw.html or search up LCD watch.

Sumptuously! I would like to know more about this

what do you want to know? orange transistor with 3 thin ribbon legs is one the things... apparently google image search of "soviet electronic components" gives loads of photos of pcbs and individual components, which all are almost exactly same, even to the pcb layout and markings... i'm sure we could find some actual method to chat if you're curious about subject... note that my age, 36, doesn't include much of personal history about those

The heaters should not run on lower voltage because of the same effect as in vacuum tubes ( valves in British ;). Voltage on anodes is high enough to "tear" electrons from cathode if it's not hot enough, and if it's happening, the oxide layer from cathode ( on VFD's filament is the cathode ) is being sputtered onto the surface of anodes, covering it and lowering the current, also dimming it ( of course phosphor is wearing out too, that's why segments got darker ) higher voltage is allowed due to less harmful effect than under powering, but if the oxides get too hot, it may fall off the cathode or loose it's strong thermoionic effect due to poisoning ( gas absorption by oxides or developing high resistance layer between oxides and cathode ). That's why the heater voltage must be just right. ( sorry for any language errors, I'm Pole and that's not my native language, sadly )

@@sebo0855 There is nothing wrong with your english, you discribed the problems very clearly. I have saved your information to a text file, I may need to refresh my foggy brain one day lol :-D My written english is far from perfect and i am english lol. No one is perfect :-D.

That means you are young person. All russian elektronics is copy on ancient western one :) And if something they made different that means that soviet technology level was unable to copy (like TU-144 an Concorde. Russians managed to steal all drawings except wing. An was unable to make proper one. This is why they used small front wings to make plane stable at low speeds)

@@mikasm3717 and put a man in space first.

@@sjefoekel6058 With Fon Braun made rockets :)

I have several boxes of them and they are probably on Ebay too...

@@DiodeGoneWild I ordered 2 years ago via E-bay somewhere in Ukraine- (dealer Oleg Sidorov?). Price with shipping to Slovakia approx. 15euro.

@@Vladynko1 Oleg? I've ordered from him directly without going through eBay just by emailing him. Saved a ton of money that way. He got arrested for terrorism last year....but seems to be selling things again.

Get the heater voltage to the nominal, check for power supply ripple voltage and check/replace the capacitors, if it's still dimm, replace the display, if you start increasing the voltages it will degrade faster and you'll have problems again (potentially even damaging it to the point where it's not viable to fix)

if it's the entire display that is dim it's probably cathode poisoning, if it's a matter of some segments those are burnt instead... in the case of cathode poisoning they say you can bring the filaments to cherry red by applying an higher voltage with a power supply, cycling like 5 times for the duration of a pair of seconds, this may clean the cathode... before that also check for resistors in series with the filaments that may be burnt... of course check the supply voltage also

I still have one on my nightstand. One day it switched over to 24hr format by itself. There is no switch to change it from 12 to 24 hr format. I took it apart and the glue they used on some of the caps went conductive. The glue was touching a pin on an IC chip. I cleaned the glue off and the clock stayed in 12 hr format.

@@DiscretesignalsI think UxwBill modded one for 24hr mode once. Also, I have a GE 7-4663 from 1987 and a 7-4695 from 1981. I also had a 7-4666 from 1983 bit it didnt work well

We call her Veritáska :).

@@goc9000 the other cat died a long time ago

@@prathikprashanth2932 sad sad sad or sweet kitty you will be missed. I once lost a pet as well. Pembroke Welsh Corgi. Smartest dog I've ever seen in my life. Not biased but very much so serious. Not the only one that has said that. Not just the folks either. Not just family. More than a handful of others.

It may be to keep your car going on battery if it has one to keep accurate time and some clocks just use a Crystal instead of a sea lion frequency.

@@aaronbrandenburg2441 A sea lion frequency? Oh, you mean "AC Line frequency"! The mains in the UK was always accurate, 50 cycles per second. Or 4 320 000 per day, anyway (if the generators slowed down during the day, they ran them a little bit faster overnight!)

In some areas, line frequency is 60Hz, but it's 50Hz in others. Also, spikes and noise on the line tend to get counted as well, so the clock gains time. Finally, using a crystal allows a battery backup when the power fails.

He's from Czech Republic.

Ok thanks

I second that I third it and so on don't do it unless you have an isolation Transformer or are you at don't do it at all. Correction just don't do it don't do it don't do it don't do it don't do it...... he did it ______________________

These displays are designed to run on AC so a DC regulator is actually worse. You will get a voltage gradient across the filament meaning one end of the display runs bright and the other end runs dimmer. It may also reduce the life of the display.

These VFDs run on ~12-24 volts on the segments and 3.3 volts on the filament. The data works by first powering the filament, then powering the control grid with the higher voltage, and then powering the segments with the same higher voltage.

The anode and grid voltage is I think 27V nominal, it tends to be regulated using three 9V zeners in series. The duty cycle is 7/32 at high brightnes and 2/32 at low brightness. The heater is 5V~ 120mA.

@@retropcs88 Thank you.. Dekuji.

Yes, we also have it. The last Sunday of March at 2:00 the time goes to 3:00. I programmed most of my microcontroller clocks do this automatically, but the mechanical or vintage clocks have to be shifted manually, of course. But this only happens 2x a year. I have to wind the mechanical clocks every week anyway :).

And you basically ruin it

А что, так пресно?

Unfortunately I don't have any. Just the crystals alone.

No, but when you hear the loudspeaker hum it usually is.

No, it was probably on for 10 years before some old grumpy Russian threw it across the room when it woke him for work one very frosty Dezember morning....lol!

learn to spell

I don't have it yet, or maybe I had it with almost no symptoms, who knows....

I also have 1978 ones that still work. And some 1962 geiger counters that still work. And some 1890 thermometers that still works :).

@@DiodeGoneWild «that's weird» © DGW ☺ I'm subscribed to your channel for a year only, although this has been long enough to realize that I should expect various pieces of technology on a verge of extinction. And thank you for what you're doing, it's really interesting to watch you digging into these devices.

Yes please tell yes please do it yes please to okay okay yes yes yes yes yes

I see a cold green plexiglass and a cyan-turquoise-aqua-teal colored light ... not exactly cyan-turquoise-aqua-teal. This color of light can only be described as a VFD color :).

@@DiodeGoneWild 😄 It was an interesting video I never saw a clock like this in real life.

You should go on his website and see his childhood drawings, they're amazing.

Born in early 1987 in Prague, he developed a passion for electronics in 1993. His family moved to Mělník around this time. At 9 years old, he received his first digital multimeter. Apart from disassembling electronics, he spent his time creating apocalypse-themed charcoal drawings and playing Bio Menace on DOS. Later, he got himself a Win95 PC (and then maybe another one), connected to the Internet and established the domain danyk​.wz​.cz in 2002 to dump his projects on. (The nickname comes from his name Daniel K. → Daník (his classmates would call him this) → Danyk.) There are over 100 articles published there since. His early videos of shocking experiments, now seen on the _danyk666_ channel, were shot and edited (!) in _VideoDJ_ on his Sony Ericsson K510i, which he enthusiastically showed to friends. He graduated a grammar school in Mělník and went on to study economics in Prague. His attempts to find a wife online failed, but he got a great GF he visited Sydney with in 2014. He moved -to -*-**-* _relatively_ close to his favourite brewery in 2015. He has a dog, Jessie, and a cat, Veritáska and a "secret" RU-vid channel for his alter-ego's mysterious content, on which he sometimes hits the viral jackpot. He loves low-budget films and muic by Rammstein, Iva Frühlingová, Anna K, ABBA, Linkin Park or Evanescence. His favourite places are pubs and waste dumps with old electronics.

@@vaclavtrpisovsky w h a t ?????????

@@aaronbrandenburg2441 The deep web... I used Archive​​.​​org and I'm also Czech, so following the leads was quite easy for me. A manual depth-first search starting on his website was a good start. Thanks to his long-lived Internet presence and willingness to share I have gathered a lot of information about him. I'm not going to doxx though, just stay a secret admirer... He has a very unique personality and I would love to be his apprentice in electronics. If you want to find out more about his projects, his website (now residing at danyk​​.​​cz) is a great resource. His "secret" RU-vid channel I'm not going to link to featured a few popular videos (1M+ views) from 2014, but they got removed in late 2019 for spreading misinformation. I'm convinced he did not want to deceive anyone though, just earn a bit of money for rent and components, desparately resorting to clickbait.

are your soviet watches too?)

If one segment is dead or one segment always on in all digits, it tends to be a bad K176ID3 chip, a BCD to 7 segment decoder. Sometimes it can be a broken connection in the display. You can also have 2 segments shorted with each other in the display. Then both light up if any of them should light up. I'd check the K176ID3 first. If you don't have an old stock, you can buy both the display and the chips on ebay.

If you want to see him, just visit danyk.cz and about me...

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