Small steps

Sometimes a project stalls for a while. A long while. You know you will get back to it. You just have to compete all the other tasks in life first. But you know that you will not quit. You will finish the project - oh yeah. All that it takes is a little discipline. And a few years.



My decatron-nixie-HF-radio is one such project. I know I will finish it. Its just going to take a while. Today I surprised myself after a hiatus of 10 months and finished a 9 V regulator for the 500 V step-up DC/DC-converter for the decatron tubes.



It was only a 10-minute build. And it was not pretty. But it was an important step towards the (one time in the future) finished project. Stay tuned. The front panel is soon to be finished.

Hiding an ugly Wi-Fi router with some old books

Disclaimer. This post is not directly related to electronics DIY, but it is somewhat radio related. It is also DIY and a hint of crap.

I have an ugly Wi-Fi router on a shelf that I would like to hide. Although I am a radio geek, all the antennas and blinking LEDs just do not match the rest of the living room. I collected some old books on a flea market, ripped of the spines, and stapled them together to create a nice box.

Ripping of the spine is a quick process using an utility knife. I left about 5 mm of the front and back cover to be able to staple them together.

This is the inner side of the construction. For the books at each end, I left the front and back cover respectively, creating a sort of flimsy box.

The finished product on the shelf. It covers the Wi-Fi router nicely. Since the box is open at the top, ventilation is not restricted. In addition, my calculations reveal that 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz should propagate nicely through these old book spines.

Since I love books, and have a few thousand titles in my library, I took great care not to dissect any useful books in the process. Others may disagree, but I found theater history. anthropology and cultural history to be of particular use for this project.