My attempt to build a IN-13 vu-meter

[Olivier]

Hello,

Over a year ago I found some picture of a IN-13 vu-meter made by Paul from Bad Dog Designs. I contacted Paul to get more details on his built and he happily replied. I then decided to start my own.

I built a one channel prototype with through-the-hole components and then re-designed the PCB to use SMDs as I needed the board to be very small. I built each channel on one separate PCB to reduce cost; they are all stacked together.

Then I had the oak wood box made locally by a carpenter and the brass plates as well. The final results is below: it uses 20 IN-13 tubes, 10 for each channel. The choice of frequencies matches a home-made 10 octave equaliser you can see below.

It is working fine, though some channels need some additional fine tuning! It is fully analog. 

Cheers,

Olivier 

[Joe Croft]

Hi Oliver,

Very good job.  Very pretty device! I love the brass work! Did you do the brass work yourself? If so, what did you use for cutting and etching?

Analogue rules! (says the SW guy)

-joe

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[Ian Vine]

Very nice. 

IanV

On 2 Feb 2023, at 11:12, Joe Croft <cro...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Olivier]

Hi Joe

I had the brass work done by an engraving company. Not cheap though! 

Thanks IanV!

Cheers,

Olivier 

[Mac Doktor]

On Feb 2, 2023, at 12:55 AM, Olivier <lest...@gmail.com> wrote:

I built a one channel prototype with through-the-hole components and then re-designed the PCB to use SMDs as I needed the board to be very small. I built each channel on one separate PCB to reduce cost; they are all stacked together.

Very nice. 

I'm very curious to know what problems you had with the tubes. I hear that there's a lot of variation among them. Did you have to buy extra tubes and then test them until you had enough that worked properly?

Can you share the schematic for the part of the circuit that's driving the tube? I'm always looking for the most reliable way to do that.

Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"

https://www.astarcloseup.com

"Would you like to see the relevant data?"—343 Guilty Spark, Halo 2

[Nick Andrews]

Very nice!  And cheap...not!  I don't think I even have that many of those tubes.  The price has been going straight up.  Have just a few of teh IN-9 too.

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 11:55 PM Olivier <lest...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Joe Croft]

May not have been cheap, but it adds the icing to the cake!

-joe

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[Olivier]

The tubes tend to behave differently depending on the signal frequency. Hence a lots of pots to adjust :) I purchased much more than needed for this project. 

I had one or two who died and had to replace them (the right most hand side on the picture has been replaced already)

i have attached the Eagle schematics. 

Price wise they tend to increase like all the tubes I guess :) 

Thanks,

Olivier