I had an unusual valve kicking around – an ECH83. It’s a triode-heptode designed for use in car radios, with an anode voltage of only 12.6V.
I also had a couple of the ubiquitous Park G10 practice amps from my early guitar-playing days waiting to be recycled into something better, so I thought I’d see if I could concoct some sort of bastardised hybrid.
The G10 actually has quite a nice chip amp for it’s final stage; the TDA2030A. What a pity about the JRC4558 preamp stages. I really hate the sound of that particular 80’s opamp.
Inspired by this wanton ECH83 abuse by Engels, I decided to use both the triode and heptode in the ECH83 as preamp stages and salvage the silicon from the G10 for a power amp stage.
This is the result (click to enlarge):
Read on for explanation, layout and construction notes.
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I’ve been getting back into electronics. High voltage stuff this time around – I’m trying to get a small Tesla Coil running at the moment (and to that end just let the magic smoke escape from my cheapo bench power supply).
Going through my camera, I found some photos of some robots I built last time I was in a soldering mood and thought I’d share and document – read on for pics and details.
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EYEkanoids is a webcam-controlled Breakout/Arkanoids type game. I made it a few months ago but I dug it out, applied some polish, and decided it’s ready to post. Click here to play now (Note you need a webcam!)
The little cityscape banner at the top of the page was drawn by my good friend Dave when I lived and worked on the Isle of Skye. It’s been part of the site for years and years, but it used to be static. I decided I’d update it with some tasty parallax scrolling and ended up building in a little game.
It’s a really interesting aspect ratio to work within. I also thought it would be novel to have a banner game that isn’t trying to sell you something 
In addition I wanted something with no keyboard input, just a single mouse button.
Just click the little Start Game button in the banner right at the top of this page to play. It features an online high score table (you get to the high scores at the end of the game).
