Wow, of all the conductive paint/adhesive products I've encountered so far, this one is the most pleasant to use.
https://www.bareconductive.com/collections/electric-paint
I tried a couple of different conductive pens (clogged easily and permanently?!), Wire Glue (falls out of solution badly and is very hard to stir back up, inconsistent results), but the bareconductive one will hopefully be a winner. Going to test the results once it fully dries...
@vxo i've used bareconductive and it's very good for the first week but then it sets really brittle and the smallest amount of flex will break your connection
as long as that's not an issue, yeah it's brilliant
@mavica_again yeah this is on two rigid parts that are going to be reinforced with CA glue, that should keep it happy
@mavica_again this kinda also suggests that any sort of fancy LEDs-on-glass frobozz i should happen to want to create would work fine too
@mavica_again I wonder how similar this might actually be to Aquadag, the coating that was used on the inside and outside of CRTs to form the anode voltage capacitor
(I almost said beam supply capacitor because an inductive output tube for high power transmitters and the electron gun of a mere friendly household CRT are hilariously similar!!)
oh snap i'm doomed to be a broadcast engineer forever with this kind of useless insight
@mavica_again typical crt: 20-60KV, very low current
broadcast tube: 32KV, 3 AMPS of current, filament current = very yes
@mavica_again also instead of modulating the beam current with a control grid like in a CRT, you're stabilizing and regulating the beam current to be constant using a big pyrolytic graphite grid and... actually modulating the electron velocity using the magnetic field of the input RF, causing little standing traffic waves in the beam which gives up its energy when passing through the inductive output cavity, resulting in a big net amplification.
real wizard hours all up in there
@mavica_again the thing that I don't totally understand is that this approach leads to a very linear RF amplifier, but in theory the fact that it just bunches the electrons leaves me wondering how that's effectively gating the output off as needed
oh wait I'm actually stoned enough to understand it now. it's not the beam current. it's the CHANGE in beam current, since the whole thing is a weird gainy transformer. hell yes. lmao
@mavica_again I know that this is the weirdest niche stuff in electronics that no one will probably ever dabble in again, but it's just fascinating and there are a few of us still running these systems through their paces... I dunno if saying that just makes me sound old but I'm glad I've gotten to work on the tube stuff before it got replaced by little magic rocks
@mavica_again @vxo me when there’s analog