Originally posted by: Mallow
I have red and blue in mine... they own
What cheap way y'all have of getting cathodes? I bought a kit for like 30 bucks w/ inverter included and such. Is an inverter hard to make... any tutorials out there?
I go
here to get mine. Look under Lamps and then Flourescent
here. They have a good selection of colors. You have to do some soldering and figure out your own installation, but I enjoy the flexibility and lower cost. They also sell inverters that run on 12v (
this one) for $10 and will drive 2 CCDs each - you can end up with dual CCDs for about $20-25.
I've been doing electronics and soldering for about 17 years. I built my own inverter out of spare parts to test a CCD. You will get as good if not better performance from the commercial one, and it will cost much less. If you're still interested, you can use a 555 or flip-flop transistor pair to feed a high frequency signal (4 KHz+ for best effiency) to a MOSFET or power transisitor which then feeds a step-up transformer to about 600v. If you have no idea what that last sentence meant, you are much better off buying one. Unless you have access to a supply of spare parts and know your way around a soldering iron, it will cost more to build than buy, and will probably be more bulky (and could shock the hell out of you - be careful with high voltages). If you want to learn more, look for some electronics tutorials on the web or go to Rat Shack and get some of the Forest Mims books - good tutorials on electronics.