Magic eye 6E2 tube/valve kit

Since I really like tubes/valves, bulb's, crt's, led's and similar light/electron emitting devices and looking for sometime to experiment with magic eyes, finally spotted one in kit form and within budged! After a month it arrived and costed less than 6 Eur, shipping included...

It arrived well packed along with the local bank publicity... I suppose...

The tube was a little dirty on the glass, my guess, it was made to be cheap and not to be beautiful like we see on some other tubes.

Connected the wires and started testing the heather, since this, besides the glass envelope, is the most fragile part...it was in good shape and didn't burned during power on! So far so good!

Now the plates power under normal light conditions, it worked! First time!

All the glory under low illumination:

Power supply using a 230 to 12 and 12 to 230-0-230 transformers as isolation, I had my share of electric shocks so I like to avoid them whenever possible:

A simple 7805 is providing the heater voltage.

And the schematic:

I didn't tried yet to bias with low voltage on the diode to see if would be simple to transform the circuit in a s-meter indicator from an agc voltage...


Have a nice week!