30-Year-Old Rechargeable Flashlight with Gallium Arsenide LED & Simple Circuit Reverse-Engineered
Pretty novel old design – with some slick-looking nickel-cadmium cells that are still in incredibly good shape given their age.
Watch:
A bit of electronic treasure from the past. I bought this unique little rechargeable flashlight from a long gone (and much missed) shop in Glasgow called RME. The RME stood for Radio, Mechanical and Electrical, and it was a surplus and salvage store based in Howard Street in Glasgow, Scotland.
What made this little flashlight appealing was that it was rechargeable directly from the 240V mains supply with a standard figure-8 style mains connector. I was very intrigued by how they had managed to fit a charging circuit inside such a small light. keep in mind that this was from the 1980’s so it seemed a remarkable electronic feat.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
