By Paul Parry, Founder of Bad Dog Designs
As long as I can remember, electronics has been a big part of my life. As a child, I dismantled my toys to see how they worked. This was much to the annoyance of my parents, so they started to get me old radios and televisions to take apart instead.
I remember Nixie tubes from about the age of 5 when I dismantled a calculator, but I had no idea what they were back then. Skip ahead 35 years. I’m a manager sitting in an office staring vacantly at a huge spreadsheet when, for whatever reason, I remember these strange glass tubes with numbers from the calculator.
Google soon told me they were called Nixie tubes, and that people now used them to make clocks. “I can do that,” I thought. Skip ahead another 10 years. I now have a business that has made and sold over 3,000 Nixie clocks worldwide. A lot of these clocks are made from old or repurposed items. I even ended up as a regular maker on the BBC’s “Money for Nothing” program, upcycling all kinds of things into clocks as reusing things is still very popular.
I do like to reuse as much as I can, and the thought occurred to me about the possibility of reusing electronic components. Like most electronic engineers, I have drawers of obsolete or left-over-project components that I knew would never get used, so—just for a bit of fun—I soldered a couple together to see if I could create a recognisable picture.
I posted my effort on social media. The response was overwhelming, and then the requests started to flood in! Just regular people at first, asking if I could do a representation of their cat, or of a bunch of flowers, or… all sorts of things. Every time I created a new piece, I’d put it online, and more requests would come in.
Then I started getting electronics companies asking if I could recreate their logos out of electronic components. First, I did one for Keysight and then for RS Components in the UK, and so it went on. Next, I approached a local art gallery and asked if they would be interested in having a couple of my pictures on display. Well, that went down a treat, and now a bunch of galleries have my Component Art on display!
Creating this art is a fiddly process. Having four hands would be extremely helpful. The process starts by my drawing an outline of what I want to make. It doesn’t matter if it’s an animal or a spacecraft, so long as the key features are well-defined, and the proportions are correct.
I then use 1mm diameter silver-plated jewellers wire to trace the outline of the shape. As this wire doesn’t want to stay where you’ve put it, I use lots of little pieces of tape to hold it in place until the outline is complete. I then solder the end to the beginning, resulting in a framework I can populate.
There is no real method as to how I fit the components, I try to keep a good mix of resistors, capacitors, and semiconductors. This is a labor-intensive task. Some of the pictures can take days to create. I’m currently working on a map of the world. I just completed North America. This is still a work in progress but will be awesome once complete!
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