Although New York City is not renowned as an electronics trade center, there are a few good electronics surplus stores in the city. One is Argo Electronics, 393 Canal St. This store is a remnant of the Canal street junk trade. They mostly deal in used and surplus consumer electronics, but they have a wall of various electronics stuff. The merchandise is rather hit-or-miss, but I've found some very nice pieces while searching through the bins: the 12v motors for my spinning signs and visible motors, and the tiny gearhead motors for my mousebot. I stop by a couple times a year to see what they've got and am often pleasently surprised.
I recently discovered Leeds Radio in Williamsburg, a refugee from Radio Row, displaced by the World Trade Center. The Leeds Radio web site gives only a hint of the store contents -- a large garage stuffed floor to ceiling with all manner of electronic odds and ends. Being a radio electronics store, a large fraction of their inventory is devoted to vacuum tubes. But there is much more - switches, knobs, piles of CRTs, oscilloscopes, giant power resistors, high-voltage supplies, solenoid-powered bells, etc. They even have a stock of nixie tubes and sockets, which were in excellent condition and offered at a moderate price (but duplicated what I already had in stock). I get the impression that they replenish their stock by purchasing or scavanging discarded equipment, as the owner and his assistant seemed to be picking useful parts out of an old chassis when I arrived. The price list on the web site is a little high, but I found that they are willing to bargain if you show up in person and pick out your own parts (saving the owner the hassle of tracking down the list price of all the parts in the basket). Below are some of the more interesting bits that I picked up.
The key part of this toy is the meter with the scale safe-danger-explosive (see here). Its a gag waiting to happen. I put it in a box with a distance sensor (the rectangular thing with the two black eyes) and a large solenoid. If the distance sensor doesn't register an object, the dial on the meter makes an unbiased random walk with reflecting barriers at the bottom of the scale and at the safe/danger transition (I use the PWM output of an ATMEGA48 fed through a 1K resistor to drive the scale). If the distance sensor does pick up a person standing in front of the box, the random walk is biased upwards and the upper reflecting barrier removed. When the meter hits the top end of the scale, I active the solenoid a few times (violently shaking the box), then turn off the display for a few seconds. The row of LEDs blink randomly to attract the eye and make a victim wonder what the box is doing. Its actually pretty effective. Below are the insides, showing the giant solenoid.
I also found some huge neon bulbs. There is an INS-1 on the right, for comparison.
Some green neon bulbs:
A large and very smooth DPDT switch:
And some electro-mechanical displays. These are small solenoids, which move a white rod back and forth, with a viewport at one end. Here is a front view (showing off (left) and on (right)).
and a top view. These displays are about 1 inch long.
