Workshop Update for August 21st, 2012
With about a month until Maker Faire New York we’re scrambling to get things together. We’ve contacted some shops about showing up for a tour today.
A few bugs in the IR Toy code were isolated. Squashing will continue on Friday.
We’re also considering building a huge nixie thing with all the tubes sitting around. Could be fun to take to Maker Faire and keep in the workshop.
Routed the Smoke Tester v1 board.
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Comments
can you make a nixie display of tweets from twitter? hihi
oops are nixies capable of displaying letters??ive only seen numbers..Nixies to display the fibonacci sequence then!
I have a few with some letters, but only scientific notations. Most tubes only have 10 or 11 elements, so I think you’d be stuck with a limited alphabet (eg 4 letter word clocks).
15 segment nixies do exist:
http://www.akh.se/tubes/htm/b7971.htm
Unfortunally hard to find and quite expensive, last time I saw them available on ebay they cost over $70 each… Alphanumberic VFD tubes are a lot easier to find.
Ah, the famous B7971, they are really nice and quite expensive nowadays. Luckily I bought a batch of them many years ago. I also have a box full of the flat ZM1350′s but they don’t look as spectacular at the 7971…
http://www.jogis-roehrenbude.de/Roehren-Geschichtliches/Nixie/ZM1350.htm
Ahh how nice. I was thinking of getting some to play around with, but it’s not readily available here in Singapore. Looks like I’m going to have to ship them from the US.
I think the lesson of my big box of nixies is be cautious what you get :) There’s a tendency to buy and hoard them. I’ve had this collection for years and only did one or two small projects (learned a ton though!).
The goal of this project is to give them all some use, if only artistic or random :D
“Buy and hoard them” – you don’t say? :-)
This is my current nixie collection: http://s15.postimage.org/7ig0y6n4r/Nixie_Collection.jpg
Top left to right: 10 pcs alphanumeric ZM1350, 5 boxes @ 20 each of the tiny IN17, 8 pcs of the huge B7971.
Left middle: A box with about 100 random nixies with 16 pcs of the red-tinted ZM2010
Bottom left to right: 25 pcs of the beautiful & large IN-18, and then a bunch of random front-view tubes in different sizes, 10 pcs IN-1
But I want more! and more! :-)
Hoarding…Yup. Nice to know that I’m not alone in my insanity. Here’s . To be fair, there are some VFDs and Dekatrons in there as well. I’ve salvaged most of my nixies (side view in the plastic flip box, end view in the neighboring cardboard box) from old equipment that I’ve acquired from swap meets, which can be a lot cheaper than resorting to eBay. The three assemblies on the left are display modules from retired (and non-functional) HP 5340A frequency counters, ready for conversion into clocks…
Most nixes are sold by sellers from the former Soviet Union and also shipped from there. There are a mix of good and bad sellers but most of them seem to have formed a cartel to keep the prices up. There is a guy in Germany that is really trustworthy, somewhat more expensive than the ebay “Soviets” but you know that you will get tested and well packaged items.
Ask Jan First is the name of the shop: http://www.die-wuestens.de/eindex.htm
If you’re interested in Nixies you should also join the Neonixie-group at Google.
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/neonixie-l
Thanks for the useful info Mats!
If only we could buy nixie tubes as easily from Taobao…
I can help you design the power supply!
Normally I would totally build one up, but since time is short I’ve ordered a hefty transformer to handle all the tubes.
I’m wondering if you pass customs with that..
At least you need to pay for extra weight :D
There are a couple of very nicely-designed power supplies sold by members of the neonixie-l group. I’ve used both of these supplies in clock designs and have been very happy with them. Standard disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with either of these guys, just a happy customer.
Let’s see if I can actually post a link this time without messing it up…
First, John Taylor has a couple of models available (handy comparison chart here). The very first nixie clock that I built was one of John’s kits (the “TI Appnote” kit, all 7400 series logic)
Neonixie-l user threeneurons makes a nice dual HV supply that’s handy for nixie clocks which also contain a dekatron or two – it’s usually available on eBay via seller “tortugascuba”, sample link here.
Threeneuron’s blog is a wonderful reference for working with nixies, dekatrons, and other obscure HV technologies.
I always knew Nixies would look good – last night along with 50+ others I saw some really nice ones and fantastic 8x8x8 LED cube. They were the hit of the night, although the other speakers were a close 2nd :)
See http://xinchejian.com/2012/08/22/wednesday-meetup-free-xinchejian-7-9pm-22082012/ and aguegu.net/