Tom Cousins of DOAYEE made this DIY nixie tube clock:
Below is the schematic for the project, as you can see I’m using 6 IN12 nixie tubes, each with it’s own 74141 nixie tube driver. These drivers are great! They simply connect directly to the nixies and display whatever 4 bit binary number you give them (if you give them anything above 9 they blank the display – hence why I use the number 10 in my code to blank the nixies). Because they take in a simple 4 bit binary number, I can hook them directly up to some shift registers to drive them, in my case I used 3 74HC595 shift registers (available everywhere), because they can be “daisy chained” together, meaning in the code I only have to write one 24 bit binary number and it will display all 6 numbers on the nixies. Though in reality I split them up into pairs and write three 8 bit binary numbers.
Check out the video after the break.