Nixie Tube Projects
Here is a description of my first Nixie Clock project.
I built an electronic compass that uses a Basic
Stamp and three Nixie tubes as the
display. This was my first working Nixie tube device. My Nixie
Compass is now featured on Parallax
Hobby Applications
Earlier Work:
I recently purchased a bunch of IN-12 Nixie tubes, tube
sockets, and 74141 controller chips from a guy in Ukraine through
eBay. They have really cool Cyrillic markings on them. The first
project I plan to complete is a Nixie clock that might look something
like this. I insist on building the whole thing without
a kit. I read an article about using the seven segment output of a
regular desk clock to drive the binary input of Nixie controller chips
at this web site. That might be a good way to go since
then the clock, alarms, etc. are already worked out. I ordered an EPROM
eraser and programmer so that I can implement this conversion on a chip.
My first step was to configure a single Nixie tube using an electronics
project board form Radio Shack. I built the anode supply from a
rectifier plugged directly in to 120V AC from the wall with a filter
capacitor across the output and an 18k current limiting resistor in
series. A less elegant power supply may never have been built, but it
did work, and it cost almost nothing. I wired the controller chip up to
the tube inputs, and configured four manual switches to control the BCD
input.
Bringing the tube to life was very encouraging. I think the rest will
be straightforward. I will update this web site as I progress through
the project.
Next I wrote a very simple program for a Basic Stamp to step through
the binary inputs of the 74141 at half second intervals. I made no
attempt at elegance in the source code,
but the program works fine. Here is a video of the result.