Rocky_Motor
New Member
For my engineering class we had to make a clock. It's a lot more difficult than it sounds. Most everyone used boring old 7-segment displays. I decided I wanted something cooler and to make my clock using Nixie Tubes! It has been quite the journey. A lot of time and money has been spent getting this up and running through various mishaps and mistakes. I ended up creating 7 threads in my endavours. In the end most of it was scrapped and replaced with an arduino which made life wonderful 
There she is. While I feel that there may be a few adjustments to make, the clock runs great. I think the tubes may be a little to bright. I did measure it to be 2.5mA which is the nominal current though so it should be no problem. It's a little hard to make out the numbers just because the camera was exposing weirdly.
I also included some blue LED's underneath!
To make this project, I ended up coding an arduino to count in binary. That ended up using 19 pins with just 1 left over to add a button to set the time. The arduino sends its outputs to 74141 chips that decode the 4 bit binary to 0-9. Thus the nixie tubes light up.
I then created a box. It's not that good but I was in a pinch of time to get it done for class. I may make a new one in the future but this one works well. It has a black top but it is off right now.
It uses 9 volts and 12 volt power supplies. I could have definately gotten away with just one 9 volt power supply or one 12 volt PS but I chose to use the two because I was being a bit anal.
I power the nixie tubes using a 180 volt power supply from allspectrum.com. I tried building my own but I think the mosfet was broken. It only ended up doubling my voltage so I went ahead and got the kit from that website.
So what do you think? It aint the best thing in the world, but for my first ever electrical engineer project (probably my last school wise sadly, may not be continuing with the major) I think it is pretty good.
I may have forgot a few things to talk about, hopefully not.
Questions, comments, concerns?
There she is. While I feel that there may be a few adjustments to make, the clock runs great. I think the tubes may be a little to bright. I did measure it to be 2.5mA which is the nominal current though so it should be no problem. It's a little hard to make out the numbers just because the camera was exposing weirdly.
I also included some blue LED's underneath!
To make this project, I ended up coding an arduino to count in binary. That ended up using 19 pins with just 1 left over to add a button to set the time. The arduino sends its outputs to 74141 chips that decode the 4 bit binary to 0-9. Thus the nixie tubes light up.
I then created a box. It's not that good but I was in a pinch of time to get it done for class. I may make a new one in the future but this one works well. It has a black top but it is off right now.
It uses 9 volts and 12 volt power supplies. I could have definately gotten away with just one 9 volt power supply or one 12 volt PS but I chose to use the two because I was being a bit anal.
I power the nixie tubes using a 180 volt power supply from allspectrum.com. I tried building my own but I think the mosfet was broken. It only ended up doubling my voltage so I went ahead and got the kit from that website.
So what do you think? It aint the best thing in the world, but for my first ever electrical engineer project (probably my last school wise sadly, may not be continuing with the major) I think it is pretty good.
I may have forgot a few things to talk about, hopefully not.
Questions, comments, concerns?
