pimp up grandma's clock with Nixie tubes

[Sjoertdb]

Those are very nice tubes!

[DaJMasta]

I love it. Keep it up. I want to see how those new nixies work out. I am thinking about starting a small tube company using basically the sales model they are using.

Good luck. From what I've seen, you should plan a year full time or so to develop and practice the art of tube making, and to buy a lot of expensive gear. This is how Dalibor Farny makes them:

That is a very cool video.

[NivagSwerdna]

I do a two way multiplex at 100Hz and it looks fine to humans.  (Looks a bit flickery when taking photo/video on my phone due to beat of frame rates).

I have six digits with each having two decimal points and also I have space for some colons so I use 2x HV5812s

(I hope you plan a stepper motor for the manual hands and GPS time sync)

Lovely tubes

[FrankBuss]

I updated the Hackaday.io project. You can find a description of the VHDL code for the PWM generator and the Arduino sketch, which might be useful if someone wants to do own experiments, now all in a github repository:

https://hackaday.io/project/20474-antique-nixie-clock/log/56827-pwm-test

If you like an follow the project on hackaday.io, you'll get always the latest news about it But I'll post updates here, too.

[FrankBuss]

I created a breakout board for the AB1815 RTC clock chip to test it, but I can just mount this on a vero board for the clock later as well. I like the 3D view of KiCad:



KiCad files are in the repository.

[FrankBuss]

I got the PCBs from OSH Park for my breakout board for the RTC chip:





With some solder paste and my heatgun I managed to solder the QFN IC and the other two parts:



A quick test with my STM32 discovery board, generating some SPI signals shows that it is ticking, when I read the seconds register:



Note the jump from 0x19 to 0x20. This is because it counts in BCD mode.

[Gary350z]

I am curious. Say I make a nixie clock, nixie tubes are relatively rare and expensive, how long will nixie tubes last when running 24 hours a day?

[NivagSwerdna]

I am curious. Say I make a nixie clock, nixie tubes are relatively rare and expensive, how long will nixie tubes last when running 24 hours a day?

Most commercial Nixie designs have the option to turn off the tubes at night or when no body is near (PIR sensor etc)... but I think the answer is between zero and 50000hrs... but googling will give you a better answer. (It is recommended to turn all digits on in turn every now and again to avoid crud on the unused elements... that's something I badly need to add to my clock firmware)