Nixie Tube Clock: Guest Blog Post
November 30, 2013To wrap up my month of posting every day, I’m happy to present a guest post from my husband!
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Jill asked me to contribute to her blog with a post today. I’m more of a maker than an art/craft or baker-person, so I’ll share one of my geeky projects with you:
I designed and made a Nixie tube clock. Nixie tubes are from the bygone era of vacuum tubes, but there’s been a resurgence of interest in them over the past decade-how retro! Many of us have never seen one of these tubes actually functioning. Each tube can display a digit from 0-9 based on which combination of connections on the bottom of the tube are connected to a high-voltage supply. So, I found some tubes and decided I’d turn them into a clock. I designed a small 8-bit computer to run the clock and put it all together in a half-open assembly (guys like to see the guts of things).
Here’s a picture of the finished clock:
Ryan’s nixie clock
I designed and debugged the circuit boards, built them, programmed the computer and put it all together. I have many more details here, including the circuit board designs, and the source code for the software that runs the clock. Enjoy! How’s that for something different?
Very cool clock. And it’s nice to hear from Ryan.
This is so cool! My husband is a techie, too, he would love this!
I don’t even know what half of this means, but it looks really impressive!