To 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?
