Nixie Tachometer

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHiYCZkAq5o]

A Nixie tachometer is new to us. We’ve seen tons of various displays, but not a tachometer. After having extensive annoyances with the factory ignition timing system in his totally awesome Holden Gemini, [Brett] installed a MegaJolt electronic ignition system. To top things off and add that extra bit of flair, he built a nixie tachometer to sit on his dash. Not only does it have the numeric read out, you can see a nixie “bar graph” on top as well. Skip to about 2:30 if you want to go right to the action. You can download the Arduino code from the forum post.

23 thoughts on “Nixie Tachometer

  1. wow, that is a coincidence. I was working on making an mpg gauge yesterday and was thinking it would be pretty cool to use nixie tubes so it was great to see it in an automotive application.

  2. LOL.., that guy could be me. I have my MegaSquirt fitted and I’m busy building my custom microchip LCD dashboard.., hehe. :D

    But nice one, I love those Nixie tubes! :)

  3. I read his (very long but worth the read) post that goes with this, and he said that it was built as a prototype for his Charger that is being rebuilt. So it’s only sitting on the Gemini’s dash temporarily while he fine tunes it.

  4. it seems to be a little slow on the update for the rpm. but i like it very much. same thing i want to do as well. could make for a nice tach/speedo combo meter.

  5. I have always had the idea to measure the total amount of engine revs instead of kilometers runned for maintenance purposes.
    You wouldnt need more than 5giga_revs to fit a 2million kilometers capable motor.
    Then instead of saying “at 5000 km u do oil change” u would say “do oil change at 15.5Mrevs”
    Just made an oversized estimation on hw to convert runned distance to total revs made by the engine.
    At 100km/h (~60mph) supposing the engine is running at 4000rpm then you do 240.000 revs for 100Km, from there u get less than 5Grevs for 2Million km (something rarelly will be done)

  6. would it be possible to do this on a modern vehicle by plugging into the OBD port and skipping the whole trigger wheel setup? I’ve always liked the look of retro displays.

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