neon

34 Articles

NE-2 neon lamp illuminated side-by-side with non-illuminated

The Humble NE-2 Neon Lamp Has A New Trick

October 24, 2021 by 45 Comments

Ah, the humble neon lamp. The familiar warm orange glow has graced the decks of many a DIY timepiece, sometimes in a purely indicating duty, and sometimes forming a memory element in place of a more conventional semiconductor device. Capable of many other tricks such as the ability to protect RF circuits from HV transients, its negative resistance operating region after it illuminates gives us usable hysteresis which can used to form a switching element and the way the pair of electrodes are arranged give it the ability to indicate whether a voltage source is AC or DC. Now, due to some recent research by [Johan Carlsson] and the team at Princeton University, the humble NE-2 tube has a new trick up its sleeve: acoustic transduction.

The idea is not new at all, with some previous attempts at using electric discharge in a gas to detect audio, going back to the early part of last century, but those attempts either used atmospheric pressure air or other non-sealed devices that exhibited quite a lot of electrical noise as well as producing noxious gases. Not ideal.

Continue reading “The Humble NE-2 Neon Lamp Has A New Trick” →

The History Of Neon Lights

May 17, 2021 by 12 Comments

We always enjoy history videos from [The History Guy] but they don’t always cover technology history. When they do, though, we enjoy them twice as much as with the recent video he posted on the history of neon signs. Of course, as he points out, many neon lights don’t have actual neon in them — they use various noble gasses depending on the color you want. Sure, some have neon, but the name has stuck.

The back part of the video is more about the signs themselves, but the early portion talks about [William Ramsay], a Scot chemist who started extracting component gasses out of the atmosphere. The first one found was argon and then helium. Krypton and neon were not far behind. The other noble gas, Xenon, also fell to his experiments. He and another scientist won the Nobel for this work.

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The Art Of Nixies Hack Chat

October 26, 2020 by 4 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, October 28th at noon Pacific for The Art of Nixies Hack Chat with Dalibor Farný!

When they were invented in the 1950s, Nixie tubes were a huge leap forward in display technology. In the days before affordable LEDs made seven-segment displays a commodity, there were few alternatives to the charming glow of the clear and legible characters inside Nixies. Sturdy and reliable, the cold-cathode displays found their way into everything from scientific instruments to test equipment, and even some of the earliest computers and the equipment that formed the foundation of the Space Race sported the venerable tubes.

But time marches on, and a display that requires high voltage and special driver circuits isn’t long for a world where LEDs are cheap and easy to design with. Nixies fell from favor through the late 1960s and 1970s, to the point where new tubes were only being made by the Russians, until that supply dried up as well. Rediscovered by hobbyists for use in quirky clocks and other displays, any stock left over from the Nixie’s heyday are quickly being snapped up, putting the tubes on the fast track to unobtainium status.

That’s not to say that you can’t get brand new Nixie tubes, of course. Artisanal manufacturers like Dalibor Farný have taken the Nixie to a whole new level, with big, beautiful tubes that are handcrafted from the best materials. Reviving the somewhat lost art of Nixie manufacturing wasn’t easy, but the tubes that Dalibor makes in a castle in the Czech Republic now find their way into cool clocks and other builds around the world. He’ll join us on the Hack Chat to dive into the art and science of Nixies, and what’s going on with his mysterious “Project H”.

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 28 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones baffle you as much as us, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

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384 Neon Bulbs Become Attractive Display

July 23, 2020 by 11 Comments

Neon lights have inspired much prose over the years, with their attractive light output receiving glowing adulation. [Pierre Muth] is a big fan, and decided to spend lockdown creating something suitably pretty for his desk.

An 8×8 segment of the total panel. The display draws 40W at 5V with all pixels on at the same time.

The project consists of an 8×48 matrix display constructed out of INS-1 (ИНC-1) tubes. These tiny neon tubes are 6.5 mm in diameter, showing a bright orange dot of light when powered up. Requiring just 100 V and 0.5 mA to light, they’re a touch easier to drive than the famous Nixie.

[Pierre] decided to go all out, wishing to replicate the capabilities of smart LEDs like the WS2812. These contain a microcontroller built in to each LED, so [Pierre] would have to do the same. Each of the 384 neon tubes got its own bespoke PCB, containing a PIC16F15313 microcontroller, step up voltage circuitry, and a 6-pin connector. (Whoah!) When each bulb was soldered to its PCB, they were then plugged into a backplane. An ESP32 was then employed to drive the display as a whole.

Creating a display in this fashion takes a huge amount of work, with most of it being soldering the 384 individual bulb PCBs containing 11 components each. We have a lot of respect for [Pierre]’s work ethic to get this done during lockdown, and the final result is a gloriously retro neon matrix display. We’ve featured other neon matrixes recently, too. Video after the break. Continue reading “384 Neon Bulbs Become Attractive Display” →

Forget LED Matrices, How About Neon!

July 18, 2020 by 16 Comments

The low-cost LED has changed the way we approach lighting in all its forms, allowing complex addressable displays and all sorts of lighting goodness. But what did we do before we had cheap LED arrays? Use neon bulbs, perhaps? That’s exactly what [Manawyrm] has done with her chainable 8×8 neon matrix boards, taking 64 neon indicator bulbs and driving each from mains potential with an individual triac. A line of 74HC595s handle the data transfer, floating at mains voltage while their ESP32 driver is kept safe by a set of isolators.

A Twitter post shows it in action, but perhaps the most hackworthy praise should be reserved for the test rig. Unable to source a variable 230 V mains supply for testing the array, she applied a 50 Hz sine wave to an audio power amplifier, and replaced the speaker with the low voltage side of a mains transformer. It’s the sort of hack we can’t help liking.

Neons have generally featured here as novelties rather than as significant displays in their own right. They’re interesting components that everyone should have a play with, not least because the possess negative resistance, and can be made to oscillate.

Powering Neon With A Joule Thief

March 14, 2020 by 10 Comments

Joule thief are small, fun circuits which exploit a few characteristics of electronics and LEDs in order to “steal” virtually all of the energy stored in a battery. They can operate at incredibly small voltages and are fairly simple to make. With a few modifications to this basic circuit it’s possible to drive other things than an LED, though, like this joule thief that lights up a neon bulb.

The circuit from [suedbunker] aka [fuselage] is based on a pin from the Chaos Communication Camp which had a standard LED. To get a neon light to illuminate a few modifications to the standard joule thief are needed.

First, the windings have to be changed from 10:10 to 10:80 to increase the voltage across the bulb. Second, a transistor with slightly different characteristics was used than the original design. The capacitor was also replaced with a larger one.

While it might seem simple, the physics of how a joule thief works are anything but, and modifying the delicate circuit to work with something other than an LED is commendable. It also has a steampunk vibe which is a cool look even in projects that don’t involve steam at all.