Reader [Bradley] sent in his ArduiNIX project, an Arduino shield designed for driving nixie tubes. The shield allows the Arduino to drive and multiplex nixie tubes without any additional hardware. These antique-looking displays are commonly hacked into clocks. It takes 9 volts from a wall wart and steps it up to over 200V in order to drive the displays. The shield is capable of multiplexing up to 80 individual elements. He has example code for driving a 6-digit display and a clock on his site. He is selling kits and completed shields too.

Related: Victorian nixie tube clock

[thanks Bradley!]

[John Clarke Mills] has pieced together this tastefully done Victorian style Nixie tube clock. He picked up a kit from nixietube.com and an old clock off of eBay. A little bit of elbow grease and solder later, he has this very nice mantle piece. Well done.

For those unfamiliar, a Nixie tube is used for displaying numbers or letters. They are a glass tube, filled with a gas (usually neon). There are metal structures inside that glow when electricity is applied. First widely used in the early sixties, Nixies were pretty much replaced when LED technology got cheap.

We noticed that nixietube.com was down, so you might also check TubeClock.com and neonixie.com for kits.

If you’re looking for more inspiration, read about the Nixie counter clock, Russian vfd, and the 6502 driven Nixie clock all previously on Hack a Day.

[via Retro Thing]