Nixietach II is a feature-rich tachomoter [Jeff LaBundy] built for his 1971 Ford LTD. It displays RPM with an error rate of only 0.03 RPM at 1,000 RPM
The latest iteration of a long-running project, [Jeff] approached it with three goals: the tachometer had to be self-contained and easy to install, the enclosure had to be of reasonable size, and it had to include new and exciting features over the first two versions.
The finished project consists of an enclosure mounted under the dash with a sensor box in the engine bay connected to the ignition coil. He can also flip a switch and the Nixietach serves as a dwell sensor able to measure the cam’s angle of rotation during which the ignition system’s contact points are closed. The dash-mounted display consists of those awesome Soviet nixie tubes with a lovely screen-printed case. Its reverse has a USB plug for datalogging and a programming interface.
Hackaday has published some great car projects recently, like this chess set built from car parts and a 90-degree gearbox harvested from a wrecked car.
This is an absolutely gorgeous piece of work and an equally amazing amount of documentation on his site. I’m nearly speechless with dreams of making one myself. Would be nice to see more pictures of it installed in the car itself tho (Such a classy ride too!)
My hat is off to you Mr LaBundy, stunning project!
I wonder how long those nixies will last in a car.
I was wondering the same thing. Also, how readable would that actually be while driving? There’s a reason most automotive tachometers use analog readouts.
There are cars out there that rev so hard and fast (fast as in: RPM rise very fast) that an “analog” dash driven by a stepper is too slow to keep up. I think the Lexus LFA is one of those.
So use a fixed-width pulse from a monostable multivibrator to drive an analog meter.
If that really is a problem, nixies can be replaced with other, far more durable, display technologies.
If that really were a problem, would you build this anyway, just because it uses nixie tubes?
Would you consider this if it used vacuum-fluorescent tubes/displays?
Vibration+Nixie tubes=sadness, unless he has something clever up his sleeve
He put it in a car that rides like a waterbed.
In Australia we call it a landbarge.
In the USofA we call it a land yacht. ‘Detroit’ has, for the most part, stopped building land yachts because ‘Detroit’, for the most part, doesn’t exist any more because it built land yachts.