Vacuum tubes are awesome, and Nixies are even better. Numitrons are the new hotness, but there’s one type of tube out there that’s better than all the rest. It’s the ИГГ1-64/64M. This is a panel of tubes in a 64 by 64 grid, some with just green dots, some with green and orange, and even a red, green, blue 64 by 64 pixel matrix. They’re either phosphors or gas-filled tubes, but this is the king of all tube-based displays. Not even the RGB CRTs in a Jumbotron can match the absurdity of this tube array.
[Muth] got his hands on a few of these panels, and finally he’s displaying images on them. It’s an amazing project that involved finding the documentation, translating it, driving the tubes with 360 Volts, and figuring out a way to drive 128 inputs from just a few microcontroller pins.
First, the power supply. These panels require about 360 Volts to light up. This is significantly higher than what would usually be found in a Nixie clock or other normal tube-based display. That’s no problem, because a careful reading of the datasheet revealed a circuit that brings a normal-ish 180 Volt Nixie power supply up to the proper voltage. To drive these pixels, [Muth] settled on a rather large PIC18F microcontroller with eight tri-state buffers. The microcontroller takes data over a serial port and scans through the entire framebuffer. All in all, there are eight driver boards, 736 components, and 160 wires connecting everything together. It’s a lot of work, but now [Muth] has a 64×64 display that’s green and orange.
You can check out a ‘pixel dust’ demo of this display in action below.
Would plasma be considered a tube type display? In a few years they’ll be the new HaD hotness.
this panel is insane and awesome.
Gorgeous. Kinda like the plasma displays in 80/90s pinball machines, but the extra color just makes it that much better.
We need a gas tube version of a neopixel.
Apple ][, is that you?
>>Vacuum tubes are awesome
Why?
High voltages, vacuum, glasswork. That’s why.
although we’re going to need a cnc vacuum tube manufacturing setup. Maybe like dirtypcbs, dirtytubes
Can the RGB version do color mixing or do they just to full red, green, or blue per dot?
I have the same sun microsystems mouse pad
me too XD