Hands On With A Giant Nixie Tube

October 24, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 9 Comments

[Sam Battle] is no stranger to these pages, nor is his Museum is not Obsolete. The museum was recently gifted an enormous Nixie tube created by Dalibor Farný, a B-grade (well, faulty) unit that could not be used in any of their commissioned works but was perfectly fine for displaying in the museum’s retro display display. This thing is likely the largest Nixie tube still being manufactured; although we read that it’s probably not the largest ever made, it’s still awesome.

Every hacker should have their own museum.

It is fairly simple to use, like all Nixie tubes, provided you’re comfortable with relatively high DC voltages, albeit at a low current. They need a DC voltage because if you drive the thing with AC, both the selected cathode digit plate and the anode grid will glow, which is not what you need.

Anyway, [Sam] did what he does best, clamped the delicate tube in some 3D printed mounts and hooked up a driver made from stuff he scraped out of a bin in the workshop. Obviously, for someone deeply invested in ancient electromagnetic telephone equipment, a GPO (British General Post Office, now BT) uniselector was selected, manually advanced with an arcade-style push button via a relay. This relay also supplies the ~140 V for the common anode connection on the Nixie tube. The individual digit cathodes are grounded via the uniselector contacts. A typically ancient GPO-branded snubber capacitor prevents the relay contacts from arcing over and ruining the display unit. There isn’t much more to it, so if you’re in the Ramsgate, UK, area anytime soon, you can pop in and play with it for yourself.

Nixies are cool, we’ve covered Nixie projects for years, like this DIY project from ages ago. Bringing such things into the modern area is the current specialty of Dalibor Farný, with this nice video showing some of the workmanship involved. By the way — the eagle-eyed will have noticed that we covered this particular Nixie tube before, shown in the format of a large art installation. But it doesn’t hurt to get close up and play with it on the bench.\

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Symbolic Nixie Tubes Become Useful For Artistic Purposes

October 10, 2024 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

When it comes to Nixie tubes, the most common usage these days seems to be in clocks. That has people hunting for the numerical version of the tubes, which are usually paired with a couple of LEDs to make the colon in the middle of the clock. However, other Nixie tubes exist, like the IN-7, which has a whole bunch of neat symbols on it instead. [Joshua] decided to take these plentiful yet less-popular tubes and whip them up into a little art piece.

The IN-7 is a tube normally paired with the numerical IN-4 tube in instrumentation, where it displays unit symbols relevant to the number being displayed. It can display omega, +, M, pi, m, A, -, V, K, and ~.

[Joshua]’s build is simple enough. It spells the word “MAKE” in Nixie tubes as a neat sign for a makerspace. It uses “M” for Mega, “A” for Amps, “K” for Kilo for the first three letters. The fourth letter, “e”, is achieved by turning the tube 90 degrees, so the “m” for milli approximates that character. Two rows spelling “MAKE” (or “MAKe”) are assembled, powered via a small circuit which [Joshua] assembled on a custom-etched board using the toner transfer process. The electronics are all wrapped up in a neat laser-cut acrylic enclosure which was designed in Inkscape.

It’s a neat little project which makes good use of a Nixie tube that is, by and large, unloved. It also recalls us of a misspent youth, writing silly words on scientific calculators using only the available Greek characters. Meanwhile, if you’re working on your own Nixie builds, we’ve featured some neat drivers that you might just find valuable.

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Recreating A Popular Faux-Nixie Clock

September 13, 2024 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

There’s a good chance you’ve seen “Nixie clocks” on the Internet that replace the classic cold cathode tubes with similarly sized LCD panels. The hook is that the LCDs can show pictures and animations of Nixie tubes — or pretty much anything else for that matter — to recreate the look of the real thing, while being far cheaper and easier to produce. It’s a hack for sure, and that’s the way we like it.

[Trung Tran] liked the idea, but didn’t just want to buy a turn-key clock. So he’s decided to build his own version based on the ESP32-S3. The WiFi-enabled microcontroller syncs up to the latest time via NTP, then uses a PCF8563 real-time clock (RTC) module to keep from drifting too far off the mark. The six displays, which plug into the custom PCB backplane, can then show the appropriate digits for the time. Since they’re showing image files, you can use any sort of font or style you wish. Or you could show something else entirely — the demo video below shows off each panel running the Matrix “digital rain” effect.

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There’s Already A Nixie Addon For The 2024 Supercon Badge

September 12, 2024 by Lewin Day No comments

Nixie tubes are cool, and hackers like them. Perhaps for those reasons more than any other, [Kevin Santo Cappuccio] has developed a very particular Simple Add-On for the 2024 Hackaday Supercon badge.

The build began with a Burroughs 122P224 Nixie tube, and a HV8200 power supply. The latter component is key—it’s capable of turning voltages as low as 3 V into the 180V needed to power a Nixie. Then, an 18-position selector switch was pulled out of a resistance substitution box, and [Kevin] whipped up a basic DIY slip ring using some raw copper clad board.

Smoosh it all together, and what do you get? It’s a Nixie tube you can spin to change the number it displays. Useful? Hardly, unless you want to display varying glowing numbers to people at unreadable angles. Neat? Very. Just don’t touch any of the pins carrying 180 V, that’ll sting. Still, [Kevin] told us it’s pretty tucked away. “I’m totally comfortable touching it, but also would get sued into oblivion selling these on Amazon,” he says.

As [Kevin] notes in his post, the 2024 badge is all about the add-ons— and there’s actually a contest! We suspect [Kevin] will have a strong chance of taking out the Least Manufacturable title.

If you need more information about the Simple Add-On (SAO) interface, [Brian Benchoff] posted the V1.69bis standard on these very pages back in 2019. Apparently the S used to stand for something else. Video after the break.

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Random Number Generator Is A Blast From The Past

November 2, 2023 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

Hackers love random numbers, or more accurately, the pursuit of them. It turns out that computers are so good at following our exacting instructions that they are largely incapable of doing anything that would fit the strict definition of randomness — which has lead to some elaborate methods of generating the unexpected.

Admittedly, the SB42 Random Number Generator built by [Simon Boak] isn’t exactly something you’d be using for cryptography. The method used to generate the digits, a pair of 555 timers sending pulses through linear-feedback shift registers, would at best be considered pseudo-random. Plus the only way of getting the digits out of the machine is by extracting them from the Nixie tubes with your Mark I Eyeballs. But it absolutely excels at the secondary reason many hackers like to build their own randomness rigs — it looks awesome.

Externally, it absolutely nails the look of a piece of vintage DIY year. Down to the classic white-on-black label tape. But open up the hood, and you’re treated to a real rarity these days: wirewrap construction. In an era where you can get PCBs made and shipped to your door for literally pennies, [Simon] is out there keeping the old ways alive. It doesn’t just look the part either. Unlike most modern projects we see, there isn’t a multi-core microcontroller behind the scenes doing all the work, it’s logic gates all the way down.

This isn’t the first random-ish number generator that we’ve seen use shift registers. But if you’re looking for something that might actually pass some randomness checks, and don’t mind working with something a bit spicy, you could check out some of the previous devices we’ve covered that used radioactive decay as an entropy source.

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Four large nixie tubes showing the number 2

[Dalibor Farný]’s Enormous Nixies Light Up Contemporary Art Museum

September 16, 2023 by Robin Kearey 30 Comments

Nixie tubes come in many shapes and sizes, but in only one color: the warm orange glow that makes them so desirable. They don’t usually come in large numbers, either: a typical clock has four or six; a frequency counter perhaps eight or nine. But some projects go bigger – a lot bigger in [Dalibor Farný]’s case. He built an art installation featuring more than a hundred jumbo-sized nixie tubes that make an entire wall glow orange.

This project is the brainchild of renowned installation artist [Alfredo Jaar], who was invited to create an exhibition at the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art. Its title, Umashimenkana, means “we shall bring forth new life” and refers to a poem describing the birth of a child amid the suffering and despair following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Visitors to the exhibit experience a dark room where they see a wall of orange numbers count down to zero and erupt into a waterfall of falling zeroes.

Nixie tube expert [Dalibor] was the go-to person to implement such an installation – after all, he’s one of very few people making his own tubes. But even he had to invest a lot of time and effort into scaling them up to the required 150 mm diameter, with 135 mm tall characters. We covered his efforts towards what was then known as the H-tube project two years ago, and we’re happy to report that all of the problems that plagued his efforts at the time have since been solved.

One of the major issues was keeping the front of the tubes intact during manufacture. Often, [Dalibor] and his colleagues would finish sealing up a tube, only for the front to pop out due to stress build-up in the glass. A thorough heating of the entire surface followed by a slow cooling down turned out to be the trick to evening out the stress. All this heat then caused oxidation of the cathodes, necessitating a continuous flow of inert gas into the tube during manufacture. Those cathodes already had to be made stronger than usual to stop them from flexing, and the backplate light enough to keep everything shock resistant. The list goes on.

After ironing out these quirks, as well as countless others, [Dalibor] was finally able to set up a small-scale production line in a new workshop to get the required 121 tubes, plus spares, ready for shipment to Japan. The team then assembled the project on-site, together with museum staff and the artist himself. The end result looks stunning, as you can see in the excellent video embedded below. We imagine it looks even better in real life – if you want to experience that, you have until October 15th.

You might remember [Dalibor] from his excellent video on nixie clock fault analysis – which we hope won’t be necessary for Umashimenkana. He might be able to make your favorite shape into a nixie tube, too. Thanks for the tip, [Jaac]!

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Conductive Gel Has Potential

July 18, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 24 Comments

There are some technologies first imagined in the Star Trek universe have already come to exist in the modern day. Communicators, tablet computers, and computer voice recognition are nearly as good as seen in the future, and other things like replicators and universal translators are well on their way. Star Trek: Voyager introduced a somewhat ignored piece of futuristic technology, the bio-neural gel pack. Supposedly, the use of an organic gel improved the computer processing power on the starship. This wasn’t explored too much on the series, but [Tom] is nonetheless taking the first steps to recreating this futuristic technology by building circuitry using conductive gel.

[Tom]’s circuitry relies on the fact that salts in a solution can conduct electricity, so in theory filling a pipe or tube with a saline solution should function similarly to a wire. He’s also using xanthan gum to increase viscosity. While the gel mixture doesn’t have quite the conductivity of copper, with a slight increase in the supplied voltage to the circuit it’s easily able to be used to light LEDs. Unlike copper, however, these conductive gel-filled tubes have some unique properties. For example, filling a portion of the tube with conductive gel and the rest with non-conductive mineral oil and pushing and pulling the mixture through the tube allows the gel to move around and engage various parts of a circuit in a way that a simple copper wire wouldn’t be able to do.

In this build specifically, [Tom] is using a long tube with a number of leads inserted into it, each of which correspond to a number on a nixie tube. By moving the conductive gel, surrounded by mineral oil, back and forth through the tube at precise intervals each of the numbers on the nixie tube can be selected for. It’s not yet quite as good as the computer imagined in Voyager but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless, not unlike this working replica of a communicator badge.

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