Nixie Tubes Adorn Steampunk Solar Power Meter

January 10, 2016 by Dan Maloney 44 Comments

The appeal of adding Nixie tube displays to a project seems to know no end. First it was Nixie clocks, now it’s Nixie power meters, with the latest addition being this Nixie-Steampunk hybrid solar power monitor.

We’re suckers for a project with a vintage look, and this one pushes all the buttons. Built on commission for a solar power company CEO’s office, [Paul Parry]’s build is based on a Depression-era Metropolitan-Vickers combined voltmeter and ammeter. The huge meters with mirrored scales and the rich wood of the case – our guess is that it’s mahogany – made a great starting point, and after some careful hole drilling, nine IN-18 Nixies were sprouting from the case. A strip of RGB LEDs below decks added the requisite backlighting of the envelopes, and a Raspberry Pi was enlisted to interpret data from the company’s solar farm and drive the tubes and the meters. The project was capped off with a new finish on the case and a couple of fancy brass plaques.

[Paul] sent us the tip for his build after seeing the last power meter we covered, and we have to say they’re both great looking and functional projects. Keep the Nixie projects coming!

Nixie Tube Energy Meter Dresses Up Front Hall

January 4, 2016 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

When you move into a new house, there’s always something that needs fixing up. A bit of paint and some new drapes may help freshen up the place and put your mark on it, but things like exposed wiring and a very utilitarian looking electrical panel in your front hall are altogether different. Unwilling to live with the mess, [John Whittington] decided to enclose his utility panel and add a Nixie tube IoT watt meter to dress things up while monitoring energy usage.

Looking at the “before” pictures on [John]’s blog, we can see why he’d want to invest the effort – not exactly an attractive way to greet guests at the front door. A simple wooden box to replace the previous cover would have sufficed, but why pass up the opportunity to add value? [John] opted for a Nixie tube display to complement the glass of the electric meter. The Nixie modules were a bit on the pricey side, though, so with only a pair of tubes to work with, [John] came up with a clever system to indicate the scale of the display. We doubt he’ll ever see megawatt-level instantaneous power draw, but the meter is also capable of totalling energy use, and as a bonus an ESP-8266 gives lets him stream data to the web.

We’ve featured tons of Nixie projects before – everything from clocks to cufflinks. We have to agree that [John]’s Nixie project turned out great, and it’s sure to be a conversation starter with arriving guests.

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Nixie Tube Clock Isn’t Just A Clock

September 19, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

With everything that’s been happening in the news lately, [Jarek] decided it was finally time to finish up his latest project. The Internet of Things has been exploding with projects lately, and this clock that also alerts him of the weather is the latest addition. Plus it has the added bonus of using everybody’s favorite display: nixie tubes!

Of course, using high voltage for the nixies can be terror-inducing, but [Jarek] found a power supply on eBay that was able to power the tubes for not too much money. The controller is an HV5622 which can control up to 32 nixies while only using up three pins on a microcontroller which is pretty handy if you have a limited number of output pins.

The clock also has another device hidden behind all of the wires for the tubes: an ESP8266 to give it network connectivity. The clock connects to the Internet and searches for the nine-hour weather forecast. There are a few nixie lights behind the display which illuminate cutouts in the case to indicate a few different weather statuses. It’s a very polished project, and since it’s enclosed in a nice case it’s not likely to be mistaken for any movie props. Of course, other nixie projects don’t have the same comforting look.

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Unusual Nixie Tubes Lead To Unique Clock

July 14, 2015 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

There’s no doubting the appeal of Nixie tubes. The play of the orange plasma around the cathodes through the mesh anode and onto the glass envelope can be enchanting, and the stacking of the symbols in the tube gives a depth to the display that is unlike any other technology. So when [Ian] found a set of six tubes on eBay at a fire sale price, he couldn’t resist picking them up and incorporating them into a unique but difficult to read Nixie clock.

It turns out the set of tubes [Ian] ordered were more likely destined for a test instrument than a clock, displaying symbols such a “Hz”, “V” and “Ω”. Initially disappointed with his seemingly useless purchase, [Ian] put his buyer’s remorse aside and built his clock anyway. Laser-cut acrylic, blue LEDs under the tube for a glow effect, a battery-backed RTC talking to an ATmega328, and the appropriate high-voltage section lead to a good-looking and functional clock, even if [Ian] himself needs a cross-reference chart to read the time. You’ll be able to figure out at the whole character set after watching the video after the break; spoiler alert: sensibly enough, Ω maps to 0.

We’ve seen lots of Nixie projects before, but few as unique as [Ian]’s clock.

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[Mike] Illuminates Us On LED Filaments

April 18, 2015 by Adam Fabio 76 Comments

LED filaments started showing up in light bulbs a few months back. [Mike] discovered that the strips are available in bulk from ebay and Alibaba. Always keen to work with new LED technologies, [Mike] ordered a few for experimenting and posted the results on his [mikeselectricstuff] YouTube channel. He also added the information to his website.

The filaments consist of 28 LEDs connected in series. The blue LEDs are covered by the typical yellow phosphors to make them glow white. It’s interesting to note that some of the filaments use a removable silicone sleeve to hold the phosphor coating, while others are coated with a resin material. The LEDs themselves are bare dies mounted to a metal strip and joined by bond wires. The entire strip can be bent, but be careful, or you’ll break the fragile bond wires.

The strips do require a fair bit of voltage to operate. The entire strip runs best at around 75 and 10~15 mA, while putting out about 1 Watt of light. [Mike] tested a strip to destruction by pumping 40 mA through it. Predictably the strip went out when the bond wires melted. The surprising part was that the strip blinked back on as the wires cooled and re-connected. The strip and wires were working as a temperature controlled switch, similar to the bimetalic strip found in old fashioned “twinkling” incandescent Christmas lights.

Not satisfied with simple tests, [Mike] went on to build a clock using the filaments as elements of a seven segment display. Inspired by numitron and minitron displays, [Mike] built a single sided PCB which held the clock circuit on the bottom and the LED filaments on top. The filaments are spaced off the board by tall wire wrap sockets, which proved to be difficult to keep from shorting out. Texas Instruments TPIC6B595 chips were used to control the LED filaments. Logically the chip functions the same as a 75LS595, which means it can be driven with a SPI bus. The open drain outputs can handle 50 volts – which makes them perfect for this application. The clock is tremendously bright, but there is still a bit of room for improvement. [Mike] notes that the phosphor of un-powered filaments tend to glow a bit due to light absorbed from nearby illuminated filaments. He’s experimenting with color filters to reduce this effect. At full power though, [Mike] says this clock would easily be daylight readable, and we don’t doubt it!

[Mike’s] final test was a bit whimsical – he built a cube entirely from the LED filaments. The cube looks awesome, but we can’t wait to see who will move things into the 4th dimension and build a tesseract!

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DIY Turntable In A Beautiful Wooden Case

March 9, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 44 Comments

Old timers who have been around for the last 40 years or so have been fortunate enough to have lived through several audio reproduction technologies – Vinyl Records, Cassette Tapes, Laser Disks and CD-ROM’s. Most will also swear that analog, especially vinyl records, sounded the best. And when it comes to amplifiers, nothing comes close to the richness of vacuum tubes.

[MCumic10] had a long time desire to build his own HiFi turntable encased in a nice wooden housing, with the electronics embedded inside. When he chanced upon an old and battered turntable whose mechanism barely worked, he decided to plunge right in to his pet project. The result, at the end of many long months of painstaking work, is a stunning, beautiful, wooden turntable. Especially since in his own words, “I didn’t have any experience in electronics or woodworking before I started this project so it took me many long months in learning analyzing and frustration. I burned some electronic parts few times and made them from the beginning.”

The build is a mix of some off the shelf modules that he bought off eBay and other sources, and some other modules that he built himself. He’s divided the build in to several bite sized chunks to make it easy to follow. The interesting parts are the 6N3 Valve Preamplifier (the main amplifier is solid-state), the motorized Remote Volume Control Input kit, and the Nixie tube channel indicator. And of course the layered, plywood casing. By his own reckoning, this was the toughest and longest part of his build, requiring a fairly large amount of elbow grease to get it finished. He hasn’t yet measured how much it tips the scales, but it sure looks very heavy. The end result is quite nice, especially for someone who didn’t have much experience building such stuff.

Thanks [irish] for sending in this tip.

Hacklet 37 – Nixie Projects

March 6, 2015 by Adam Fabio 18 Comments

Nothing quite beats the warm glow of a tube. What better way to enjoy that glow than to use it to read numbers? Nixie tubes were created by Haydu Brothers Laboratories, and popularized by Burroughs Corp in 1955. The name comes from NIX I – or “Numeric Indicator eXperimental No. 1”. By the mid 1970’s, seven segment LED’s were becoming popular and low-cost alternatives to Nixies, but they didn’t have the same appeal. Nixie tubes were manufactured all the way into the 1990’s. There’s just something about that tube glow that hackers, makers, and humans in general love. This week’s Hacklet highlights the best Nixie (and Nixie inspired) projects on Hackaday.io!

We start with [Sascha Grant] and Nixie Temperature Display. [Sascha] mixed an Arduino, a Dallas DS18B20 Temperature sensor, and three IN-12A Nixie tubes to create a simple three digit temperature display. We really love the understated laser-cut black acrylic case. An Arduino Pro Micro reads the Dallas 1-wire sensor and converts the temperature to BCD. High voltage duties are handled by a modular HV power supply which bumps 9V up to the required 170V. Controlling the Nixie tubes themselves are the classic K155ID1 BCD to decimal converter chips – a favorite for clock builders.

Next up is [Christoph] with Reading Datasheets and Driving Nixie Tubes. Chips like the K155ID1, and the 74141 make driving Nixie tubes easy. They convert Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) to discrete outputs to drive the cathodes of the Nixie. More importantly, the output drivers of this chip are designed to handle the high voltages involved in driving Nixie tubes. These chips aren’t manufactured anymore though, and are becoming rare. [Christoph] used more common parts. His final drive transistor is a MPSA42 high voltage NPN unit. Driving the MPSA42’s is a 74HC595 style shift register. [Christoph] used a somewhat exotic Texas Instruments TPIC6B595 with FET outputs, but any shift register should work here. The project runs on a Stellaris Launchpad, so it should be Arduino compatible code.

[Davedarko] has the fixietube clock. Fixietube isn’t exactly a Nixie. It’s an LED based display inspired by Nixie tubes. Modern amber LEDs aren’t quite the same as classic Nixies, but they get pretty darn close. [Dave] designed a PCB with a 3×5 matrix of LEDs to display digits. A few blue LEDs add a bit of ambient light. The LEDs are driven with a 74HC595 shift register. The entire assembly mounts inside a tiny glass jam jar, giving it the effect of being a vacuum tube. The results speak for themselves – fixietubes certainly aren’t Nixies, but they look pretty darn good. Add a nice 3D printed case, and you’ve got a great project which is safe for anyone to build.

Finally, we have [Johnny.drazzi] with his Open Nixie Clock Display. [Johnny] has been working on Open Nixie for a few years. The goal is to create a Nixie based clock display which can be driven over the SPI bus. So far, [Johnny] has 6 Russian IN-12 tubes glowing with the help of the ubiquitous K155ID1 BCD to decimal converter. The colons of the clock are created with two INS-1 neon indicators. [Johnny] spends a lot of time analyzing the characteristics of a Nixie tube – including the strike voltage, and steady state current. If you’re interested in building a Nixie circuit yourself, his research is well worth a read!

Not satisfied? Want more Nixie goodness? Check out our Nixie tube project list!

That’s about all the time we have for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!