This bulky package is a Nixie tube wristwatch. We still like [Woz’s] watch better but this one has a few nice tricks of its own. Notably, there aren’t any buttons to set the time. Instead, a large magnet is used to actuate a magnetic switch inside the body. Speaking of enclosures, the case is aluminum and the face plate is polycarbonate but looks like it’s been vacuum formed. Check out the clip after the break.
[John Sarik] keeps cranking out new ideas for his digital Sudoku project. This time he’s using 7-segment displays for each digit. The game play works the same as the Nixie Tube version, but this makes things quite a bit easier to build. The board above is one of the nine modules that make up the game. They each use three shift registers to drive the nine 7-segment displays. With the help of five resistors all of the multiplexing is addressed via the serial input on those chips.
[Aleksander Zawada] makes vacuum tubes in his home. One of the most challenging builds he has taken on is to produce a working Nixie tube. He describes the process in a PDF (Internet Archive, updated 2024), covering his success and failure. It seems the hardest part is to get the tube filled with the proper gas, at the proper pressure, and firmly seal it. In the end he managed to make a tube with three digits (0, 1, and 2) that worked for about 700 hours before burning out.
[Aleksander] joins [Jeri Ellsworth] on the short list of hackers who can pull off extreme industrial manufacturing at home. Kudos.
[Thanks Duncan]
We’re always happy to receive a tour of the guts that make things work. [John Sarik] posted several pictures and descriptions of the hardware that makes up his Nixie Sudoku build. The modular design uses professionally made circuit boards which greatly improve the durability of a large set of circuits such as this.
The design draws on good ideas from similar hardware. The Nixie Duo kit from Ogi Lumen allows tubes to be mounted on top of driver boards with cascading shift registers for control of up to 8 tubes. The ArduiNIX shield makes the high voltages needed for Nixies easy to control with an Arduino. No, [John] didn’t just order these kits and plug them into each other. He designed his own boards to suit his needs. Each driver board can control 9 tubes in a 3×3 grid, all on one PCB. His high voltage board can supply enough juice for the whole system which is tied together with a single Arduino board.
His writeup is quite interesting so do take a look. He also filmed a walk through video which we’ve embedded after the break. It clears up some questions, such as showing the use of a blinking decimal point to indicate the current cursor position.
[John Sarik] asked himself why a project should only have a handful of Nixie tubes? Without a good answer to his query he went ahead and built this Sudoku game using 81 Nixie tubes. There’s not much of a description for his work but here’s how we think things go: The two knobs manipulate a cursor, one for rows and the other for columns, while the keypad is used to input your chosen number. The system is Arduino based and [John’s] linked to his code, schematic, and board layout files on Dropbox. He’s even written a recursive solver which can be seen in the video after the break. Would it be inappropriate to bring this to work and whip it out during some down time?
Nixie Voltmeter Clock
[Gmglickman] built a clock out of an old digital voltmeter. The Fluke 8300A came out in 1969 and is featured in their 60 years of innovation slideshow. What makes it a cool clock? The Voltmeter’s display is made up of Nixie tubes.
Easy optical encoder wheel generator
If you need to print out encoder wheels for your project there is an online tool you can use. It has almost any setting you would want to make a rotary encoder wheel.The black wheel can be used with old mouse parts and the checkered wheel with an optical sensor. [Thanks Bluewraith]
New CD without the CD
1-bit Symphony is a newly released album. It come in a CD jewel case but there’s no CD included. That’s because they’ve built a circuit to playback their music via a headphone jack. We didn’t see any info on what microcontroller was used, but we love the cleanliness of the design. This apparently isn’t the first time the artist has released an album like this either.[Thanks Juan]
Making a standard SIM work with the iPad
[Tony Million] used a standard SIM to reduce the monthly cost of using broadband on the iPad. This is the exact opposite of using the iPad SIM in an iPhone and requires that you cut down your standard SIM quite a lot. [Tony] did this because he imported his iPad to the UK from the United States and using AT&T wasn’t an option for him. [Thanks David]
16TB NAS is a thing of beauty
The Black Dwarf is a sixteen terabyte network attached storage device that looks more like a display counter for high-end hard drives. We’d usually think of this as a closet or basement dweller, but an item this gorgeously crafted deserves a place of honor in your home or office. Documenting the entire process was as complex as the build itself. We like seeing the time-lapse version. [Thanks Howard via Engadget]
This little art piece might be just the thing to add that mad scientist look to your room. It’s called the Coachella lamp and it makes use of several throwback display devices. At the top an Argon discharge lamp puts out ultraviolet light. Protruding from each of the four sides you can see a set of decatrons. There’s also four Nixie tube bar graphs standing tall from each corner of the base. The final touch is the colored glow in the center which is provided by LEDs. We’ve embedded some video of the device after the break.
The lamp is powered by a wall outlet and controlled with an Arduino. We’ve seen deactrons used as timing devices and would love to see some clock functionality added to the lamp. Trying to decipher the time from the different Nixie displays would put this up there with some of those other hard to read timepieces.
