Recent Posts

Never mind!
I know I clicked the link for the 6-digit code, but wound up uploading 4-digit code.
After verifying, I discovered my mistake. Uploading the 6-digit code, everything works fine!

I see it's been a LONG time since anyone has posted... hopefully this forum is still monitored.
I've got a pair of V3 Arduinix boards and a pair of UNO's. I have one 6-digit IN17 board.
I build these a few years ago, both tested and working, as was the IN17 board.
I just dragged everything out of mothballs, misplaced my UNO's, so ordered two more.
Flashed them with the code in the download section and connected everything.
Both Arduinix V3 boards and both Unos have the same display on the IN17 board.
The first digit has both the 1 & 2 turned on. The second digit is blank.
3rd digit has a 2 displayed (Not sure what the actual time is on the Arduino).
4th digit has at least 3 elements lit... this digit will change, sometimes displaying a '3' Clear as day, but looks like normally has 3, 4 and 5 lit.
5th digit is off. Haven't seen anything come on in this tube,
and 6th digit always has the '3' on. As this should be seconds, I would expect this to increment, or at least flick.
So my thoughts are that the issue is with the IN-17 PCB... since both V3 and Unos give me the same results.
I did try a second set of cables as well just to be sure... same result.
Any thoughts on this?? Am thinking about just picking up another IN-17 board and trying it.
It's curious that everything worked before going into storage, but doesn't now.
I've been unable to locate my original Arduinos, the two I am using now just showed up yesterday. I will concede there is a chance
that they both have some kind of identical issue that would cause this as well. Just looking for ideas on what I can check.

Thanks!

Beautiful!  Extremely nice workmanship, and use of wood.  Love how this looks.

As far as the real time clock, I've been picking at that problem now for a while as well.  And I am not a coder at all.  Wish I could show you the way to do it, as it'd be handy for me as well!

Hey guys, I'm somewhat new to nixies and I wanted some advice.

I'm driving (4) IN-8-2 nixies to display [hours] and [minutes] for a clock.  I'm using the V3 Driver Shield and the IN-17x6 V3 Tube Board.  This means I have the upper/lower seconds tubes are empty since i'm only driving 4 tubes total.

The IN-8-2 nixie is the type that has a decimal place. What I would like to do, is be able to animate the decimals.

Example: All 4 decimals light up in a cascading effect during one second -> each decimal lights up for 1/4 second, starting left to right, one after another.

I know the decimal needs to be limited with a 100k Ohm resistor due to its size.  I've thought about tying the decimals into one of the upper/lower [seconds] tube sockets that are open on my multiplexing board.  I'm not sure I'm thinking about this correctly though.


Any insights appreciated, thanks!

My Setup:



Multiplexing board:



IN-8-2 Pinout:

Greetings!

This is my first-time post and wanted to share my journey to building a Nixie clock.  The old time nostalgia is what brought me to build one of these but bottom line, they look COOL! 

Sorry for all the pictures but thought it would be a nice touch to see them and follow how I built and got to the end result.

One thing I am NOT is a coder and I use code graciously provided here at Arduinix http://www.robotpirate.com/forums/index.php?topic=298.0.  The one item I am struggling with is how to add a real time clock.  I have been looking at other's code but still can't quite wrap my head around it.  If anyone has any pointers or example code that I can use in my project it would be greatly appreciated.

I purchased several different kinds of nixie bulbs from a russian site and in this project I decided to use IN12 bulbs along with INS1 colon dots:







I purchase a bunch of pins for my needs and designed some sockets in Aspire Vectric to use with my hobby CNC machine and carved them out of wood.  The results turned out pretty good.  I did this with the purpose of being able to swap out any dead lamps in the future.  I went ahead and expoxied the pins into place:












Then came the first tedious part of wiring up the INS12 sockets, and properly adding heatshrink tubing. 





I had some oak and maple wood scraps lying around so I started of with the faceplate for the IN12 and INS1 sockets.  I messed up a bit on my CNC machine but because the plate gets the sockets inserted you don't notice a thing afterwards:





Here are all the sockets inserted.  I wanted a bit of a modern/techno look so I used M3 screws to affix all sockets and enclosure (to follow):







Next step was to wire it up to the Arduinix nice and neatly as I am dealing with some confined spaces when it comes to my enclosure:





Next came the enclosure.  Like I said I had some scrap oak and maple that I made it out of.  I used linseed oil and a spray of clear laquer and finally built it up with all the electronics inside.  The entire enclosure is sealed up with M3 screws:













It turned out quite nice but like I said I really need to get a real time clock involved since I am losing seonds and have to adjust it every once in a while.

Here is a video as well for your viewing pleasure:

https://youtu.be/WCTsQQ1ziMI

If you have any comments I would be more than glad to answer...and am hoping someone with better coding experience can help me out with the real time clock!

Cheers!

Thank you for sharing Maxime!

Hey all,

Since I wanted a minimalist build with no buttons on my clock, I decided to throw in a GPS to get the time sync from!

Short list of features:
* Time sync from GPS (Ublox NeoM6 module, but can be any)
* Timer interrupt to refresh/multiplex the tubes in a stable way.
* Fully non-blocking tube multiplexing (no delay()-functions)
* Uses the Time class, rather than millis() to keep track of time

Overall I think the code is cleaner and easier to read, compared to the original example code.

You can find the code on GitHub:
https://github.com/maximevince/arduinix_gps_timer_isr

Let me know if you like it, use it, ... or send me a pull request on GitHub if you improved the code!

Sorry guys, we had some broken links on the assembly section and the code section.  Those should be fixed now.  Please let me know if you find anything else that is broken on the website.

Thanks!

Brad

Has anyone tried using the IN-16 tubes? I'm working on mine now, but my first setup doesn't seem to work.  I think I just have the voltage set too low. I plan on getting back to it at some point this week if all goes well.

What voltage do you have it set to? What power supply are you using?  Make sure it's at least 650 milliamps or greater, one amp would be good. 

[digitalWrite]

digitalWrite is very slow and inefficient because it does error checking to make sure the user isn't trying something stupid, and because it has to decode which port and bit the requested pin is on.  And it makes your code much easier to read and understand.  Not necessarily bad, but in a multiplex routine, especially one called from an interrupt, speed counts.  The code gets executed hundreds of times a second.  If it's slow and inefficient, it leaves less processing power for other things.

A faster and more efficient way to control pins is the write directly to the control registers.  The disadvantages to this are the opposites of what I mentioned above.  You need to know what port and bit the pin is on.  You better get it right, because if you do it wrong, god only knows what could happen.  And it involves binary math and bit manipulation which can be rather confusing.

So here it is, a routine for controlling the output pins that writes directly to the ports.  It is literally 100 times faster (I benchmarked it!).

Code:

void setOutputs(byte bank, byte digit1, byte digit2) {

byte val1 = digit1 << 2; // Store number 1 in value 1, shift bits 2 places left (Move BCD value on last 4 bits to middle 4 bits)
byte val2 = digit2 << 6; // Put least 2 bits of Number 2 into upper 2 bits of Value 1
byte val3 = digit2 >> 2; // put highest 2 bits of Number 2 into lowest 2 bits of Value 2
byte val4 = (1 << (bank + 2));  // Choose which bit is needed to control the bank pins 10-13
// The bank selection is middle 4 bits, so the number needs to be shifted over by 2 bits

PORTD &= B00000011; // Turn pins 2-7 off
PORTB &= B11000000; // Turn pins 8-13 off
PORTD |= val1; // Set pins 2-5 to match BCD number held in middle 4 bits of Value 1
PORTD |= val2; // Set pins 6 & 7 to match highest 2 bits of value 1 which is lowest 2 bits of num2
PORTB |= val3; // Set pins 8 and 9 to lowest 2 bits of value 2 which is highest 2 bits of num2

PORTB |= val4; // Turn the appropriate pin (10-13) for the bank
}

This code is very specific to Arduino models Uno, Micro, Mini, Nano, and other Arduino clones that use the 328P chip.  To use it on a Mega, or some other type of microcontroller, you will need to change the ports and which bits get manipulated.

Wow, that's pretty awesome. 

It'd be nice to get a fresh codebase for the ArduiNIX one day, I've been looking into it, but I am not a coder, I am more on the art side and hardware side.

Very neat work!