Recent Posts

Hello,
     I'm building clock with four IN-4 and INS-1 Neon Tube colons. I have everything wired but i'm having some issues with the MOSFET heating up and an issue where voltage is leaking to cathodes. For example, anode2 is shared by a nixie tube (cathode1) and the INS-1 colon (cathode1). When i fire the colon, some voltage is bleeding through to the nixie tube.

    I'm wondering if i damaged the SN74141's. I didnt' have any sockets on hand and impatiently solder'd them directly.

    FYI, here's a link to my Driver software. Still a work in progress. If the C++ pattern ends up being too slow i'll re-write it in C-style code:
https://github.com/waldo1979/WitchingHour

-Waldo

Can you tell me a bit about your setup?

Do the tube and colon share a common anode as well?
Are they both resistored on the anode?

Try different anode channel per unit. And use the multiplexing to gate them.

Below is a table describing my tube wiring. The nixies have a 10k resistor on the anodes and the neons are connected in series with a 47k resistor. When I illuminate the neon tubes (colon) and leave it on the Nixie->hour2 has a ghost. Using a different anodes have the same effect. if i illuminate in a loop with a delay the ghosting isnt visible.

The wiring to the tubes is AWG 28 (http://amzn.com/B007R9SQQM), which might be a little small. The tubes are socketed using sockets from Germany i bought off ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/331114980365

When the neon tube is illuminated, if i take a voltage reading from the cathode pins which are supposed to be in the off/low state and ground there is 140~ volts. I checked for shorts but didn't see any. Seems like the problem lies within the shift registers.

Anode1	Nixie->Hour1
Anode2	Nixie->Hour2, Neon Tubes
Anode3	Nixie->minute1
Anode4	Nixie->minute2
Cathode0	Nixie->hour1, Nixie->hour2
Cathode1	Nixie->Minute1, Nixie->Minute2, Neon Tubes

Hello,
     I'm building clock with four IN-4 and INS-1 Neon Tube colons. I have everything wired but i'm having some issues with the MOSFET heating up and an issue where voltage is leaking to cathodes. For example, anode2 is shared by a nixie tube (cathode1) and the INS-1 colon (cathode1). When i fire the colon, some voltage is bleeding through to the nixie tube.

    I'm wondering if i damaged the SN74141's. I didnt' have any sockets on hand and impatiently solder'd them directly.

    FYI, here's a link to my Driver software. Still a work in progress. If the C++ pattern ends up being too slow i'll re-write it in C-style code:
https://github.com/waldo1979/WitchingHour

-Waldo

Can you tell me a bit about your setup?

Do the tube and colon share a common anode as well?
Are they both resistored on the anode?

Try different anode channel per unit. And use the multiplexing to gate them.

Hello,
     I'm building clock with four IN-4 and INS-1 Neon Tube colons. I have everything wired but i'm having some issues with the MOSFET heating up and an issue where voltage is leaking to cathodes. For example, anode2 is shared by a nixie tube (cathode1) and the INS-1 colon (cathode1). When i fire the colon, some voltage is bleeding through to the nixie tube.

    I'm wondering if i damaged the SN74141's. I didnt' have any sockets on hand and impatiently solder'd them directly.

    FYI, here's a link to my Driver software. Still a work in progress. If the C++ pattern ends up being too slow i'll re-write it in C-style code:
https://github.com/waldo1979/WitchingHour

-Waldo

Thanks!!

You can read the associated post.
https://plus.google.com/113825690086131396297/posts/3YxUHktmzoH

You can check out my code (shared on this forum) to see how I've used a pushbutton and a rotary encoder for time/mode set inputs using the Arduino's analog pins. My code also solves the delay problem in getting inputs that the sample code would have. It doesn't keep time, though, as I used an external RTC. Hope it helps.

one suggestion is to use an IR receiver and integrate the ir receive arduino code (lots of examples).  once you go thru a 'learn', you can have access to a whole set of buttons and only have to have 1 hole in your chassis (for the ir) and only 1 line on the arduino needed to get you lots of buttons.

I don't know how the IR interrupt code will play with software based muxing, though.

you can use port expanders (i2c) and define them as inputs (with pullups to 5v) and to sense them you do an i2c (wire.h) read.

if there are local pins on the arduino, you can use them, too, of course.

Greetings All,
Well, I assembled my ArduiNIX, and all is working well.  One thing that never entered my mind is how do I set the time with this setup.  I am very very new when it comes to the Arduino and the ArduiNIX, so please bear with me.

I have assembled Nixie clocks from kits in the past, but those all had the control buttons indicated on the control board.

My question to you guys is, how do I add control buttons to this setup.  I have read everything I could find on the board here, but nothing is clicking in my head.  If anyone has a link or some info to share, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

Ron

one of my hobbies is DIY audio.  here is a headphone amp with a nixie volume control display!



its arduino based (uses my own arduino board called LCDuino).  this time, no lcd, but nixies.

I was going to use an arduinix board (or 2) but decided to try making my own from perf for this proto build.  I'm not muxing the nixies and so it didn't make sense to use the 'nix board (avoiding muxing was due, partly, to this being an audio system and I didn't want extra noise to come in that didn't need to be there).  here's the underside of the board:



there are 4 nixies, driven by the customary russian 74141 chips via BCD, but to supply the 16 bits needed I used 2 8-bit port expanders (i2c), pcf8574.  I use them in other projects and they were easy to apply here.  the nixies sit on a board with the 74141 and 8574 chips.  a small dc/dc converter was bought from ebay and is located in the chassis, away from the audio wiring.

there is a learning IR remote control and the volume knob is a motorized pot; if you use the IR remote to change volume, the pot moves

the volume control is a relay and resistor (r2r) attenuator we call the delta-1.  it gives accurate half db steps from 0 down to -127.5db (shown on the display).

the amp tech is from AMB (called 'beta 22') and its an all discrete bipolar+fet+mosfet system.  the power supply to the amp is also fully discrete and designed by AMB.  (I designed the LCDuino and delta1).

Ahhh... I hope that is not the case.  I will move on with the Arduinix, IN-18, blue dot (unfortunately) on the digit 1 combination for my first clock build.  Maybe I can get smarter and do a version 2 that is better.  Can you help point me to sources of information?

Very nice!  I checked out your images... any chance you might like to tell a DIY story about those?