My take on a Nixie Clock

[mrspicman]

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!

[nonentity]

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!