Jkx@home » neon

Sodium sucks / I still perfer Neon signs !

admin — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:11:36 +0000

I’m currently a bit off of my desk right now, cause I need to study for a english test. But, while wasting some time, I came thought some mailing list posts.. and found a really interesting collections of light bulbs..

This stuffs are really nice, you can find the whole collection on the antique light bulbcollector.

This remind me a bit the mad scientist light.

I know a little shop here in my town, that sells this kind of light bulbs (the Neon ones). The mad scientist bulbs doesn’t exist here in France, I’m unable to find one.

Ok, now I know where I should go for my next free time.

Enjoy light of the town ?

Nixie clock: “Buy the nixies”

admin — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 13:52:03 +0000

I decided to build a nixie clock, a long time ago. I finished this stuff, and I decided to write some articles on the way to achieve this.

So this is the first of a short serie of article, on my nixie clock. Beside I want people to be able to reproduce this for the own purpose, I choose to use some really common stuff, and cheap too.

The first step, is to buy the nixies and the nixies drivers. Every month, the nixie price tend to be higher .. so..

I bought some nixies on eBay. This is a good place to find some, at a decent price. Jan have some at good price too. Take care that a lot of website, buy some tubes on eBay and sell them after. (with a very large price increase..)

So, first choose the type and size of your nixie, Dieter website is the best place to look at the nixie specs. After look at the corresponding prices on eBay. Some users reports receiving broken tubes, but if you choose a serious vendor, you won’t have this kind of problem.

Here is a couple of pics, on the first nixies I bought. It’s some IN-8-2. They have a good price, a good shape, and quite good size. Bigger nixies cost a lot to much money for me.

The next post, will be about powering and testing a nixie with a generic microcontroller and a simple power supply.

Feel free to ask questions Bye bye..

Nixie clock at home ?

admin — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 22:04:42 +0000

Ok, I’ve been off for a while right now. In fact, I’m playing with electronic’s stuff a lot. I just decided to build a nixie clock (for the fun).

For those wondering what is a nixie. Take a look at Wikipedia

And a nixie clock look like this:

There is a couple of hard stuffs to fix for that:

find the nixies (ouch prices)
build a custom power supply. (~170 VDC.. not really easy without external transformator)
find a way to drive the nixies (BCD drivers with 250VDC are hard to find)
find a way to have a working clock. Crystals aren’t really stable with temperature.. perhaps a DCF77 module is the right way
Build the stuff without too much pain, and too much money.

That sound funny ..so let’s give it a try ;)