Nixie Clock 2.0

So, it's time to make a nixie clock! To those who don't know what nixie tubes are, take a look at the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube. My older brother gave me a bunch of these over the past year. They come in a number of types and sizes, but they all have a similar orange-red glow to them. They were used as an early display technology, but now people mostly use them for making retro displays such as clocks.

I have already made a nixie clock. A picture of the clock is shown below (thanks Lance for taking the B&W film picture of me). I learned a great deal about electronics from the project, but I used an Arduino (user-friendly programmable input/output device) for the project and purchased a kit for the power source. It does have a lot of features, like two alarms, temperature reading (shown below in degrees celsius), 12-hour/24-hour format, sleep setting (where it turns the tubes off at night), and an auxiliary input which does nothing right now. Still, I wanted to do everything from scratch and not rely on convenient technology.

So, this blog will now be dedicated to updating the progress of making the nixie tube clock completely from scratch, but without the fancy extras. I will start with a 9VDC power supply and make all of the components from either available or purchased resistors, integrated circuits, capacitors, transistors, etc. The next post will explain what my design will be and I will follow with updates on everything from the power supply to controlling the tubes and constructing the actual clock.

I might also show how I made the first nixie clock (Nixie 1.0). I'm pretty proud of it.

Enjoy!

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