Nixie Tubes!

Nixie Clock 2.0 has some pretty neat inspiration -- a plethora of nixie tubes. My older brother gave me a bunch of Russian IN-14 tubes. Take a look at this website, they have an insane number of tubes for sale. He got them on ebay still attached to a display rack:

Of course, I have already taken a few of them off of the rack (desoldering these was quite a chore). You can see on the far right that they come with a few neon lamps, which might be good for the colon between hours and minutes? All of these items take 170VDC and each of the nixie tubes has an anode and 12 cathodes (one for each of the digits, 0-9, and the last two are for decimals before or after the digits).

So, I think you can probably already get an idea of the issues associated with making a clock out of these tubes. They take very high voltage (although very low current) and require switching between each cathode in order to display any one of the digits. I also need 5V for switching using integrated circuits. I would like all of this to be in a compact design. Speaking of design... next post. See you then!

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