The Plan

Ok, so Nixie 2.0 needs to be different from all of the other nixie clocks out there. I'm tired of seeing the same thing all the time. People make neat boxes and enclosures, but they sometimes lack that coolness factor.

After thinking about it for a while, I thought it would be neat to have modular units for the tens hours, hours, tens minutes, and minutes. I admit, I'm getting this idea from a ThinkGeek product, but I don't think the final product will look anything like their Matrix Cube clock. I made a simple sketch, which is shown below:

Yeah, it's crude, but I hope you get the general idea. There will be a base which contains all of the business-end things--the power supply, timer circuits, and buttons. Each of the nixie tubes will be contained in a very small box which will be wired to the base. All of the boxes for each of the tubes will be able to nest into a depression in the base, or they can be moved around at will. I wonder if I need to put something heavy at the bottom to make sure they don't tip over. I have thought about maybe even using a monitor cable as the method of supplying the wires to the tubes, allowing me to unplug each nixie tube box if I want to exchange it, or it may allow me to put the nixie tubes in confined areas, hiding the base.

The point here is that I want the base to be as skinny as possible, so I will try to compact all of the components into as small of an area as possible. I really have no idea about the location of the buttons, the style and material of the box, or how I might add the neon lamps. All I know now is that I need to make as small of a power supply as possible, on the cheap, from scratch.

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