The Art of Making a Nixie Tube
Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)
Posts: 23,514
A friend of mine sent me this link:
Totally captivating! Enjoy!
-Phil
Totally captivating! Enjoy!
-Phil
Comments
Very well worth watching.
http://www.decadecounter.com/vta/tubepage.php?item=18
It was used in the "Programmer" which allowed the user to preset the number of copies required on Nixie tubes, and then displayed the count as copies were produced. It had the advantage of being able to drive Nixies directly.
I guess I was a bit late to the scene, not building my first tube circuits till the early nineteen seventies. By the time I got to building my Nixie clock in 1971/2 it was a TTL world.
Learn something new everyday...
I was the UK National Workshops Planning Engineer. One of my maintenance engineers designed and built himself a digital clock, using Beam-X tubes and Nixies.
Agree. I had to make a second cup of coffee and watch the whole thing.
There are so many technologies involved with that process! A lot of high end machines, low end torches, and stuff in between.
That lab must have cost a fortune!
Still, kudos for seeing a vision through to the end!
Jim
Far from sad it's a celebration of what people can do if they want to.
Far from limited and pedestrian, Nixie tubes are a beautiful and now rare thing. Works of art.
Pedestrian today is the LED, or your flat panel LCD screen. Good luck trying to make one of those.
Yeah, as a business proposition it may be doomed. But was that the motivation ?
For whatever reason, Nixie tubes never grabbed me. If you're going to go to that much bother, why not make a klystron, a TWT, a gyrotron, a betatron, or even a lowly x-ray tube?
If it is specifically display capability you seek, a multiplexed array of <you name it> light sources looks and works great! Or build a 7-segment filament display. Or roll your own vacuum fluorescent display.
As a kid I put together a clock that used large Numitrons. It was - and still is - an outstanding look.
You see, I built a digital clock in 1970 at age 14. Using these new fangled TTL logic chips. I had only built analog circuits with transistors and tubes before that. Of course it used Nixie tubes. That was a time when nobody had ever seen a digital clock.
Those Nixie tubes gave a happy glow for years after. Making sure I got to lectures in uni until 1979.
Wish I knew what happened to that project. It got lost somewhere along the line.
Mind you. I still love LEDs. I saw my first LED about the 1970 as well. My friend brought one to school and showed how it lit up when connected to a battery one way around but not the other. WTF, you mean that thing is a diode that lights up?!
A Nixie isn't pretending to be something it isn't. It's a gas discharge tube, and gas discharge is an inherently beautiful thing as the neon sign industry will agree, and it's using gas discharge to show us a number. Simple and direct. It can't be some other color, it can't show us a symbol that isn't formed into the tube when it is made. It is what it is. Nixies were around before transistors and when vacuum tubes were much more primitive than they got before we mostly abandoned them. My own Nixie alarm clock started out as an industrial scale display around 1974, and today the same drivers and tubes show me the time with a little help from a P8X32A. It was designed by engineers let loose by NASA in the wake of the Apollo program, so I'm pretty sure it will last awhile even though it is already forty years old.
And it's art. It's OK for that to be manual. A little bit of his soul goes into each tube, distinct, prized by the person who ends up with it.
1) I make this thing I would like you to buy.
2) Here is a video showing exactly how I do it. After all, you are more likely to buy it if you know I made it well.
3) You can do it yourself if you like.
Wouldn't it be great if Intel and such would do that?
http://www.daliborfarny.com/r-z568m-nixie-tube/
Knowing that none of us could not afford the cost of a foundry.
No, seriously.
-Phil