| Year | Status |
|---|---|
| 2021 | Completed |
My first project
This was my first serious project that I made. I found out about nixie tubes from an anime called “Steins;Gate”. Ever since finding about those lamps I fell in love with their aesthetic. I wanted to make something with them, so I decided to make a clock.
The brains
For it’s brains I picked out a Raspberry Pi Zero W and I wrote the code in Python. It is a bit overkill to use a Raspberry Pi for just a clock, but again it was my first project, so you will have to excuse me. I did later down the line found some other programs to run continuously on the Pi that I will write about later.
Nixie drivers
For the nixie drivers I used exixe-14 nixie tube driver modules. They’re pretty great for projects like these, but in the future I would make the drivers myself or use cheaper ones.
High voltage
To power nixie tubes you need 170 volts. Since I wanted to power my clock with 5 volts through USB I needed a high voltage power supply that would step up my 5 volts to 170 volts. I chose to use NCH8200HV power converter. It worked fantastic and produced no noise.
Connecting everything together
I’ll repeat myself one more time and say that it was my first project. Because of that I wasn’t yet familiar with making PCBs, so I connected everything a bit strangely. I cut out two pieces of perfboard and connected them together, effectively creating what could be considered a 4-layer circuit board. When I soldered everything together, 3D printed a case and put everything together.
Making the tubes last longer
These tubes have a tendency to wither out if not properly used. If a number is glowing very long it damages the other ones. To negate this effect and make the tubes last longer I wrote a simple function to cycle all the number every 20 minutes for a few minutes.
Putting Raspberry’s power to good use
As I have said before the Raspberry is a bit too much for just a clock. Because of that I have found ways to make good use of that excess power. One of them is hosting Pi-hole, a network-wide ad blocker. Another thing you can do is host a discord bot or a few at the same time.
Pictures
