I spoke to a technical guy at Supertex in the UK a few months back. He said that they were working on a 5V version, though I haven't seen or heard any further. There are other reports that these devices will actually run fine from 5V, rather than 12V, logic levels, though I haven't tried this myself. Might be worth experimenting.
I have used HV9308's which are designed for 5V logic inputs, but only switch 80-90V tops, so you have to be careful. That's OK if you've got (say) 180V supply, then there will never be less than 120V dropped through the nixie, leaving the HV9308 just to switch the last 60V or so to ground. It works. Two of these 32 bitters in cascade drive six nixies unmultiplexed, but because I also like to transition/fade the display, required quite a bit of work to optimise the software to get the refresh rate I needed. It basically means shuffling out alternating patterns of 64 bits, 200 times a second! Power consumption of the HV9308s is not a problem at all - less than 10 mA from Vcc. *** On May 29, 1:16 am, Robert Sexton <[email protected]> wrote: > A reall hungry device might consume 30mA @ 1.8v. My biggest problem with > the supertex device is the strange logic levels. It looks like the > economics is a wash. The lower chip count is an improvement, but you'll > also need to add a 12v rail to your device for level shifting. That may > undo the simplicity advantages of the supertex solution -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/neonixie-l?hl=en-GB.
