> Were on a fixed income and I was figuring I could get some advice > about suppliers from this board. I need a supplier that will let me > buy $20-30 worth of parts at a time until I have all the parts > together.
A cheap way to get the high-voltage power supply is to hook a pair of small step-down transformers back-to-back. You can rectify the low-voltage loop between them for your logic supply, too. It should be possible to round up a couple of 12 volt or so "wall wart" supplies for little or no money. Try to find one that outputs AC, then you can leave it intact to feed your project. The other one can be any transformer based supply, just remove it from its housing, and hook its transformer up in reverse to supply your high voltage. If it's a DC supply, you can grab its diode(s) (and filter capacitor, and regulator, if it has these parts) to get started on your logic supply. With just the back-to-back transformers, along with a diode capable of holding off a few hundred volts, a current limiting resistor, and ideally a small high-voltage capacitor, you can light up a nixie (they'll work on pulsing DC, but most of use use some sort of filter capacitor in a finished design). You can steal suitable high voltage diodes and even a filter capacitor from an ordinary PC power supply. Those too can often be had cheap or free. Come to think of it, most line-operated switching power supplies can donate these parts, and these days, a lot of wall warts are switchers instead of transformer based supplies, so if you happen to grab one of those, you still have some useful parts. - John KG4L -- 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.
