> I patched up the power supply, just like every time, leaved the > breadboard alone and didn't touch anything. Should have worked as > before. I switched on the uC.
I darkly suspect you were overrunning your nixies, but with the short duty cycle, it wasn't obvious. When the processor paused in the bootloader, the very fast cycle stopped, and one nixie got full power supply current through itself and its transistor (since there was no current limiting anode resistor), and the transistor smoked. > So now I need to ether try to reburn the bootloader and see if that's > the case, or get a new uC and wait for it for another month. If not, > something else went off. > Now please go ahead and spit on me for using an arduino. Hopefully it's one of the socketed Arduinos, in which case you can pop in another microcontroller chip and be good to go again. I use Arduinos to drive nixies (there's even a shield for it), nothing wrong with that approach, and you don't have to buy a separate programmer. Sadly, I suspect your hardware design needed more fine tuning before being hooked to a microcontroller. If I were you, I'd put back the anode resistor and try manually switching a single digit by running +5V and ground into the switch transistor via its current limiting resistor. Get your current and brightness dialed in that way, then try controlling it with something else. If it suddenly gets dim then, you have the information that it worked fine beforehand, and you know where to look. Why do you have to wait an entire month for another microcontroller? - John -- 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.
