Think about the requirements for your project before you start working on a design. :) Is power consumption a concern? 4 B7971's will draw a lot of current if direct-driven. Do you want the tubes as bright as they can be? direct-drive gives you lots of brightness. Is tube-life a concern? This is trickier, but it seems to be fairly well agreed that multiplexing extends tube life (25% duty cycle means 4x more effective lifetime) UNLESS you overdrive them to make them brighter (closer to the brightness of direct driven) in which case, you shave life according to how much you overdrive the tubes.
I think that your plan to develop the software against the common anode 16-segment LED's is a great one. Once you have the code working, you can come back and start figuring out how to plug your arduino into some nixie driving IC's instead of LED driving IC's. If you really think ahead, those IC's that David mentions below will probably drive LED's as well as nixies (I've never used those chips.. check your datasheets). As far as multiplexing each segment in the nixie... Why? I think that this is needless complexity without any clear value. -Adam On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 3:46 PM, David Forbes <[email protected]> wrote: > On 5/15/2012 3:21 PM, Matthew wrote: > >> >> 2. I'm planning to code the LED version as closely as possible to the >> final >> tube version, so will be multiplexing them. Looking at Ray Ws design, it >> looks like the digits are multiplexed, with only one driven at a time... >> could/should/shouldn't I multiplex the individual segments too? Not sure >> if >> the tubes would be bright enough? >> >> > Matthew, > > I have an early FLW board, which was not multiplexed. I think it would be > a better choice to do than multiplexing, for both tube life and code > simplicity. > > I'd recommend that you use common DIP-packaged parts for the board. The > 74HC595 8-bit serial shift register and SN75468 100V 7-way high voltage > driver are low-cost, readily available parts that would be easy to use and > program. > > I'd also recommend that you go with John Taylor's tiny power supply module > unless you care to get into power supply building, in which case Nick > DeSmith's design is an excellent choice. > > Using the above parts will ensure that you spend most of your time working > on software rather than hardware. > > -- > David Forbes, Tucson, AZ > > > -- > 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 neonixie-l+unsubscribe@** > googlegroups.com <neonixie-l%[email protected]>. > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** > group/neonixie-l?hl=en-GB<http://groups.google.com/group/neonixie-l?hl=en-GB> > . > > -- 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.
