So, right now I'm looking at taking John's advice and starting with a solderless board and some LED's. I see most of these basic parts at RadioShack. Is this a good place to get parts? Any better places? Also, where is a good place to get the 74141 drivers? And the 5V power supply? Any common items I can repurpose?
On the topic of drivers, is the 74141 pretty universal for all Nixie tubes? I read somewhere about the "blue spot" problem being caused by using the wrong driver. Sorry if these are pretty simple questions! On Wednesday, 15 August 2012 13:22:37 UTC-5, nixiebunny wrote: > > On 8/15/2012 11:18 AM, John Rehwinkel wrote: > >> A couple of years ago just for fun I started from > >> scratch and designed a nixie clock circuit from the > >> ground up (pun intended), that uses (6) 74HC160 counters. > > > > How do you do the divide-by-6 digits? Just use gates to reset the > counters > > when they get to 6? I'm more used to using 7492 counters for that task, > so > > I'm curious. > > > > - John > > > > Synchronous counters will accept a parallel data input and/or a reset > signal. > The tricky part is going from 12 to 01. You have to issue a load command > with > 0001 on the data bus to set it to 1. > > The '160 has an asynchronous reset, while the '162 has a synchronous > reset. So > the logic would be slightly different for those two parts. > > The advantage of synchronous counters is that you don't get glitches, and > if you > do, they don't matter since the signals are only sampled on the rising > edge of > the clock. > > It's not so important for a time-of-day clock, but designing circuits to > work at > a hundred MHz is a lot easier with synchronous logic. > > -- > David Forbes, Tucson, AZ > On Wednesday, 15 August 2012 13:22:37 UTC-5, nixiebunny wrote: > > On 8/15/2012 11:18 AM, John Rehwinkel wrote: > >> A couple of years ago just for fun I started from > >> scratch and designed a nixie clock circuit from the > >> ground up (pun intended), that uses (6) 74HC160 counters. > > > > How do you do the divide-by-6 digits? Just use gates to reset the > counters > > when they get to 6? I'm more used to using 7492 counters for that task, > so > > I'm curious. > > > > - John > > > > Synchronous counters will accept a parallel data input and/or a reset > signal. > The tricky part is going from 12 to 01. You have to issue a load command > with > 0001 on the data bus to set it to 1. > > The '160 has an asynchronous reset, while the '162 has a synchronous > reset. So > the logic would be slightly different for those two parts. > > The advantage of synchronous counters is that you don't get glitches, and > if you > do, they don't matter since the signals are only sampled on the rising > edge of > the clock. > > It's not so important for a time-of-day clock, but designing circuits to > work at > a hundred MHz is a lot easier with synchronous logic. > > -- > 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/neonixie-l/-/V5O-eepu_mAJ. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
