> 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?
It's certainly handy, but you can generally get things cheaper elsewhere. Of course, I'm spoiled - when the local Radio Snack folded, I showed up with a station wagon and a stack of $20s and bought out their carded stock, along with the pegboard holders for them: http://www.vitriol.com/images/house/partswall.jpg MY Radio Snack is open whenever I need it! > 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? Now you're talking! There are lots of electronic items that use LEDs, and any of them that you don't want any more are fair game. 5V power supplies are starting to become fairly common too - most plug-in USB chargers will work fine, and power supplies for USB hubs are also generally 5V. Eyeball any "wall wart" type supplies you have lying around - a fair number of things use them, especially computer stuff like cable modems and wireless hubs. If you have a local thrift store, they're often good places to get stuff like that. I've seen plug-in power supplies of all sorts of voltages for less than a dollar. I just snip off the connector and connect the wires to whatever I'm building - some solderless breadboards come with binding posts that make this easy. If not, solder some solid wire to the leads and plug that into the breadboard (electrical tape or heat stink tubing helps insulate the joints. Note that when I snip off connectors like that, I leave a few inches of wire on them, in case I need that kind of connector some day - I'm a total packrat. The usual DIY vendors (adafruit, sparkfun, and so forth) all offer 5V plug-in supplies for reasonable prices. Most of the on-line parts stores (Mouser, Digkey, Element14, Farnell, etc.). The 7441, 74141, and the Russian counterparts are pretty common, and there are several sources for those, including sites run by members of this list. If you just want one or two to get started, send me an email with your mailing address and I'll dig out a couple and send 'em to you. > 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! Yeah, it'll cheerfully drive pretty much any nixie tube you're likely to play with. If you start getting into the oddball segmented displays or giant (coke can size) tubes, you'll need to drive them differently, but at that point, you'd have likely acquired a lot more knowledge about the subject in general. There are, of course, lots of other ways to drive nixie tubes too. - 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 https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
