Hi Marcin, That is exactly right, the blue backlight LEDs can indeed be used for this purpose. They do already come on if the tube doesn't ionize but the LED current in low ambient light is very low so there's not many photons emitted. I changed my code a bit yesterday so that I can inject a variable boost current for the initial 160us, 320us, 640us or 1280us. I am trialing this at the moment and so far the results are really good.
Michel On Sep 12, 6:40 am, marcin <[email protected]> wrote: > It is necessary to somehow ionize the gas a bit. Light is good, radiation > is. Some people - eg. this guyhttp://eeberfest.net/gallery.php?set=thebox > use UV LEDs to ensure ionization in dark conditions. Maybe it would be > possible to somehow use your blue LEDs? I have no idea if they would be > sufficient and how much time they would need to sufficiently ionize the > gas. Just an idea. > Marcin > > > > > > > > On Tuesday, 11 September 2012 12:52:20 UTC+2, Michel wrote: > > > I did some extensive testing today and made the conclusion that these > > slow tubes need much more ambient light to ionize than other tubes. > > Raising the anode voltage to 200V rather than 170/180 is not doing > > much at all, I only see a dramatic improvement when I expose them to > > more ambient light. Could that be related to the amount of mercury > > vapor then? Is it then just a badly manufactured tube or is that due > > to its age? > > > Michel > > > On Sep 5, 8:30 am, marta_kson <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Just a thought as the off-time before the problem reappears seems to > > > be very long, may the mercury in the tube be involved in some way? > > > That would take minutes to condense. The loss of ionization is a > > > microsecond process, so the explanation must be something else. The > > > mercury insertion is also something that could had some process > > > variations at the manufacture making some tubes worser than other even > > > in the same batch. -- 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.
