Yes, I took a closer look at the board. The silkscreen indicates EL817, but if those are the anode drivers (muxed), then they really need to be the EL816. The EL817 can only tolerate 35V, and that's too small of a difference for switching nixies ON & OFF. The EL816, can tolerate as much as 80V, making it a better choice. It uses one 74141, from the pinout of that one 16-pin chip. So its clearly 1x6 muxed. Also, there's an area to stuff the HV switcher. Given, that you have to get the parts yourself, and there are some parts that most people don't have in their hobby bin (Beefy coil, power FET, ultra high speed rectifiers, ...), you could just get a pre-made switcher (Taylor ?), and just mount it over that location.
Being muxed, and using uC, does significantly reduce the part count, making it easier for a newbie. Of course using a pre-programmed uC doesn't teach the newbie anything other than maybe his soldering skills. Hey, its all depends on what you want. There are all kinds of kits out there. Get the one one that suits you. If you're ambitious, search eBay, and buy one of each ! On Thursday, June 20, 2013 3:22:48 PM UTC-7, pewter wrote: > > This kit uses a opto isolator instead of the usual transistor interface > which is nice. At the price you are paying a bit for the work in producing > the code and pcb so if you take that into account I think it is fair. > Obviously of you design a board and code code yourself then you can do it > for less. You takes your choice. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/10c32d31-2bf2-41f4-ab58-34952034e422%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
