I love the orange glow of Nixies, and a do-nothing box would distract me for hours. I only have one Nixie device, a clock (from Taylor Electronics) that sits in the bedroom and also serves as a nightlight. Currently out of commission as it took a tumble off the ledge and the power plug pulled a trace off the board. Just have to desolder the HVPS and RTC to transfer to the new board, putting it off until I make a real case for it (it was in the cardboard box it came in with a hole cut in the front for the display). But that has to wait until I finish the design and build of our 12x16 hunting cabin so we can stretch the hunting season out past the first snowfall. I'm getting too old to sleep in an unheated tent when its below freezing, since the dog is a fool and won't climb up on the cot with me. But (back to electronics) at least at those temperatures, LEDs can still put out useful light, even in a cheap solar garden light. Many of which still use NiCad cells. Glad I don't have to work with that chemistry anymore, the quarterly 24 hr urine test was annoying. Though naturally the guys would compete to see who could fill their gallon jug....
The program to simulate the reaction sounds interesting, most of my programming has been either data reduction and massaging into graphs, or school exercises to simulate molecular dynamics, which was really just solving Newton's equations of motions in a loop (and no math required on my part, ha-ha). Any particular language or were you using one of the mathematics packages? Though these days even spreadsheets can do quite a bit with a modern processor. On Sunday, April 6, 2014 8:54:56 AM UTC-5, jrehwin wrote: > > > the only high-voltage work we did was a 5 cell pack of 1.5V AgMnO cells > that was boosted by a customer's device to higher voltage (think of what > the Invisible Fence collar unit does and you get the idea). > > I was thinking of nixies, for some reason. > > > My interest is in the physical processes that occur, but most people > don't care at all about diffusion-limited reactions, > > I do, but I'm not "most people". I've even written programs to simulate > such things. I have some high-drain applications where reaction rate and > effective resistance are important (think nixie and photoflash boost > circuits). It's possible to pull a couple of amperes from AA cells, and > several amperes from C cells. I'm find of NiCd cells because they'll give > you gobs of current in a hurry. > > > they just want their flashlight to turn on long enough to get where they > are going :) > > While I love the glow of neon, and the simple glow of tungsten, there are > times LEDs are the way to go. And flashlights are a great place for 'em, > IMHO. With an ordinary incandescent bulb, as the battery voltage drops, > more and more of the energy gets uselessly radiated away as IR. An LED > hooked up to a near-dead battery will still give a useful (if feeble) > visible glow. There's even one LED flashlight made that runs on a dozen > CR123 cells in parallel. If you give it new cells, it'll run continuously > for weeks/months. But the real value of it is, you can take a bunch of the > "dead" ones from your other equipment, and they'll run the flashlight just > fine. > > Then again, the neon "do-nothing" box would run happily for quite some > time from a couple dozen "dead" CR123s in series (just to get sort of back > on topic). > > - John > > -- 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/d97d86bd-fd39-4456-8214-e153cb8ceaef%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
