> I picked up a ton of VFD displays from tubes-store.com (good prices and cheap > shipping btw.) and now I'm trying to figure out how to power them. It seems > a fair bit more complicated to power them then the nixies are to power.
Yeah, you need two power supplies, a filament supply and a grid/anode supply. > Are there any good/simple power supply circuits anyone can suggest? Most people run the filament with a DC supply and a dropping resistor. This works, but the purists (like me) prefer AC filament drive. An ordinary transformer works nicely - especially if it has a low voltage center tapped winding for the filament. There used to be a chip (LM9022: http://www.ti.com/product/lm9022) that provided push-pull AC drive for the filament, and with a capacitor/diode voltage multiplier, also generated the anode/grid supply. It is worth looking at its data sheet. Grahame found a few of the surface mount variety in the UK a while back. Konstantin used MAX628/TSC428 FET gate driver chips to implement a similar filament supply, look at kosbo.com for his designs. All Electronics used to sell a nice VFD supply on the cheap: http://www.vitriol.com/images/tech/DC-32.gif Electronics Goldmine also had a cheap VFD supply: http://www.vitriol.com/pdf/VFDsupply-G5097.pdf However, they're both out of stock now. The DC-32 is smaller, but does not include the filter capacitors (you have to provide them externally, and if a particular one is omitted, the regulation loop fails and it self-destructs). These supplies produce a center-tapped low AC voltage (to power the filament) and an assortment of negative voltages. They're intended to be used by floating the filament negative and pulling grids/anodes "up" to ground to light them. By reversing the diodes, you can get positive outputs, which is easier for most of the circuits and chips we're used to using. I bought a raft of the DC-32 supplies, want some? You can use series resistors to adapt higher VFD filament voltage sources to the needs of your particular VFDs. > Also, any helpful articles/datasheets would be awesome too. Look at the data sheets for VFD driver chips (STM86312, MM58342, MAX6920, etc.) for more ideas. Noritake has some good info: http://www.noritake-elec.com/vfd_technology_an.php?series=VFD+Technology Also, read earlier traffic on neonixie-l (search for "Beginner friendly VFD PSU circuit" for a good thread): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/neonixie-l/tarPYOcsO60 - 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/85A55AB1-53DA-4870-A7ED-038AC8F9AFB0%40mac.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
