I had a brain-meltdown and didn't realize you were making a battery-operated device.
The wristwatch I'm working on right now has a DC-DC converter (flyback converter) that boosts 3.7V to about 180V to ionize my display, and then throttle-back to around 140 to 160V to save some battery energy. The watch is controlled by a small FPGA, so I use a voltage-divider for the FPGA to monitor the anode supply and regulate it. I'm just about ready to send the board out for fab, so it's going to be a few weeks before I have this debugged. Although I've simulated it extensively in SPICE and Verilog, I dont have a good way to simulate the entire closed-loop system so do expect some surprises. So, the short answer is yes, you want to modulate your high-voltage supply to save battery energy, but you will still need to burn some extra energy via dropping resistors, or in my case, NPN-constant-current-driver, just because the neon tubes have nonlinear & varying behavior. -- 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/aa0cfc74-534c-4576-9fd6-dfedc221c09d%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
