> I also liked Pete's cascode anode driver idea so much I've adopted that as > well. > > Interesting side effect of doing that -- no need for a ground connection to > the 2 digit extension boards. That seems strange even to me... but the nixies > don't need it, the cathode drivers are all on the main board, and the LED and > colon drivers don't require a ground connection either, as they are low side > drivers on the main board.
My digit boards ended up the same way. No ground, no ground plane. Just anodes and cathodes. I peered at the engineering drawings of various right-angle male and female headers to see if I could figure out what their mated width was, so I could put the holes in the right place for my boards to plug together neatly. I finally gave up, ordered a few from various vendors, assembled them, and measured the result. Headers are cheap, having boards made is ... less cheap. How did you come up with the spacing for yours? The silkscreens look really nice. > This frees up two pins on the 20 pin inter-board connectors. Hmmm.... > Thinking out loud, I'm wondering if I can use one of the pins to identify to > the Arduino just how many extension boards there are -- therefore allowing > the software to auto-configure based on the hardware. A pull-up on the > extension board and a pull-down on the main board would form a voltage > divider I could feed into an analog input. 2 extension boards would change > the voltage level. The code can then make the mux rate and colons behave as > required, based on the number of tubes present. Slick! I guess you'd use one pin to power the pull-up, and the other pin for the sense lead? > Getting close to ordering boards,,,,, if I can just put a stop to the > creeping elegance. Believe me, I know the feeling! I just tweaked my silkscreens to make pin 1 clearer and show the transformer on the Tayloredge board to make the orientation clear, added a voltage source jumper, rerouted the power to avoid some weird crossovers, and moved a few parts to make the trace runs nicer. It's so tempting to order a set, the renders on the board house site look really nice to me. - 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/C3DB998D-7898-439E-B8B4-9F227F26D1D0%40mac.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
