Last week, I went to the TRW Swapmeet. I met a pair of our neon buddies, Westdave, and Gary, at one of vendor booths. The vendor had a bunch of element discharge tubes. Not the regular noble gas tubes, like neon or helium, but of mostly vaporized metal, gold, mercury ... He wanted $25 a piece for them. Dave and Gary picked up a couple each. Me, being a cheap SOB, and seeing they weren't dekatrons, passed. Later at Gary's house, we wanted to light them up. Gary use to have a plasma globe. If you stick a nixie tube near it, the tube would glow. But it had been broken, and he thrown it out. No big deal, he has a tesla coil in the garage. Again, no go, since it was dismantled, and he was in the middle rebuilding it. No glow joy, that day.
Well I threw together this little toy, to throw out a few KV of AC, to make a few ions: <https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-g1WFoBG9Q0A/VPie4ikNHYI/AAAAAAAAUj8/1qp4E0CaH8I/s1600/Plasma_Gen01.jpg> <https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-CrwNczn3kX8/VPifMcnNWQI/AAAAAAAAUkE/PkTQ2dlChxA/s1600/Plasma_Gen03.jpg> The circuit, is pretty simple. It just my nixie supply circuit, adjusted to output 300VDC But instead of using a simple coil, I used a transformer. The primary side, makes a 300Vpp pulse. The transformer has a ~20:1 turns ratio. 16 turns on the primary, and a tad over 300 on the secondary. The key was isolate not only the primary from secondary,but successive layers of the secondary. They maybe more kapton tape on it than wire ! The tubes are not plugged into a socket, but on a conductive platform (wire mesh), that's hooked up to HV. That green wire hanging out, is also the HV. Touch a gas filled tube to it, and it will lite up ! It's also portable. I powered it from a 12VDC source, I often drag along with me. -- 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 neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/5b99bbc3-629a-4744-8ef6-5f30128204c8%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
