Hmm, well, to me it seems a firmware issue with the timing: if it were the drivers, then it would be random and probably more constant, not showing the seconds. The reason you see the seconds in the 2nd to left tube is that tube is driven by the same driver chip as the seconds (there are only two drivers, and three pairs driven by them in quick succession depending on the anode being driven - only one (of three) anode driver is active at any given time). So, you can imagine that if the anode driver is switching to the next tube set (the hours pair) while the driver chip hasn't been fully switched off yet or switched to the hours digits, then you will see the seconds on the hours pair. It may be that it works better for certain driver chips than others, if they switch off a teensy bit faster, but that's just bad design: it shouldn't be that critical.
It could almost certainly be fixed by a firmware fix quite easily. Maybe you can tell the designer to add some dead time. It would really tick me off having to look at this crappy faint seconds-in-hours where it should just all be solid. Every time you look at it, you get a little annoyed. That's not what you want in a clock. At some point it may be so bad that you smash it against the wall in frustration. You don't want to get to that point. I'm not sure of any reliable source of driver chips, but you can try both the Russian equivalents of the 74141 as well as the 74141 itself. If you get them from two sources, surely one of them will be good (and most probably all will be good). Try disabling that leading 0 blanking in the future - it's not very good to do that. On Saturday, March 28, 2015 at 11:23:35 PM UTC+1, Kiran Otter wrote: > > Niek, > > Yes, it's showing the seconds in the hour digit, and in the minutes > digit.. though not as strongly. If I force it to display the date or > number of hours on the tubes, I can see whatever is in the most-right tube, > faintly in the next to left tube. And I swear I can see the 6 in the > seconds tube coming on for like 4-5 seconds. Again, it's all really faint, > so I assume it's not really a problem. > > Before I swapped the driver chips around, I was getting faint digits in > the left most tube. So it does seem to be driver related. But I think > it's OK for now. > > Is there a known good source for the driver chips? Someone on ebay? > > Kiran > -- 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/931c3e3e-e05a-487f-88db-8b5074f8924e%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
