Anyone been using a Raspberry pi in any nixie projects? Many years ago I worked on a clock that basically used a frequency counter as a display. Basically it output 1 pps and the counter just counted them to mark off the seconds (with some smarts to handle the rollovers from 50 to 0 seconds and so on). This used an AVR microcontroller, with a bunch of external components - a switch and rotary encoder for setting the time, some power supply related stuff and so on. There would have been additional external components needed to support more stuff I wanted to add, like a battery backed RTC.
While I had it working nicely on the breadboard, I never quite got it right on my protoboard version and soon ran out of free time to work on it. This year my son wanted a raspberry pi for Christmas and I ended up getting myself one too - figuring I could revisit the counter clock. All in all the hardware itself is about what I paid in total for the parts I'd used before, and it seems like nearly everything I need is in the pi itself (yes, it is way overkill for a clock of this nature!). I'm thinking I will even connect the pi to my wifi and use ntp as the time source which does away with all the hardware and software needed to set the time. Theoretically I just need a power supply (my counter has +5V available since it's all TTL, though I'm not sure I would use it directly), a connection to the counter's input, and a connection to the counter's reset signal. Initial quick tests are good with one exception - I had just connected an AVR output to one of the pins on the reset button on the counter and the AVR was able to toggle that output and reset the counter (pretty sure I was powering the AVR with 5V). This same trick does not work with the pi, presumably due to its puny little 3.3v-level outputs. Anyone have a standard, simple go-to for interfacing between old TTL circuitry and a pi or something like it? -- 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/CAM1F4kQZpJn25%2BER8f5o4jncRd51kLd9J9BXkfyz-LKjF5worA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
