I did a project like this for Burning Man, making Really Large "Nixie" tubes using 2-liter soda-pop bottles with the labels removed. and large-diameter (5mm) orange EL-wire for the digits. To drive them, I used a little AT89C2051 microcontroller for each digit, driving a bunch of MAC97A6 sensitive-gate triacs to switch the output of an off-the-shelf EL-wire driver. The micros communicated via a serial daisy-chain at 2400 baud.
The whole thing worked pretty well. It was a little tricky to assemble the digits in the bottles - sort of a ship-in-a-bottle challenge. I made it easier by cutting back the neck of the bottle somewhat, since that part wasn't visible anyway. I used bonsai wire for the rigid structure for the digits. The big problem with the EL-wire is the low light output. They're really only usable at night - in the daytime, you can't even tell that they're lit. You can play games with the excitation supply; I've custom-made some of my own, and by tuning the frequency for the length of wire being excited, you can increase the current flow somewhat (obviously, increasing the voltage does too)> Even at the brightest I was able to get, though, they still weren't suitable for daytime use, and the lifespan is essentially linearly related to the current flow, so I decreased the usable life (the light output tapers off) to only a couple of hundred hours in this mode. ~~ Mark Moulding On Wednesday, March 1, 2017 at 10:18:08 AM UTC-8, jrehwin wrote: > > This is kind of cool, someone has bent EL wire into numerals to yield a > nixie-ish display. > > https://theledroom.wordpress.com/2017/02/11/el_nixie-tube/ > > - 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/90cf8225-8826-4204-988c-4205d7ec5105%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
