I've also had generally very good reliability with vfd displays... instrument displays, larger tubes in clocks...
Tubes are in this clock are Russian IV-6 with roughly 1.0 to 1.1 V across the filament. Voltage is limited by individual series resistors from the nominal 5V supply. Filaments are dim, but visible in a less than bright room and vary in intensity. See photos below. As Greg suggests, "So, if you have VFD's I guess you want to keep the filaments always-on, and blank the anodes when not in use." That's exactly what I originally did with this clock. <https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ZgzeVt14yKM/WdAnV3Ex0iI/AAAAAAAAAVI/AxuOysB1VxoDYsUcHorNWPjlVSHsxn02wCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20170930_103218068_TOP.jpg> <https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ZnQTXxCLRjI/WdAnY3hDQtI/AAAAAAAAAVM/SYpY5V8S7twCIl8U1eYOqipoaN-qdYb_ACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20170930_103419522.jpg> As a side note, it would be easy to replace the (crude but reasonably effective!) series current limit resistors with active high side transistor current limiters... but all tubes are within spec as I understand it. B -- 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/6070b5b4-d383-465a-9b4b-5daebace8101%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
