Hi, I'm Tomasz. I'm one of the youngest in here - being born after the end of production of nixie tubes, even in USSR. I've made my first contact with nixies while studying - Warsaw University of Technology is still using Meratronik equipment, because it is considered idiotproof - and first year students would damage a brick, if they were given one. Shortly after my first times with electricity in a lab I've got into hobbyist level electronics and it quickly succeeded my previous one (origami). Some time has passed and I am doing electronics as a hobby, as my job and I am studying it too. I've designed only one clock so far. I'm not very proud of it, as it is controlled by spaghetti code written on Atmega328 using Arduino IDE. Also, the power section has some issues. The clock is working for 2 years now. Designing the clock was challenging to me, as it involved doing almost everything for the first time in my life - making a stable step up converter, timer management through registers directly, PCB design etc. All of that was a good lesson to me and I think the clock was more valuable than my CV when I was applying for my first (and current) job. I am actively working on an upgrade using STM32 as core and with more universal power source - USB. However, the work has been greatly slowed down, because I've got involved into yet another vintage electronics hobby - vacuum tube amplifiers. So far, I've designed a headphone OTL amplifier based on E80CC in preamp and a White follower made with E88CC. It packs 50mW/channel into my 150Ω headphones with 1% THD (and then breaks into distortion quickly). At normal-loud listening volumes THD is lower than my scope could measure. Also my friend and me have recently built a copy of Marshall JTM50 amplifier with few tweaks (changed all ground routing and added a switch, which essentialy changes it into Plexi. Also there is a rectifier switch - silicon/vacuum). It sounds great and has lower noise/hum than original Marshall amplifiers! So, for now, I am more of a nixie tube hoarder than actual clock builder. Searching for cheap/very rare tubes became a hobby on its own. But hey, at least I've got plenty of material to work with in the future! Plus, nixies are probably a better investment against inflation than gold or any other precious metal or mineral.
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