Hello everybody….My name is Bill and I am a recovering horologist…..
Who do I think I’m fooling?? I’s sitting here with a prototype Nixie clock on the desk and I am writing and testing code right now. My story goes back 49 years to the summer of 1970. A brilliant (his words) college freshman is taking what he has learned from his Guru, Don Lancaster and his RTL cookbook and wants to build the digital clock he wrote about as his high school senior project. He is ordering parts from Newark, Kierulff, Elmar and Brill. He has 6 National NL-5750 tubes ($6.75 each), a power transformer from Southwest Technical Products, 6 Vector VIP plug-in proto boards for a double handful of Motorola MC7xxP RTL logic gates and 2N3877 transistors. The clock uses a 60Hz line time base and front panel switches to do the setting. A thumbwheel switch is used to select the alarm time (only 1 minute, no snooze). After about 2 months of build, test, fix, fry, rebuild I had a 6 digit Nixie clock!! I got a lot of practical experience such as “walking ring counters have 2 stable count sequences” and “RTL is very sensitive to glitches”. But it worked and it was all my design. Being an EE student, he naturally wrote up the design for a class paper and brought in the finished unit. I picked up a few degrees and went to work at Shugart Associates building testers for the hot product, the 8 inch, 10MB hard drive. I stayed around hard drives, going to Quantum and then to Adaptec in 1981. Had a few failed startups, back to Adaptec and was a committee rat for a while. Went to Palm in 2000, was laid off, worked for Woz at his startup called Wheels of Zeus (WOZ) for a few years and setup my own consulting company, BillCo Labs (catchy name huh?). Now I work on things and contracts that I enjoy. Mainly hardware design, but also working with ME and programmers. I am very good with OrCad, OK with Allegro and tend to write my programs in assembly language (I did warn you that I am old). In 2015, seeing all of the Russian Nixie tubes available, I decided to do my own design based on the 8051 processor from Silicon Labs. A friend and I kicked features back and forth without real adult supervision so we ended up with a vast concept with only a half-vast commitment. The unit worked and has been running in my living room for 4 years. After the running question of “how’s the clock coming?” I dove back into the design. It is now on the Mark II, rev 2.2 version. I have a lot of “down level” bare fabs and would be willing to supply to anyone who is interested. In addition all of my designs are open source with the schematic, PBC and code being freely available to any interested persons. This is not a business for me and my wife would be happy to clear out some junk. Also, questionable answers are a specialty of mine. I will write up the information on the current design in a post in the main section to see if there is any interest. -Bill- On Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 8:03:23 AM UTC-7, neonixie-l wrote: > > Ladies & Gentlemen,,, > > We are getting a steady stream of new members - it'd be great if, instead > of just lurking, you could introduce yourselves with a bit of detail about > your interests, what you've built or intend to build/dream of building. > Even what gets you up the morning and makes you smile! > > Even existing members (there are over 1,000) could chip in - there's some > great stuff around... > > Welcome, one and all to this great community! > > Nick > > > -- 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/661c3157-db21-4949-a5a0-6181f9124b6f%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
