Terry, that generally jives with my experience lighting them up... they seem to settle down after some 'burn in period'. Yes, only Type-1 tubes in my inventory, a few people do make that mistake. There are also two styles of IV26 that I've found, one (the more common) with 'clipped' edges to the illuminated discs and the rarer kind with completely circular discs (initial prototypes?).
The clock has variable brightness and PIR, so tube lifetime should be fine and each tube is individually mounted to a socket, so replacement is easy (I have a nice 3D printed jig to help with aligning them all nicely too...). 36 of them lit up is quite the sight to behold.....each has an addressable LED underneath it with a small light guide, so we can go nuts with LED colours and animations (I can hear Grahame moaning about this already... :). I also have one of Jurgen's IV26 sound meters in the man cave, been going for many years now with no sign of display degradation, so your comment on the Elektronika over-driving sounds spot on. On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 11:43 PM Terry Kennedy <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thursday, March 6, 2025 at 7:58:26 AM UTC-5 newxito wrote: > > Very nice! I totally forgot about these tubes, I have enugh to build such > a display... I will never be able to empty the project queue... > > > You have to be careful with IV-26 displays, because there are three > incompatible types - one with the dots tied together to make > horizontal-tube clocks, another with the dots tied together to make > vertical-tube clocks, and a third where each dot is individually selectable. > > You're also limited to vertical mounting if you want to do horizontal > scrolling or other effects. The large Elektronika 7 clocks mount either 11 > or 12 tubes horizontally, but of course then you get a gap between digits > due to the wiring at the tube bases. > > QC on the IV-26 displays was not particularly great - it's rare to find a > complete dud, but in replacing all the tubes in a bunch of Elektronika 7's > I've found individual dots that didn't light, a surprising amount of > contaminants on the dots, and the tubes start out with bizarre brightness > artifacts, then settle down after 24-48 hours, then at around 5000 hours > they start developing dark stripes under the filament line, until some dots > barely light at all at around 15000 hours. Part of that is that the > Elektronika over-drives them, and the large Elektronika 7 doesn't have a > bright/dim switch, while the smaller one does. > > -- > 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 view this discussion, visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/419b8980-3c30-4947-b1bf-30ca2acffdc2n%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/419b8980-3c30-4947-b1bf-30ca2acffdc2n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- 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 view this discussion, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/CAOX%2BRH%2Biv6Z4Oz8x4c3czR%2BXcpL%2B1LsGFkA_kv4aFb73MVf4zQ%40mail.gmail.com.
