On Thursday, October 30, 2025 at 4:56:46 PM UTC-4 Tom Katt wrote:
If they're going to steal the firmware, I doubt they're going to invest in designing original hardware lol. This is probably what happens when someone contracts a Chinese pcb factory to make their boards - and the factory sees an opportunity to make a few extra bucks. Of course, once one Chinese company starts making them the other companies down the street start making them too. It's like the wild west of intellectual property over there... Did more Googling and wanted to correct a likely errant hypothesis - the Dutchtronix firmware is open source, so no issues with anyone copying it or otherwise using it as the foundation for their own project (though I wonder if that applies to commercial sales for profit?). And while the hardware shares many similarities with other projects documented on the web, I haven't found it to be a straight copy of anyone claiming authorship - and again, it's likely that whatever project was the basis of the Chinese boards the designs are frequently open source as well. It's possible that some Chinese engineers saw the opportunity to sell kits and created their own boards - too bad it's impossible to find documentation for the current boards. I'd very much like to examine the deflection design. I did find a discussion of the (much) older kit versions in this group back in 2020 (CRT clock kit instructions <https://groups.google.com/g/neonixie-l/c/2EgBWuonp0M>), where member Paolo generously linked the kit documentation here <http://www.mediafire.com/file/4j8cwf8ty3ixn5n/file>. This version was a two board design with the controller and power/drivers on separate boards. This version has a much more elaborate differential amp design that uses multiple transistors in each leg along with what appears to be passives for frequency compensation. But it also uses the optcoupler style Z axis as seen in the Cathode Corner design. I will have to check out my friend's kit because I believe I only counted 4 transistors in the deflection circuit while the older design uses 6. I'm not sure what dac they are using or what the resolution is - they do not seem to be using the sin/cos circle method but rather the conventional point to point. I will try to take some photos of the clock kit and board the next time I get an opportunity. They seem well laid out and use all surface mount components. -- 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/be18ee0e-e8bc-43a8-9830-ab3a024af301n%40googlegroups.com.
