Re: [neonixie-l] FLW Clocks
I actually designed and built a FLW clock out of IV-4/IV-17s; they’re quite nice little tubes and currently still reasonably easy to get on the e-site. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/709108/iv4lw.JPG And here’s a short movie of an older version of the clock “walking the tree” as was mentioned earlier in the thread: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/709108/iv4lw2_wordwalk.mov Once I’ve finished up the software, I’ll open it up if there’s interest. Sean On Thursday, April 16, 2015 at 6:11:31 AM UTC-7, jrehwin wrote: As the B7971’s are so expensive these days, perhaps we should look for really large VFD’s. Or LED matrices. I scored some huge two-character VFDs from an elevator panel refit, along with several smaller 16-character ones that accept serial input at 600bps. The IV-4/IV-17 ones are a good size and still affordable. Noritake occasionally gives away some nice VFD doc matrix displays, too. One of the important points in using them, as you already noted is to look good, they need to have accurate spacing, so it sort of rules out individual LED’s - which are really cheap. You can build it up out of individual alphanumeric LED displays, which are available in a bunch of large sizes (like the Evil Mad Science 5 letter clock). I'm also working on an ongoing project to use an old monoscope tube as a character generator to display nicely formed characters on a small CRT. This could be the basis for a 4/5/6LW project, including some fun effects like stretching letters vertically or horizontally, and moving them around. I'm on about the sixth redesign (LT1172 switching regulator driving a CCFL inverter with a voltage doubler) of the monoscope power supply at this point. I like the idea of a scrolling clock or FLW – these days micros are not expensive. So it should not be too difficult to do a large scrolling clock then the issue of four, five, six , sever or more scrolling words is not an issue, especially if the matrices can be banked together. Some of the PJRC boards have PLENTY of memory and CPU horsepower, and they're small, cheap, and can be used with the Arduino toolset. - John -- 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 neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/086686f3-07d2-41ac-a696-1dd23c13389b%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[neonixie-l] Re: PCB socket footprint for NL-5440A?
I've taken it upon myself to do just that -- I went and bought a (basic) set of calipers and spent a couple of hours with EAGLE putting together a library for the NL-5440A plus SK-185 socket. This utilizes 21.5 degree pin spacing and resulting 37.5 degree gap, which fits my observations of the socket itself quite well. I even printed a copy of the footprint on the office printer to check things out -- looks basically sane. Thanks all for the help! Here's a link to my dropbox, in case you have a need for such a thing: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/709108/EAGLE/NL-5440.lbr Share and enjoy. This socket actually fits quite a few nixies, but I only have NL-5440As on hand and didn't bother adapting symbols for variations on the scheme. Cheers, Sean On Mar 18, 10:44 am, will ossumguyw...@gmail.com wrote: Yep, for under $12 shipped on amazon (prime) you can get digital calipers that are sensitive enough to measure the width of a human hair (i.e. .01mm or .0005in precision). They have been indispensable to me a number of times, namely putting things inside of CAD programs. Also, a tip if you want to accurately measure the pinout of something:If calipers can't quite do it (they work fine for obscure SMT pitches, but circular stuff not so well), then simply put the pins of whatever you're measuring on a scanner. Scanners preserve the unit of measurement, and there is software you can use to overlay angles and measure distances and whatnot on the image. I haven't done this in a while, but I remember that it worked for some funky shaped oscillators and things that I took out of an old motion detector a few years back. On Mar 18, 9:57 am, David Forbes dfor...@dakotacom.net wrote: On 3/17/11 8:00 PM, koolatron wrote: Hi all, Before I go out and buy a set of calipers to measure this socket, has anyone managed to generate a working PCB footprint for it? Sean Buy the calipers. They are incredibly useful if you are laying out PC boards or doing metalwork. They and a stereo zoom microscope are two big-ticket items that will make your electronics hobby much more pleasant. -- David Forbes, Tucson AZ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups neonixie-l group. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/neonixie-l?hl=en-GB.
[neonixie-l] PCB socket footprint for NL-5440A?
Hi all, I'm in the process of building up a little four-digit NL-5440A clock, and I had the good fortune to find a small bag of SK-185 sockets that mate with this particular tube. If you're familiar with the NL-5440A, you'll know that the pin spacing on the bottom of the tube envelope is quite tight, making the design of a faux-socket PCB (using Mouser pins, the sort that you see commonly with IN-18s and the like) very difficult. However, it turns out that the SK-185 sockets that fit NL-5440As are also rather oddball. Here's a link to some detailed photographs and datasheet diagrams of the devils: http://www.tube-tester.com/sites/nixie/data/soc/SK-182-burr-cha/SK-185-burr-ch.htm I've tried several times to generate a sane EAGLE footprint that fits this socket, and have met with only failure. The socket has 16 pins, which would at first blush correspond to a 17-pin ring of evenly- spaced contacts, with one missing. That, however, is not not the case -- each 90-degree quadrant has four contacts, and they appear to be spaced unevenly around the circle. Before I go out and buy a set of calipers to measure this socket, has anyone managed to generate a working PCB footprint for it? Sean -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups neonixie-l group. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/neonixie-l?hl=en-GB.
[neonixie-l] Re: Finally ready to share... the IV4LW2
Thanks! I'm currently designing a case. I may end up making a limited run to sell, but I very much plan on making the code and design files available to others in case they wish to attempt this themselves. That said, the entire affair is all surface-mount parts placed very closely together. It's tough to assemble by hand, as I currently do :) The decision to use native IO for the USB communication was motivated by a few early design hurdles - there's literally no room for an FTDI interface chip on the board, and I did not want to deal with FTDI's host-side drivers, which I have quite a lot of (bad) experience with. I got my atmega328p parts from element-14, which is one of Farnell's multitude of webstores. They show as perpetually out-of-stock, due to the high demand from Arduino folks and the historically low market availability of Atmel parts since they closed a few fabs. Placing a backorder request generally works much more quickly than their lead time implies, the last time I bought these parts it only took about two weeks. I considered buying parts via eBay, but apparently some shifty entrepreneurs have been floating knockoff 328s there and I did not want to take the chance. The AVR codebase, EAGLE libraries, project files, and host-side interface code are all currently available at http://www.github.com/koolatron -- I haven't pushed to the repo in a little while, so the code is likely out-of-date, and there is no documentation as of yet. Sean On Nov 29, 1:25 am, petehand peteh...@gmail.com wrote: Interesting! You appear to be running the USB directly off the ports of that AVR - quite an achievement. removes hat Actually having in your possession, ATmega328s in QFP, that's quite an achievement also! It's the unobtainable chip of the year. Do you have a secret supplier, or do you buy Arduino boards and unsolder the chips, as I've heard some people are reduced to? On Nov 18, 3:59 pm, koolatron koolat...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, It's taken me months and months of spare time (what little I get these days) to work on this, but I finally think my most recent project is finished-enough to warrant sharing. A couple of years ago I built a -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups neonixie-l group. To post to this group, send an email to neonixi...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/neonixie-l?hl=en-GB.
