Oh, I could tell you some stories. When we did some early ships of advanced
workstations to universities, I had a bunch of complaints from Cambridge
University that their optical mice were failing randomly. I phoned the lab
tec to find out what was going on .. these mice used two colours of
There is a very similar story about an early super computer developed at
Control Data in the 70's.
An AC outlet on the side of the machine was intended for engineering for
debug instruments.
But nightly, when the cleaning lady plugged in her vacuum cleaner, the
machine would crash. It took
That story reminds me of one from work. Not Nixie-related but sorta funny :)
Years ago, work had an IBM System/360 ot /370 of some age; It started having
faults at random times, so they called in the tech. He opened the system
covers, tied in all the diagnostics tools - logic analyzer, etc, but,
You need a few ions around in the Neon for the cascade to start. This can
happen for a variety of reasons including cosmic rays, background radiation or
doping of the gas mixture with something radioactive. There is at least one
thread on here about radioactive nixies (which sent me off on a
there :-))
]
Eventually they took the doors off and made sure that the internals were
brightly illuminated!
John K
- Original Message -
From: Tomasz Kowalczyk
To: neonixie-l
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2017 7:52 AM
Subject: Re: [neonixie-l] Constant current source design
W dniu
W dniu wtorek, 18 kwietnia 2017 15:46:38 UTC+2 użytkownik jrehwin napisał:
>
> - while testing it I found out that striking voltage of tubes is a max
> value - I've tested one Z567M and one LC-631, they both strike with
> voltages lower than their normal maintaing voltage!
>
>
> Yes, it's a
It's done in FPGA code (verilog). I created a crude A-to-D converter using
a resistor tree into 4 FPGA pins. The resistors are ratioed to give the
FPGA indication when the anode voltage is 140,160, 180, or 200V. From
there, the FPGA adjusts the duty-cycle of the DC-DC converter to change the
> My wristwatch uses a 'boost' approach to ionize the display above 180V for
> 25msec, then throttles back between 140 to 160V after the display is stable.
> The saved energy is significant. It's 3-1/2 digits, direct-drive, and uses
> NPN current-regulators for each segment (24 total).
Is that
My wristwatch uses a 'boost' approach to ionize the display above 180V for
25msec, then throttles back between 140 to 160V after the display is
stable. The saved energy is significant. It's 3-1/2 digits, direct-drive,
and uses NPN current-regulators for each segment (24 total).
My bench
