Check out Norwegian maker Hans Jørgen Grimstad’s concrete & nixie clock. (The video shows some sort of test, not the regular clock operation.) Hans’s website is in Norwegian, and Google Translate doesn’t savvy Norwegian very well, so its operation is somewhat mysterious. However, I do see that there’s an XBee involved. Hans, would you care to share some details? [Thanks, Hellgeir]
4 thoughts on “Nixie tubes + concrete block = cool clock”
Comments are closed.
I’ve made a similar clock but it includes syncing via NTP. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNdCoH6BSMg
I still need to work on the concrete enclosure.
> Hans, would you care to share some details?
The casing is a concrete casting made from an Elastosil 4601 silicone mold. The digit tubes are russian IN-1 and the dekatron that I use is an OG-4.
The circuitry is pretty straight forward. An AtMega8515 drives the IN-1 tubes via 4 NOS K155ID decoders and the dekatron via 3 IRF740 mosfets. The necessary voltages are produced by an isolated power supply (back to back transformer pair). A standard voltage doubler is then used to ramp up the voltage to approx 450V for the OG-4.
I haven’t implemented the NTP sync yet, but I’m pretty sure that my DSL-provider would prefer a wireless connection of some form ;) (Either XBee or the relatively cheap Holy Stone RF-modules that are available from Sparkfun).