IoT Nixie Tubes | Hacker News Reader

IoT Nixie Tubes

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161 pointstodsacerdoti46 comments

Awesome job!

I built something similar based on a Lasermad £85 clock kit (1), although with an MQTT based API rather than HTTP. The built in firmware was a bit annoying so I ended up borging an ESP32 in place of the PIC onto the supplied PCB. Now it supports NTP & MQTT commands for power on/off of the nixie tube HV supply, as well as brightness/animations/custom blinks etc. Keep meaning to write a blog post on it.

Something to bear in mind if you're using it a reasonable amount is nixie poisoning [2]. My clock firmware runs all the tubes through each digit in rapid succession for a minute at the top of the hour.

Also that white connector on your power board is an "enable". You could just connect that to a GPIO on your ESP32, and then ditch the tasmota and let the ESP32 control whether the tube is on or not. Would simplify your cabling and software.

If you really want to go overboard, expose it as a MQTT device with HomeAssistant autodiscovery support. It shows up automatically and you can then use any HA integrations to drive it, such as the sunset or presence sensors...

1: http://www.lasermad.com/shop/product/5-tube-nixie-clock-v3-d...

2: http://www.tube-tester.com/sites/nixie/different/cathode%20p...

One interesting Nixie-like display is the Lixie, which is a stack of edge lit acrylic layers, each with a single digit etched into them. Not the same aesthetic as a real Nixie, but still a pretty interesting and low power approach.

There's a Hackaday page for it at https://hackaday.io/project/165079-lixie-ii-the-newnixie-for...

Honestly it looks dreadful. The nixie isn’t high power usage as much as high voltage. In the dark you can probably better emulate it with an old android screen with oled. It looks like prison food of nixie clocks, where you want to build a clock, a nixie but cheap out and use something completely terrible, like a prison cake made of sugarless corn flakes. This looks much better. https://www.nycresistor.com/2011/10/15/el-wire-nixie-tubes/

I didn't say it looked nice, I said it was interesting ;)

I think a good part of it not looking nice is that the sides are exposed and the stack has too much space between the layers. If you took care of those two problems it would look a lot nicer right away.

The Dalibor Farny nixies look amazing, I really like the video of them making them too.

I bought an interesting display recently that I only found out about recently, called something like - ИГГ1-64x64M. The type I got is an r,g,b matrix. It requires a voltage higher than nixies apparently.

Some handy links on them:

https://hackaday.io/project/46302-1-64x64m-adventure

https://archive.org/details/1-64x64mDatasheetenglishTranslat...

I'm planning on trying to drive mine using an FPGA hopefully.

I'm curious if anyone knows more about them, someone suggested to me it's possibly neon based with filters.

Excellent writeup, love the detail behind all the choices and how they relate to reality, not just theory or aesthetic choices.

I used less expensive russian tubes to afford 4 digits in my build, but had to buy 6 to get 4 working ones :( https://github.com/jareklupinski/nixienet

Be careful with Nixie tubes - they are a real addiction. I started with a hobby project and shortly it turned into a small business. If you are looking for a clock - will be happy to see you at my https://nixieshop.com/

They look like beautiful hardware. Have you considered using an ESP or NRF etc as the control processor to (optionally) enable WiFi and therefore NTP automatic clock setting and daylight savings? It seems like something none of the commercial Nixie clocks have, and I don't really understand why? Maybe there's a commercial aspect I'm not appreciating. For me personally I like the idea of a clock always being dead on without needing manual sync.

I'd be happy to write the firmware for you for free clocks :)

Thanks! yeah, I’m currently working on migration to ESP32. It has reasonable price and is feature-rich. Apart from the automatic NTP sync I like the idea of creating web or BLE app for managing setting etc (bye bye ugly IR remote and buttons) - everything in your phone now. And thanks for your offer - that would be great ;)

By the way there is a Google forum with many other Nixie enthusiasts here https://groups.google.com/g/neonixie-l/

Wait, how would you do automatic DST? I've made a small alarm clock for myself but DST is always a pain, and I'm not super jazzed about writing the entire logic myself.

I do currently hardcode my time zone (although it could be done as a setting) so I suppose it's not 100% automatic...maybe with a geoip lookup!

NTP gets you the date, so you just need a library or algo that maps your time zone into rules for what dates to change on and by how much. Luckily, one ships in the ESP32 sdk. I used something similar to the below, although adapting to my location. Works great for me.

https://werner.rothschopf.net/microcontroller/202103_arduino...

You would theoretically need to update your tz descriptor if your country rules changed. My countries rules never do so I've never worried about it.

This could probably be worked around by periodically checking an endpoint for updates to the tzdb descriptor (like a Linux distro does via the package manager).

Alternatively, you could just knock up a very basic web service which returns date/UTC time of next change and new UTC offset for a given timezone. Then poll once a day or whatever. For bonus points, don't use JSON because it's a pest to parse on the ESP. Or use http://worldtimeapi.org/ and accept the third party dep.

That's fantastic, thanks! Hardcoding my timezone is no problem, as long as I don't have to change the offset manually every six months. Thanks!

No problem, I was very happy when I figured it out. Only issue is you don't get to test it until next year :)

Hahah yep!

Numitron tubes are way cheaper, way lower voltage, and much easier to drive than Nixie tubes. They are still visually very similar in terms of the retro steampunky look.

For anyone who wants to try to build something similar you can easily buy Numitron tubes on ebay from eastern europe suppliers.

P.S.A. Please do stay away from Nixie tube drivers if you are not confident/knowledgeable about HV circuitry

It's not _that_ bad...

I've accidentally touched the HV side of (more modern) nixie tube drivers. You can get certainly get zapped but the drivers can't supply enough current for it to be particularly dangerous.

As with most things it depends, a driver that is current limited and drawing 50 mA is probably gonna hurt you but you have much beffier drivers. Typically nixie drivers will have large reservoir caps on the output side for ripple, someone less aware can easily get hurt.

>They are still visually very similar in terms of the retro steampunky look.

That's not exactly what I'd call "very similar".

Yeah. Numitrons are like, "how about the disadvantages of a segmented display AND a nixie tube at once!"

Admittedly not the high voltage requirement, but the bulky glass housing and pinout etc.

Most Nixie tube drivers can't hurt you, unless they are directly rectifying the mains. DC-DC designs that start with typical low voltage can give you a quick jolt but cannot sustain their rated voltage or current if you short them.

I designed my own Nixie tube driver last year, and documented it on Hackaday: https://hackaday.io/project/170962-nixie-tube-170-v-flyback-.... I think I had more fun building the power converter than with playing with Nixie tubes.

Unlike the NCH6300HV, it's an open source hardware design with complete design notes and files for understanding how a HV power converter works.

So, once upon a time I had the unpleasant job to fix a large neon display for a trade show the evening before the trade show. It was supposed to be the center piece and major attractor for the booth that it was meant for. The guy that built it was quite clever with stuff like that, he'd taken a nixie based clock and used the output from that to drive a bunch of very high voltage triacs to drive the primary of the transformers powering the neon tubes.

Unfortunately, the evening before the event the clock failed and I was left to debug it while the other guy went to have some dinner. The 'ground' that I connected my scope to was at minus many KV and the resulting spark and flash were bad enough to evaporate the crocodile clamp. I thought I had gone blind, but the power had gone out. And not just in that building. I stumbled downstairs and called the other guy who said that at his place the power had also just gone out. The good news: I wasn't blind. The bad news: a good chunk of Amsterdam East was without power. Not a good day. And we didn't get to bring our fancy clock.

so, this is not nearly as dramatic, but I was at a busy hackerspace (新车间) swapping out the brains of an electric doorbell to replace the chime with an arduino sound trigger - crossed a wire while plugged into mains and the the whole 220v side of the doorbell explodes in sparks while a dozen people on their laptops are plugged into the same surge protector. No harm done, mea culpa. A more experienced hacker comes over with a huge bulky 1:1 transformer for isolating circuits and says “if you’re going to hack on mains, plug into this”

after some inspection of the burned circuitboard, I realized all the parts I need are on the undamaged 5V side of the board, so it worked fine on USB power anyway, but I was grateful for that hackerspace spirit of “that was stupid, here’s the tool you’re supposed to use“

Nice one. Yes, an isolation transformer isn't a luxury item. Good to see you didn't hurt yourself. I still have memory flash-backs whenever I hook up a crocodile clamp to something.

Just don't let the tube show a single digit for too long. It would probably wear it out more evenly if you make the numbers "blink", e.g. instead of always showing 3, show "03" by alternating between 0 and 3 with a longer delay after showing 3: 0 .. 3 ... 0 .. 3, etc. (like the bulb clock actually works https://www.daliborfarny.com/product/blub-clock/)

Nice to hear that someone is still producing these tubes! What is the life expectancy of such a tube if switched on constantly?

Depends on the tube and if you account for cathode poisoning. My clock is still going strong after 3 years, coming on automatically at sunset and goes off at midnight.

It also depends on the voltages you drive them at.

I have built two six-digit Nixie clocks with Z5660M tubes, which I bought as "new old stock" - likely unused - for about 50€ per piece over 10 years ago. Both of these clocks have been running non-stop since then, and they are still going strong after more than 86.000 hours of operation, with negligible loss of brightness. They are still readable in anything but direct, full-brightness sunlight, and illuminate the room nicely by night.

I guess the flash memory of the Atmel microcontroller running the clock logic will lose its contents before the tubes eventually wear out.

Tangentially, this is a beautiful (with no music or narration; text notes only) high quality video of modern artisanal (i.e. all by hand) nixie tube manufacturing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA

I love the glass working parts especially. And the creative use of Ikea-sourced "lab equipment".

This is the actual manufacturer of the tube from the article! A modern nixie tube manufacture, they have had to (re)learn the processes and tooling again, from old books, and acquiring old tools like that awesome glass lathe. Their youtube channel is great to watch, they explain a lot of their steps.

https://www.daliborfarny.com/

This guy deserves every dime he gets from these. What a tremendous amount of effort to make them.

"I needed more room so I moved from the garden shed to a local castle."

What a guy.

Amazing video. I noticed some small imperfections in the process but the end result is very nice and the fact that they are made by hand probably adds rather than detracts from their charm, each tube being a little bit 'off' rather than that they all come out exactly alike. Especially during the spot welding phase there is some burn through and the height of the stems is different for every tube. But likely that doesn't impede their final operation or longevity at all.

I really like how clean he works. They must cost a fortune the way they are made.

edit: prices are listed, 135 euros each, so 810 euros for the tubes for a six digit clock, the clocks go from 1400 to 2000 euros. It depends on how you look at it: for the utility value of a clock that's pretty high but for the amount of work it is probably on the low side, and by keeping them 'hand made' there is some scarcity effect at work, they'll never be things that everybody has so that's probably a happy medium for him. I wonder how many he's making and whether or not he is tempted to move away from the artisanal process to move into more automated production, larger batches and so on.

I also wonder why he fires the getters prior to sealing the exhaust tube, traditionally the getters were ignited after achieving high vacuum and sealing the envelope and removing the remains of the exhaust pipe rather than induction heated prior to sealing (they're the cause of the metal deposit at the top of many vaccuum tubes). The way he does it you risk re-contamination after/during the gas is introduced with any one of the following process steps, the getters really should come last. But it works well enough I guess :)

That video is a masterclass in how to produce something like this, quiet, just the work, no distractions at all. And the website looks great as well. This guy really has something to be very proud of.

i have been running a 4-digit nixie clock off NOS russian tubes non-stop for a few years now.

two of the number tubes burned out in that time, one shortly after turning it on, one a year later.

they were socketed and I bought spares so replacing wasn't a big deal, and the 4 tubes socketed in now have been working for years, but ymmv with anything that old tho spares are cheap to carry for such a nice piece :)

Longer than yours. Nixies are super solid.

Looks like Nixie tubes are basically small numeric neon signs. I don’t get why you would want this to be an IOT device, why not RF or connect though Ethernet, it can also do power over it. It’s not going anywhere.

I’m sure we’ll see better quality fiber optic and laser/led clones in the future.

> One day I asked him, what’s the deal with the crappy LED clock in the living room and he proudly told me that he had built it himself, from a kit

Heh. Just like my dad, then, except there were no "kits" in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia.

Maybe not as sexy-looking, but I still prefer VFD displays. The voltage is less threatening. And if you are lazy you can buy them with serial interface. Also you can buy them really cheap.

Someone needs to build a nixie tube clock which prodtrudes from the top of a solid-state guitar (or other audio) amplifier.

I'd settle for push-buttons on the back of the case, to keep things sane and simple, and to keep down the pointless material waste. Though it's definitely among the neater Internet-Of-Shit things I've seen lately.

I hope that wasn't your actual wifi SSID and password.

What if it is? You can drive to that person's house, park outside, and steal some Wifi?

(With the combination of SSID/password that is in the document, though, that's kind of like saying "I hope example@example.com isn't your real email address." Well no, it's an example.)

"hunter2" is an old internet joke that started on IRC

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hunter2

Original link: http://bash.org/?244321

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