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Comment by tecleandor | Hacker News Reader

I finally took a different path and did it with VFD. No high voltage, they're cheaper, and one could say VFDs and Nixies are family :p

I took the open source project Flora-ESP8266 [0] in the IV-22 size, changed a couple things in the BOM that weren't available, and ordered a bunch of pcbs. Now I have a bunch of extra PCBs that I could use to build extra clocks :-)

I would have loved to change the PCB to use an ESP32 instead, because that project uses ESP8285 (something like an 8266 but a bit more powerful) and those are harder to come by today.

  0: https://github.com/mcer12/Flora-ESP8266

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Numitrons are another option; they only require 5V to light the segments. They have a very strange, almost steampunk aesthetic (though Technology Connections is not a fan…) Unlike Nixies or VFDs, they emit a broad spectrum of light, so you can put any color filter you like in front of them (red, green, blue)

I made an alarm clock from some unusual Soviet 9-segment Numitrons a while ago. The code/design is in GitHub as well as a link to a video. https://github.com/74hc595/Numitron-Clock

Oh nice! I'll save that on my list of cool displays. I might do something with them one day...

(Same as with the bunch of vintage HP QDSP-6064 tiny bubble displays that I have. I bought a dozen of them for a dollar or two each some years ago, when some NOS stock appeared by surprise, but now they're running like 20 to 40$ a piece in eBay if you can find them.)

VFDs are also nice, but for decorative purposes I like more the sight of gas tubes with cathodic light, like Nixies, where you see the light being generated in an apparently empty space, instead of coming from inside a solid, like in VFDs, CRTs, LEDs, incandescent lamps or fluorescent lamps.

Some VFDs do fit that bill

https://www.tube-tester.com/sites/nixie/different/futura/fut...

True, this IV-22 modules, that are individual digits, look a bit more like a Nixie than the classic flat VFD display of an old CD player or a vending machine (of course, not the same):

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcer12/Flora-ESP8266/main/...

My idea is also painting the interior of the clock with a super matte black paint (Black 3.0 from Culture Hustle) so it looks a bit more like if the numbers were floating there...

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