In the past I have had some success with KiCad and have had boards made at OSHPark which do look lovely. Recently I was made aware of EasyEda, an on-line PCB design tool which (apparently) is easy to learn and easy to make FootPrints with – one of my difficulties with KiCad is MY ability…
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For nearly a year I have had a Spectrum 568 board from PV Electronics sat on the shelf waiting for the moment when I allow my self the pleasure of it’s construction. At the same time, a set of Dalibor Farnys excellent tubes have also been sat there awaiting the same moment. Having recently completed…
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For me, the concept of sharing the workload between a two micros, one for NTP Time Sync and sensor reading and one for running the clock in a timely fashion (SWIDT?) has worked really well so I decided that it was time to implement the same in my Lixie Clock. I re-worked the state-machine code…
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So, here is the issue: I would like to have a PIR connected so that when motion is detected, the clock comes on. All good so far. in the main program loop I can check to see if the status of the I/O from the PIR has changed since the last iteration and if it…
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Well, perhaps not quite a supercomputer but I am working on a project to drive six Burroughs B-7971 tubes. Each tube is mounted on a ‘Smart Socket’ which has it’s own PIC micro controller which makes it relatively easy to control as the PIC takes care of what elements of the tube to light and…
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Any excuse for a blog entry! I have recently added a coupe of pages to the site, one introduces the concept of the Nixie Buyers Club and the other is just random ramblings on the subject of the various design tools (that all sounds a bit grand!) that I am now using for my projects.…
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What’s the point of having a blog if it isn’t updated – probably none at all. So here is an update on various projects that I have floating around in my head, everything from almost finished items to mere notions! In absolutely no particular order: B-7971 Single Tube Clock: Following inspiration from Roddy Scott, I…
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The Spectrum Clock I wanted to build something using larger tubes. I chose the IN-18 tubes (originally made in The Ukraine by Gazotron) which have a digit height of around 40mm. Some ebay research resulted in a package being delivered from The Ukraine. The Spectrum build is actually simpler than the QTC, resistor networks help…
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The QTC Clock After researching the various tube types and options, I settled on a kit featuring with ZM1210 tubes. The ZM1210’s were manufactured by Telefunken in Germany and come with a nice red coating (which can be removed if desired). This is a really nice kit which will support a variety of different tube…
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