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Registered Member #54503
Joined: Sun Feb 22 2015, 10:35PM
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 288
Im fascinated with Nixie clocks and am looking at doing something a little different by building a calculator using nixie tubes instead of a regular LED segment display or VFD etc.
I was looking at using a single chip module such as a TMS-0103 or the likes.
One question, can this chip easily be adapted to using nixie tubes rather than a segment display?
Im not sure what kind of encoding is used for the digits, and whether or not the outputs could be fed straight into a nixie driver or not.
Thanks for any info
If there are better chips out there im interested to know, i dont want to use a raspberry pi, as thats fairly complex and i have to wait for it to boot.
Registered Member #54503
Joined: Sun Feb 22 2015, 10:35PM
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 288
Mads Barnkob wrote ...
You need some high volatge transistors to interface between the ICs and nixie tubes, like the widely used MPSA42.
Maybe you can find some inspiration in my nixie tube clock:
Thanks will take a look. Ive got a whole bunch of 5870 nixie's and plan to do a clock that can fit in a spare 5.25 bay of my computer. I hope i can make it all fit.
A calculator should be easy with a good single chip module, but as you mention you need high voltage transistors between the IC's and drivers, although i believe the IC's designed as nixie drivers do not need this.
I see some people take shortcuts and only use one driver IC and multiplex it to all the tubes, i dont know what way is the best option, if each nixie is driven, they are supposed to be alot more brighter.
Registered Member #135
Joined: Sat Feb 11 2006, 12:06AM
Location: Anywhere is fine
Posts: 1735
its all C code. That and use the serial to parallel conversion to make a huge data bus.
You will be using many shift registers, one per tube, and a shift left operation or lookup table conversion to change the bits. So 0 would still be 0 on the shift register, but if you want to light the digit 1 it becomes binary 2, and 2 is binary 4.. and so on.. since the tubes are segmented you have to make your own conversion. Or you could use the BCD to decimal converters like mentioned before and cut down on the shift registers, either way it doesn't really matter. The BCD converters would allow you to use one shift register for two BCD and two tubes, the software method is more computer 'sciency'.
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