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Registered Member #540
Joined: Mon Feb 19 2007, 07:49PM
Location: MIT
Posts: 969
Hi. I decided to make a dekatron spinner for the fun of it. A dekatron spinner is a display thing that makes the glowing gas in the tube to move in a circular path. It does this by applying pulses to the glow transfer guides causing the glow to move from one cathode to another. I used the 6802 for my dekatron spinner and for the anode supply, I used a four stage voltage multiplier.
I made a little stand thing to connect all the cathodes together. I made the copper ring at the bottom by wrapping some 14 awg wire around a wooden dowel then flattening it with a vice. I forgot that I needed to do that after mounting the socket. :S It's fine for now though.
I used a couple resistors and capacitors for shifting the phase angle to drive the guides. The problem was that the original phase shifter (that's what I call it) didn't work properly. I scoped the output of it and found that for some reason, both the signals were in phase (or just out of phase by a little bit).
I found another diagram that had a different layout and I tried that. The design itself wasn't that different so I just lashed up the phase shifter.
The other phase shifter worked well so I am going to use that for my final design.
Here is a video of the spinner running. Sorry about the quality of it :S. Later, after I mess around with it more, I'm going to put the entire thing in a plastic case because it won't be isolated from mains. Also I am going to have multiple switches that can switch if it is spinning or frozen, the direction, send a pulse to the guides when it's frozen, switch the rate that the guides receive a pulse. I am thinking of making a ring counter out of discrete parts to divide the mains freq. I could either use neons or transistors. There are problems with using neons to divide the line freq. There need to be buffers between the multiple rings, it may be unreliable and also it's kinda difficult to obtain the neons that have a large enough difference between striking and maintaining voltage. I guess I'll go with transistors then. Is there any other way to divide the mains freq easily with discrete parts?
Registered Member #540
Joined: Mon Feb 19 2007, 07:49PM
Location: MIT
Posts: 969
I just got the dekatron from ebay. Yeah, the 'control system' applies ~500V to the anode and pulses that are out of phase to move the glow from cathode to cathode.
I used something similar to this schematic. The values of the caps aren't too critical. I used .22uF caps for the multiplier and a .1uF cap for the phase shifter. In some diagrams they call for a 33k resistor in series with the multiplier but I found that was too much for 120V operation. I used 1.8k and it works fine.
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Dekatron Spinner
