Nixie Clock

From the fine people at PVElectronics, my wife bought me for Christmas a Nixie Clock kit! There’s nothing quite like 170 Volts to make you careful and to short those capacitors!

Completed Nixie Tube Clock

Total build time was about 3 hours, plus 2 hours of debugging a problem with the high-voltage transistors on the anode of one the tubes:

But some quick email support with Pete at PVElectronics (thank you SO MUCH for being around to offer support the day after Christmas!) and I got the problem isolated to one of the MPSA92 transistors. Since this clock is a multiplexed cathode design using the anodes to select the active tube, the 4th tube was displaying the digits from the other tubes because the suspect MPSA92 was shorted always-on. I swapped it out with one that I had in my parts bin and voila! A shot of the finished board:

And some close-ups of the tubes themselves. Very neat old technology.

You can see the individual digit elements inside the tubes “stacked” on “top” of each-other.

Very cool little clock. Next project is to build a wooden case for it!

1 thought on “Nixie Clock

  1. Thanks! I’ve actually not tried to get listed in any search engine explicitly. I can only assume that something in WordPress is enabling that to happen.

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