> First of all, I have no experience in circuit design, electronics, or > programming. Is it ridiculous to design and make my own Nixie clock? > Maybe...But that's not going to stop me from trying. But I wouldn't say no > to some helpful guidance or friendly advice!
> So...Where should I start? I picked up "The Art of Electronics" to teach > myself a thing or two about electronics and circuit components. But looking > around at other people's clocks I see a lot about microcontrollers, drivers, > 555 Timers, etc. You've put your finger on one dividing line right there. The two main approaches to nixie clocks are wired logic and microcontroller-based. The difference is in how the clock behaviour is defined. With a logic clock, the behaviour is defined by the chips you choose and how you hook them together. With a microcontroller, the behaviour is defined by a program that describes what to do. The choice is up to you - it's quite possible for a beginner to build a working clock with either approach. However, I'd suggest building your clock a bit at a time. Maybe get a solderless breadboard, a bunch of LEDs, a 74141 decoder/driver chip, some resistors, and make, scrounge, or buy a 5 volt power supply. Hook the LEDs to the outputs of the 74141 and try hooking the inputs to 5 volts and ground in various combinations. The chip will light different LEDs for different inputs. This chip is designed to drive a nixie tube, but it will drive LEDs too, it just "sinks" voltage on one of its outputs to turn it on. I suggest starting with something like this for two reasons. One is to get a feel for working with electronics, an other is the appeal of short-term gratification. There's a third one too - you can make mistakes with this lashup without frying anything expensive, or running the danger of shocking yourself with a high voltage nixie power supply. If you burn up a LED or 74141, no big deal, they're cheap and common, and you'll have learned something that you'll tend to remember. What you do next depends on what you'd like to do next. There are two likely directions. One is to obtain a nixie tube and high voltage power supply and replace the LEDs with the nixie. Then you can control nixie digits instead of LEDs. The other way is to get something like a counter chip (if you like the logic approach) or a microcontroller of some sort (if you prefer that route), and use that to drive your 74141 instead of manually switching the inputs. And so forth. > I'm pretty good at teaching myself all sorts of things but I feel like I > need a push in the right direction. What are the basics I need to get > started? Hopefully I've shed some light above. In fact, the above reminds me of another how-to-get-started writeup I did a while back, let's see if I can find that one. Yup, here it is: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/neonixie-l/nui9pdWbDNI/v8HnMNRQVnoJ > Are there any tutorials/guides? Any good examples that I can study? There's lots of information out there, look at older traffic on this list, and especially, go look at the group files archive on our old Yahoo host: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEONIXIE-L/files/ You'll probably have to sign up on Yahoo to access them, but there's a wealth of information there provided by group members on their own projects. Finally, you'll find all sorts of help, advice, and encouragement available on this group - the people here are knowledgable and friendly. I skimmed over quite a lot of details in the brief advice above, feel free to ask questions on anything you want to know more about. - John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
