I actually designed and built a FLW clock out of IV-4/IV-17s; they’re quite nice little tubes and currently still reasonably easy to get on the e-site.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/709108/iv4lw.JPG And here’s a short movie of an older version of the clock “walking the tree” as was mentioned earlier in the thread: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/709108/iv4lw2_wordwalk.mov Once I’ve finished up the software, I’ll open it up if there’s interest. Sean On Thursday, April 16, 2015 at 6:11:31 AM UTC-7, jrehwin wrote: > > As the B7971’s are so expensive these days, perhaps we should look for > really large VFD’s. Or LED matrices. > > > I scored some huge two-character VFDs from an elevator panel refit, along > with several smaller 16-character ones that accept serial input at 600bps. > > The IV-4/IV-17 ones are a good size and still affordable. > > Noritake occasionally gives away some nice VFD doc matrix displays, too. > > One of the important points in using them, as you already noted is to look > good, they need to have accurate spacing, so it sort of rules out > individual LED’s - which are really cheap. > > > You can build it up out of individual alphanumeric LED displays, which are > available in a bunch of large sizes (like the Evil Mad Science 5 letter > clock). > > I'm also working on an ongoing project to use an old monoscope tube as a > character generator to display nicely formed characters on a small CRT. > This could be the basis for a 4/5/6LW > project, including some fun effects like stretching letters vertically or > horizontally, and moving them around. I'm on about the sixth redesign > (LT1172 switching regulator driving a CCFL > inverter with a voltage doubler) of the monoscope power supply at this > point. > > I like the idea of a scrolling clock or FLW – these days micros are not > expensive. So it should not be too difficult to do a large scrolling clock > then the issue of four, five, six , sever or more scrolling words is not an > issue, especially if the matrices can be banked together. > > > Some of the PJRC boards have PLENTY of memory and CPU horsepower, and > they're small, cheap, and can be used with the Arduino toolset. > > - John > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/086686f3-07d2-41ac-a696-1dd23c13389b%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
