On Sunday, December 3, 2017 at 12:09:54 AM UTC-5, Jeff Walton wrote: > > Terry - I don't know if your earlier MOD-SIX clocks had tube hour > registers, but my curiosity is how many hours do you have on your B7971 > tubes on your clocks? Have you had any failures? >
Yes, the tube timer was a feature since day 1. I bricked the original CPU on my oldest clock (botched update on my part) and don't know its total hours. The CPU I replaced it with (0 hours when installed) is reporting 56,200 hours (checked just now). This is with no display blanking at night, just some dimming. The MOD-SIX is a direct drive design using PWM for dimming, BTW. The MOD-SIX page says the new version has an optional PIR sensor, so it should be possible to blank the display when nobody is around. The current firmware already has 2 programmable display on / off settings. The manual has examples of using them for both an office and a home schedule. I've never had a tube fail. AFAIK, no-one else has either (purists may cringe at my manual's "carefully bend the pins with pliers if necessary", but it works). My experience with these tubes is that they obviously have excellent shelf > life, good seals and seem to be easily capable of 100,000 hours in actual > use. It would be nice to know of some actual elapsed time readings in > nominal circuits. > Agreed. The youngest of these tubes is probably close to 50 years old at this point, and I've never seen a real "NOS" one - the ones on the Lectrascan display boards were obviously from units that were replaced by newer types of display, but the tubes I've seen represented as "NOS in original foam trays" appear to be preventative pulls from displays, given the mismatched date codes and overall condition. There have been a number of revisions to the tube design (I think the ones with the "antenna" wire are the oldest, used to position the assembly inside the envelope), but unlike other tubes of the same vintage, the older revsions don't seem to be less reliable. I have a number of bad tubes, but they were all received that way. -- 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/10b0769a-a849-49c6-acd9-e5ce48783bb5%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
