I built some huge fake "Nixie" tubes for a Burning Man project using empty two-liter plastic soda-pop bottles, with the digits formed using EL (electro-luminescent) wire. EL wire need about 100 volts or so, but AC at around 1 kHz. The frequency can be critical to get good brightness, and also significantly affects the life (although this was only for a two-week project, so I didn't care much).
I ended up making a software-controlled inverter power supply, then using sensitive-gate high-voltage SCRs to switch the excitation voltage to the various digits. They looked great at night (but were invisible in daylight - a fundamental problem with EL wire). The trickiest part was threading the digits (which were supported on coat-hanger wire) through the necks of the bottles; I cheated a bit by cutting a slit on the back side. ~~ Mark Moulding On Tuesday, January 23, 2018 at 7:04:25 AM UTC-8, Paul Andrews wrote: > > Love this: https://youtu.be/JUFx7mmOjXw > -- 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/652b2b3f-2c2f-4110-8f21-a89ebdfab68b%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
