Hi Yall, My love for all things glowing orange started with my dad's nothingboxes back when I was 6 or 7 (Long time ago) . Simple little relex oscilator's using a neon buld, resistor and a capacitor. His circuit was a bit different than most though. I've attached a picture. Naturaly, the powersupply was not what's in the schematic. He used a big 90v battery from RCA that would put a tingle up to your elbos if you licked your fingers and pt both hands across it.
I saw nixie clocks before maybe when I was in my 20s but didn't really have the money to play with them until later in life when I made my NixieNeon clock. It blends neon bulbs and nisie tubes together. I liked it because the processor was not really involved in the running of the clock. It just let it keep the time during power losses and gave it a little eye candy. See http://ww.nixieneon.com. I have a kit or two left and several PCBs if anyone is interested. -joe On Sunday, February 4, 2018 12:00:38 PM CST SWISSNIXIE - Jonathan F. wrote: > I made this post to share my story how i found my way to nixie-tubes, and > i'm curious how everyone else came to this hobby :) > > My way to nixie tubes was a "double accidental". The very first encounter > with this type of tubes were around 2001 when i was around ~10-11 years > old, along my way to school there was a little local scrapyards, where me > and my friends used to go and collect all kind of materials for more and > less usefull constructions of electronic. One day we tear apart a old > calculator that had "strange looking number tubes" and we took a few of > them home, after a few tries to get them on with a lab power supply and the > few search request with the internet of that time didn't bring up anything > helpful, so the tubes ended up in a storage container, which ended back at > the scrap yard again.. > I never seen a vacuum or nixie tube again until 2013. At that time i > ordered a few GM-Tubes from a bulgarian seller on ebay, he put a few IN-12 > as a gift in the package. I instantly remembered my old scrapyard find, and > started to reseach these type of tubes just for curiousity. From there on i > fell in love with the typical orange glow that instantly remains of "old > age" (from my point of lifespan :-) ) and just looks very beautiful. I > quickly discovered that there are alot of different types of nixie tubes > around, so i started collecting them. I also started to find out more about > old electronic technology, and started to collect all kind of vacuum tubes > and circuits. About a year in collecting tubes and stuff i noticed that i > will run out of space.. so i had to decide to only collect nixie tubes > since they don't take up to much space. Today, 5 years later I own around > 240 different types of nixies with around 600 tubes total. > > Im very interested in how you got to the tubes, since there are a lot of > people here that have seen encountered nixies when they still were a normal > electronic part and not something considered rare or collectible. -- 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/18994658.i9P5ZIVMUf%40phil. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
