I wouldn't build a separate depoisoner; just build-in to your clocks. I've had very few issues with IN-18 poisoning. If your tubes have been sitting around unpowered for years, they shouldn't be poisoned and should be ready-to-use. My IN-18 clock runs about 16 hours per day, and at night it runs a 1-hour depoisoning routine that cycles thru the unused digits at a rate of once persecond. Tubes that display 0-9 (such as unit seconds) are left off, because they get uniformly used during the day; tubes that cycle 0 thru 5, such as tens-seconds and tens-minutes, are cycled 6-9. The remaining 10 tubes ( hours, month, day, year) are cycled 0-9 because they are essentially static.
You would think the year tubes would have poisoning problems, but they dont, so the 1-hour cycling seems to be enough. I dont run them at elevated current for depoisoning. The most-troublesome tube is for the unit months, and it can take a few days at the beginning of certain months to fully clean-up. I've never seen a 5092 show signs of poisoning; they are outstanding tubes. They are used in my first nixie clock, run 24/7, and have no depoisoning algorithm. My 7971 clock runs a 24/7 depoisoning algorithm when the display is idle (based on a PIR sensor), and runs 1 segment of 1 tube for about 0.3 seconds, cycling thru all 15 segments and all 8 tubes repeatedly. Never saw even a hint of poisoning. On Tuesday, January 9, 2024 at 3:25:36 PM UTC-8 J.C. Wren wrote: > Greetings. It's been a long time since I've participated in the > neonixie-l group. Having retired and having free time on my hands, it's > time to do something with the stash of tubes I've been sitting on for > years. My intention is to put those tubes in a few clocks I'll design, but > before I do, I'd like to go through and test them all. > > What's the latest and greatest Nixie tester that supports cathode > de-poisoning? I've seen a couple on eBay that seemed a little more basic > than I'd like, and the one from nixietester.com that's no longer > available. I'm not particular if it's a kit or fully assembled. It would be > nice if it has a smart de-poisoning algorithm, such as the one described > for the bi-quinary tubes by Mark Smith. In a perfect world, it would > datalog the current and voltage for each segment. > > The tube models I'd like to test are IN-18, ZM-1040, NL-840, 1970-0009, > B-5092, B-7971, and NL-5859CS. The first three are the critical ones, as > they're my favorite tubes :) > > Any and all recommendations appreciated! > > Thanks, > --jc > > > -- 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 view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/a2e018fc-92d5-4661-99c2-2ce3ce87670dn%40googlegroups.com.
