very cool
I may need one
~
*mcvei...@gmail.com *
On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 12:27 PM Jon wrote:
> Nothing like the Niximatrix for lighting up a whole room in lovely neon!
> Well, apart from Dalibor's H tube installation of course, but that's in a
> different league to everything :)
>
> Yes, if p
Nothing like the Niximatrix for lighting up a whole room in lovely neon!
Well, apart from Dalibor's H tube installation of course, but that's in a
different league to everything :)
Yes, if people have the interest (and the tubes and sockets!), I should
have the PCBs and components for at least
The Niximatrix is a sight to behold!! I must dig mine out... Do you
have any more kits Jon?
Nick
On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 12:55 AM Jon wrote:
> >For the hardware I was thinking that one of the 595's would connect to
> low sided drivers (MPSA42 etc) to ground the required cathodes whilst the
>
I took a similar approach on my designs. Nowadays, all of my projects are
based on the Raspberry Pi (specifically, the Pi Zero W because of it's
low-cost and integrated WiFi). In some cases, the Pi lacks horsepower for
timing-critical needs, so I have an FPGA adaptor PCB that bolts an Altera
FP
Very nice work - a lot more sophisticated than I dare to dream to achieve!
- Richard
On Tuesday 9 January 2024 at 08:55:39 UTC Jon wrote:
> >For the hardware I was thinking that one of the 595's would connect to
> low sided drivers (MPSA42 etc) to ground the required cathodes whilst the
> oth
>For the hardware I was thinking that one of the 595's would connect to low
sided drivers (MPSA42 etc) to ground the required cathodes whilst the other
595 would connect to high sided drivers (MPSA42+MPSA92 etc) to connect the
>desired anode to the HV supply
Yes, that approach works really well
@ David - that is an interesting idea - I did that already in another
design where I wanted to reduce the workload on an ESP8266 so I used a
Teensy running a state machine based piece of code to do the heavy lifting
- the ESP8266 just fed data to the Teensy over a serial connection - I kid
you
Hi,
Next time I do a clock, I am going to separate my hw into 2:
A cheap ARM based MCU using SPI/DMA to do multiplexing and dimming, with
enough IO to drive anodes and cathodes via individual transistors, with
Comms to the main MCU via spi or i2c.
An esp32 or esp8266 to provide application logic
@Mike - many thanks - I think I'm getting it.
- Richard
On Friday, 3 November 2023 at 11:15:27 UTC Mike Mitchell wrote:
> That's basically what I'm doing for my simple case. The upkeep work is
> done after tubes are energized, where I have significantly more time before
> the next event. Th
That's basically what I'm doing for my simple case. The upkeep work is
done after tubes are energized, where I have significantly more time before
the next event. The off time is only 200us so I don't do anything during
the off time. With the fast processors of today you could do "quick"
thi
@Mike
So, I have been getting my head around the whole state-machine concept. I
have one I did before - curiously also running on a Teensy but that was
because I was worried about speed (I had no idea!).
Regardless.
Here is what I think my state-machine might look like:
Set State to 'Turn Off
@Mike, many thanks.
I'll work through that.
- Richard
On Thursday, 2 November 2023 at 12:20:53 UTC Mike Mitchell wrote:
> My most recent Nixie project uses ZM1032 tubes. They are a 9-pin tube,
> with five cathode pins and two anodes. I'm using direct-drive on all the
> cathodes, but skimp
My most recent Nixie project uses ZM1032 tubes. They are a 9-pin tube,
with five cathode pins and two anodes. I'm using direct-drive on all the
cathodes, but skimp on the tens-of-hours digit where I only drive three
cathodes instead of all five. I'm using four SN75468 darlington arrays to
dr
Where it all leads to, I think, is that you no longer need to do custom
logic design, and you can skip the need for certain ICs such as realtime
clocks, by switching to a software-based design, whether it's RasPi,
Arduino, or any other embedded controller.
It's gotten so "bad" that I rarely nee
Dual Core Processors - now my head really hurts - I mean - I love the idea
but don't think my programming skills are ever going to stretch that far!
Just woke early (03.13) - still full of Covid and had a wrestles thinking
session on this during which I reminded myself of all the success that I
I'm using a Pico in my project, I run the tube driving routine on one core
and everything else on the rest so it doesn't suffer from slowdowns.
I've had to introduce a delay to slow it down to a 1ms refresh!
Craig
On Wednesday, 1 November 2023 at 15:47:33 UTC gregebert wrote:
> Multiplexing migh
Well you don't wait in an ISR, so in the ISR it is really just:
- figure out what bits to set
- set them
- figure out when you next want the ISR to trigger
- arrange for that to happen
I've only ever set 64 bits in an ISR so I've no idea if it would break if I
tried to set more, but make sure yo
@David - I should have said - I'm not against LEDs and Nixies in any way -
just not for this project - it is for panaplex displays which don't really
lend themselves to backlighting - though I have done something recently
with FFD21 Minitrons (which are equally opaque) by using side facing leds
@Paul - I have no idea of the sense of scale and the relative times taken.
If I were to hang another HV driver on the chain with associated
electronics to switch the HV, is there going to be enough time to do the
following:
Set the bits for the segments required- I add this step just in case an
@David - many thanks for that caution though there will not be (nor ever
will there be!) any LEDS for this project!
@Pauld - thank you - I had thought of that but I was endeavouring to keep
the code inside the ISR to an absolute minimum so thought that it would be
best handled outside of it and
Hello,
if an ESP8266 is not enough powerful, the ESP32 will do the job.
the ESP_WROVER can be a good platfom.
you should have a look to Mose's work on https://neonixie.com/Z57XM6DV2/
the code is a bit "strong" as it can be used both on an 6 IV-9 clock and a
more traditional 6 digits Z57, superb
Hi Richard,
Remember that the Microchip chips (HV5530 etc.) are just *high voltage*
port expanders. You can use them to control the MPSA42/MPSA92 transistors
too, so assign a bunch of their pins to the cathodes and some to the
anodes. Slight wrinkle is that that specific chip is open-drain, so
Hi,
I offer you one caution with the ESP8266 boards - almost everything is
implemented in the libraries in software rather than onchip hw.
That means doing things like updating addressable LEDs can cause the
multiplexing to glitch slightly because of the need to send LED data at
strict timings.
Many thanks Nick.
Unless anything else comes to light I think I will forge ahead on that
basis. I want to drive 15 segment panaplex displays (16 including the DP)
so plan to use HV5530 or similar driver for the segments, probably two of
them. Then the same MPSA42/MPSA92 driver arrangement for t
Hi,
It’s not difficult. My fumbling attempts at a Nixie clock some time ago
used a 4:1 multiplex ratio, using four digits and only one decoder. I used
the same MPSA42/MPSA92 driver as your example. My multiplex function was
called at 100Hz, so each digit was refreshing at 25Hz. It doesn’t flic
Actually - I just looked through an example over
at: https://www.hackster.io/doug-domke/multiplexed-nixie-tube-clock-759ff5
... and it all seems fairly understandable, have I overthought this?
- Richard
On Wednesday, 1 November 2023 at 09:22:03 UTC Richard Scales wrote:
> The time has come w
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