Nixie tubes operate through a process called gas discharge. It was also the culmination of a long line of breakthroughs. But if you think about what was technologically possible in the middle of the 20th century, you soon realize it was the most logical and reliable option available. The Nixie tube may seem like an unnecessarily complicated invention for something as straightforward as displaying a number. It's a classic story of 20th-century innovation, complete with a quirky genius, shrewd corporate maneuvering, and brilliant flashes of insight. But some glimmers, at least, of its enduring appeal emerge from the tubes' colorful history. We may never fully understand why this quirky technology, out of innumerable others, has been plucked from obsolescent obscurity. Nearly two decades later, the movement is still going strong, and Nixies now inhabit a unique niche as ultracool retro tech aimed at discriminating consumers.

But their extraordinary resurgence didn't really begin until around 2000, when a small but devoted cadre of hobbyists, collectors, and aficionados began searching out and buying old, never-used tubes and designing clocks around them. Some Nixies lingered on in legacy equipment, of course. The tubes might have died the lonely death of countless other obsolete devices-and yet they did not. In the 1970s, Nixies were eclipsed by LEDs, which were not only much cheaper to make and use but also more versatile. Remarkably, it continues to do so, even for people who, like Farny, grew up long after the tubes had faded from common use. For many people, the warm glow of the Nixie came to evoke an era of unprecedented scientific and engineering achievement, of exciting and tangible discoveries, and of seemingly limitless progress. Born in the basement of a German-American tinkerer in the 1930s and later commercialized by the business equipment maker Burroughs Corp., Nixies displayed data vital to NASA's landing on the moon, lit up critical metrics for controlling nuclear power plants, and indicated the rise and fall of share prices on Wall Street stock exchanges, among thousands of uses. These neon-filled glow lamps were ubiquitous in the late 1950s and 1960s, illuminating numbers, letters, and symbols in scientific and industrial instrumentation.

In 2012, Farny began working to revive the manufacture of a display technology called the Nixie tube, the last commercial examples of which were produced when he was still a child. Carefully, almost lovingly, he unloads crate after crate of heavy equipment and supplies-an industrial glass lathe, a turbomolecular vacuum pump, and glass. He puts on some heavy gloves, steps out of the truck, and opens the back hatch. 1 kohm for R8 may be too high for two LEDs, I suggest 220 ohm.On a cold December morning in the Czech village of Březolupy, a man stops his truck in front of a 17th-century castle. Both registers need the signals RCLK (D8) and SRCLK (D7).Connect Q7S (QH#) of the first register to DS (SER) of the second to transfer the content.You don't need the shift register Master Reset (SRCLR#) inputs.This is also important for the 4 RGB dots. One issue may be noise in a radio next to your circuit. You can try later to remove some of them, if you want to know where stability issues start. It is good practice to place a capacitor from 100 nF up to 1 uF close to each chip between VCC and GND. It is important, that there is not again a long track between the IC and the capacitor.

VCC1 shows a 'dirty' supply of an IC without decoupling capacitor, VCC2 shows the effect of a capacitor close to the chip. The time domain simulation shows such a problem here: The influence on other circuits will be reduced. Simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLabĭecoupling capacitors stabilize the supply voltage at places where fast switching circuits have a high current demand for a short period of time. A capacitor does not allow a DC current to pass, so after power on there will be a short moment where the capacitor forwards the rising voltage but this voltage will drop to zero while the capacitor charges. In your schematic it is in the current path, between the regulator output and the load (the rest of the circuit). There is a capacitor C2 at the output of the LM7805, but it must be connected between the output and GND. You need more decoupling capacitors and a better understanding of the intention behind their use.

Nixie clock