my1st try at building a gizmo for son (sephiroth)
Looks good, is it actually lit to say Ecto-1 or is that just printed inside the tubes?
Is that a kit or scratch-built? I’ve got a full Spongeface kit now but haven’t even opened the mailer box yet to tackle the assembly.
Plus, I had already bought a Spongeface motherboard last year, before he switched to selling only full kits, and I have some Nixie tubes from Julz, plus a spare shaver cord from my old electric razor.
So I’m thinking of building one-and-a-half gizmo’s simultaneously. A hero and a stunt, if you will.
Alex
Wow - are the nixies actually functional? Looks like you have some kind of extra circuit on the back? More details, please!
hey Alex
wondered if anyone would notice, they are actually lit from the same 2 AA batteries for the red leds.
did some research on the numitron tubes and found each filament only takes about 20mA at 3volts so i hardwired the leads on the back of the gizmo to light up the tubes
i used a pcb from radio shack and a printout from jarius and amazingly discovered only after gluing the printouts front and back and adding about 1/2 of the components that about 90% of the holes line up, if i do another one i’ll leave the copper side of the pcb bare on the back and not cover it with a printout so i can actually solder ALL of the parts on instead of superglu
jim
Carpeteria
was responding to alex’s post when i saw yours
have not seen any one else try to light them up but it’s pretty simple, my only concern was battery life as the more filaments lit the more current used, ie if you lit all 7 segment plus the dot it would be around 160mA per tube (8x20mA)
obviously i’m not using every segment and i’ve been using the same 2 AA batteries off and on for about a week
jim
Wow! Light-up nixie tubes! That’s above and beyond, Jim!
Can you explain in more detail how to do that? I’d love to make mine more functional once I begin soldering it all together.
Alex
uploaded some more pics of details of circuit, it helps to have a lighted magnifier
i used some fine copper wire stripped from a stranded cable to connect the leads on the back of pcb
note from earlier post found that if use jarius’s jpg of gizmo pcb and line it up right the hole for leads line up almost exact to pcb i used
realized this by accident only after applying the downloaded jpg’s to front and back of shack’s pcb
every component was close to a provided hole except the 4 white sanyo parts with gold leads, i had to offset these instead of
completely parallel
next time will not apply jpg to back of pcb
a note of caution, too much heat from soldering iron will lift the little copper pads from the radioshack pcb