You’d probably say that of the rest of Frank Buchwald’s work too.
https://www.frankbuchwald.com/index_eng.html
Personally, I think they look cool, but they are way outside my budget. (And any low priced knockoff is likely to look cheap and nasty) They wouldn’t look out of place in a Myst game.
I have two old-ish no-name PoS tablets sitting around the house serving alternatively as digital picture frames or clocks. There are several Nixie-tube clock simulation apps availiable that look quite nice.
Those particular tubes will run you about $500-1000 for a set of four. The rest you can program with a few dollars in ICs and the parts for a PSU to power the tubes (to make a 12VDC to 160VDC SMPS) will run in the $10-15 range. No need to waste a Raspberry Pi (and then you won’t get derided by Cory for it being an “Internet of Shit” gadget).
Can you suggest a good NTP chipset?
I was thinking more along the lines of a microcontroller along with an RTC that you set manually like some kind of savage. Or you could just use an ESP8266 derived controller but then you’re back into Internet of Shit™ territory.
I would be surprised if it did. The GPS signal would have to contain DST data for every locale in the world. Seems a waste when a simple embedded Linux install will come with that data, and updates.
The pi is dirt cheap. You are not “wasting” it.
I can sort of see this on some movie set with a steam-punk, alternative retro-history thingy going for it. That’s about it.
I wouldn’t call it dirt cheap at $30, and regardless it’s massive overkill to use a Pi for something like this. That’s why I say you would be wasting it.
I did it with ATmega8 microcontroller with 32 kHz clock crystal attached and 74xx series BCD to decimal decoders. There are even special BCD to decimal decoders with Nixie output (7441 and 74141), though I didn’t have those and added high voltage transistors instead. Time is set by potentiometer attached to ATmega’s ADC. Even SMPS isn’t really necessary - I used regular transformer.
*looks at username*
Yup, seems legit.
Yeah, not my thing, but I do see what people like in them.
“Um, where are the Nixie Tubes? I wanted a Nixie Tube clock for my set design!”
“We kind of figured that you would composite them in during post. See, we made a green screen top for it”.
But we are talking about driving nixie tubes which are expensive in both power and money. These days I will use a microcontroller where I would previously have used a few CMOS chips. Its technically over engineering to work that way but because the heavy infrastructure behind the microcontroller is a solved problem, and because it is sold cheaply in huge quantities, it is actually the simplest way to solve many problems.
And yes from one perspective it is overkill to use a 1Ghz CPU and a few million lines of code to drive a clock, in terms of putting the thing together it can actually be the simplest way to go about it.
Its like the post up the page where somebody has a nixie tube clock app on an old tablet. Thats technically overkill, given all the work which went into those tablets, but for him its a cheap, simple solution.
Going that way they could show Nixie tubes the size of rain barrels.
I don’t really agree with this. You can get IN12 tubes for really cheap and while they are high voltage they are low amperage so they aren’t particularly expensive to power. I set up a prototype rig for a Nixie thermometer with about $50 in parts, including the tubes.
That’s cool.
And if anyone nearby can’t read one of your tubes, you could grab the tube, pull it up as far as it’ll go, and point it at that person. You can go, “See? SEE?!”
Budget-wise, for some there could be more than just the cost of the ‘Buchwald’. There’d have to be (for some) room decor that wouldn’t make this thing stand out like a Jaguar in a junkyard.
