Nixie tubes are awesome looking tubes that contains a wire-mesh anode and multiple cathodes shaped like numerals or symbols. The tube is filled with gas at low pressure, usually neon mixed with argon or/and mercury.
The most commons Nixie tubes are used to display numbers. It was introduced in 1955 by Burroughs Corporation and was mostly use as numeric displays in the early digital measure machine : voltmeters, multimeters, frequency counters. The official production were stopped by the 1990.
Their retro-futurist look provide it a raise of popularity in the DIY community to create steampunk looking electronics machines.
Links :
- More about Nixie tubes on Wikipedia
- How to buy Nixie tubes for your DIY projects
- How to control Nixie tubes with Arduino
- How to drive a Nixie tube (diagrams, electronic sheets and principles)
Projects using Nixie tubes
The Nixie clock
Links
- This kind of model can be bought on this website : https://nixieshop.com/
- Step by step tuto for creating your own using Arduino
The steampunk Raspberry Pi Geiger counter
How I find about Nixie tubes? By digging around this RPi project.
Links:
Calculator
This one seems to be created by Das Kabinett Watches, that usually create steampunk watches.
Watches
This one was seen on Steve Wozniak’s wrist. It was his watch before Apple Watch release. How cool is that? ⌚️
High speed cameras calibration display for NASA
As Nixie tubes can go up to 100 000 changes per seconds the NASA ask the modern Nixie tubes craftsman Dalibor Farny (see below) to create a display using this technology to be able to calibrate 100 000 fps cameras (😱)
How Nixie tubes are created?
By looking about Nixie tubes on YouTube, I found this video from Dalibor Farny that show the whole creation process of a handcrafted Nixie tube and everything. I learned a lot on how tubes are made while watching his videos. What an awesome piece of engineering!
Checkout his website which is as beautiful as his creations : https://www.daliborfarny.com/