Make your own Retro Nixie Clock with an RTC!

hi there recently I've been looking through the comments underneath my videos and I noticed that lots of people want me to do a video about so-called Nixie tubes so guess what today I will be talking about sniper capacitors I'm just kidding because I actually just finished creating this retro-looking Nixie clock whose main components are obviously for Nixie tubes a high voltage power source an Arduino an RTC and wood filament for the custom 3d printed enclosure initially I thought this project would be a walk in the park but there were some problems I ran into so let's not waste any more time and let me show you my journey of creating this Nixie clock well let's get started this video is sponsored by jl CPCB whose servers are used for this project in order to get ten PCBs for my Nixie clock at a low price so feel free to upload your Gerber files as well and order PCBs for your own projects with ease first off let's talk about Linux II tubes it is basically a glass tube filled with gas in which wire mesh is placed that forms the digits 0 to 9 all the numbers have one common anode so a plus pole but a separate cathode so a minus pole in order to light up each digit individual year the big attraction of this display is basically the warm cozy light it gives off as well as the mechanical construction of the tube itself and of course there exist different kind of Nixie tubes when it comes to the size but I settled on the I and fourteen ones since they're still widely available and also rather cheap in comparison to other Nixie tubes and with the help of the datasheet we can easily identify which pin is connect - which digit so I hooked up positive 12 volts to the anodes and ground to the digit 5 cathode and as you can see nothing happens because such an exit tube requires a 170 volts firing voltage that means we need a high voltage DC power supply and that is the point where I have to warn you that working with such a high voltage can lead to fatal injuries replicate the zucchet at your own risk with that being said I searched for Nixie a high voltage supply on tindy and quickly found a promising looking bond what I really liked about it is that the physical dimensions along with the efficiency tests and even the whole documentation of the power supply are available after receiving it I powered it up with a 12 volt supply which like expected created 170 volts on the outputs before connecting it to the Nixie tube though I realized that while the tube requires 170 volts for firing it only requires 145 volts and 2 point 5 milliamps for maintaining its function so by doing a simple current limiting resistor calculation I came up with a required 10 kilo ohm resistor that needs to be able to handle above 62 point 5 millivolts after connecting such a resistor to the anode I finally hooked up the high voltage in order to find out that the Nixie tube works just fine next I got myself those K 155 ID one driver I seized whose all datasheet can tell us that it is a BCD to decimal decoder designed to drive gas fault Nixie tubes perfect to use them you simply have to supply them bullfight foods connect their four inputs to a micro controller of your choice and that 10 outputs to the 10 digit pins of the Nixie tube then by pulling leave for imports high or low according to the given truth table you can activate each number individually since I will be using for Nixie tubes - for the hours and - for the minutes I will need four of those dry braces and thus 16 output pins of a microcontroller luckily the Arduino Pro Mini comes with this many output pins and even features a few more ones so that I can still connect and I Square CRTC aka real time clock for which I use this ds1 3:07 breakout boards in a nutshell you only have to program its time once and then it keeps track of the time by itself by using the power of a 3 volt lithium cell so the functional principle of my clock looks like this the Arduino gets the current time from the RTC and then it activates the drivers in order to display the hours and minutes with the Nixie tubes and with those ideas in mind I created a proper schematic for the project with the free easy EDA online software as soon as that was done I click the convert to PCB button and started the PCB design by properly positioning the Nixie tubes next to one another would be defined distance which I figured out beforehand then I defined a size for the outline of the PCB and started arranging the remaining components around the tubes the two special things about this PCB design is that I for one positioned most of the components on the back side in order to save space on the top side so that the housing can later easily close and also that I had to increase the clearance of the ground copper layer because of the high voltage once my PCB design was completes I ordered 10 PCBs both black solder mask and an eco surface finish for a rather low price through jlc PCB which I then received after week of waiting the quality of the PCBs was certainly awesome and thus it was time to first disorder in all the SMD components followed by the resistance five fold regulator and 16 pin IC it's afterwards I soloed male headers to the Arduino Pro Mini that female had us pushed them into the PCB and sold out everything in place I later repeated the same procedure for the RTC breakout boards before doing that though it was Nixie tube time which was the hardest to sold on my tactic was to shorten all the pins remove the sockets hot glue it in place right above the solder points push the Nixie tube in place with a lot of patience solder the pins and remove the hot glue and after adding all the remaining components the electronics for the nicks o'clock were complete and thus I hooked up 12 volts ground and 170 volts for testing after then connecting an FTDI breakout to the Arduino in order to program it I created a simple function which basically allows me to display a different number on each display as a first test though I simply wanted to cycle through the available digits of the Fortis place but after uploading it I noticed quite a few problems the first one was that the numbers count down instead of up the reason for that was that depends of the tubes were not connected to the proper outputs on the driver I sees due to a layout error to fix that I only had to reverse the numbering inside my created function and thus we easily got the correct counting for the our digits the next problem was that the next tube could only display uneven numbers which according to the truth table could be a problem with input a aka pin 11 as it turns out for some reason pin 11 of the Arduino is not able to properly pull the input of the driver IC lo to fix that I had to hook up a 2710 own pulldown resistor to the pin which made the first digit of the minutes counter work just fine now the last digit did not work at all because I use depends a six and a seven of the Arduino which coincidentally cannot be used as outputs so all I had to do was to connect those pins to pin two and one and change those values in the software in order to make everything work and with those problems out of the way I uploaded the ds1 3:07 test sketch from the magic designs ds1 3:07 library to the arduino in order to use the serial monitor to set the time of the RTC afterwards all I had to do was to include this library in my code and add a few more lines in order to read the time and display it and as you can see my Nixie clock works just fine and thus it was time for me to design a proper enclosure for its in 1 2 3 D design and with the help of this wood filaments I 3d printers not only the lids with cutouts for the tubes but also the main enclosure after drilling a hole in it in order to later glue a DC input jack in place I sanded it all down and made it all look nice and shiny with the help of some wood oil then I connected all the components to one another with wire secured the power supply to the bottom with em 2.5 bolts pushed the main PCB in place and close the door up with the lids which I secured in place with m3 bolts and just like that my retro Nixie clock was complete and I hope that you enjoyed watching my journey of creating it if so don't forget to Like share subscribe and hitting the notification bubble stay creative and I will see you next time

Channel: GreatScott!

Views: 1,026,221

Keywords: nixie, clock, tube, retro, tutorial, diy, do, it, yourself, make, project, guide, your, own, beginner, beginners, in-14, in 14, k155id, k155, ic, driver, bcd, decimal, voltage, high, 170V, power, supply, dc, resistor, current, limiting, arduino, rtc, real, time, pro, mini, pcb, custom, design, easyeda, jlcpcb, layout, minute, hour, solder, trouble, error, ftdi, program, code, library, sketch, enclosure, 3D, 3d, print, printing, wood, filament, fix, greatscott, greatscott!, electronics, electronic

Id: ObgmVNV1Kfg

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 15 2019