This beautiful clock features circuit carving Nixie tubes
This beautiful clock features circuit carving Nixie tubes
Arduino Team — March 14, 2023
Everyone loves a nice Nixie tube clock, but Nixie tubes are expensive and hard to find. Even if you can pick up a working set, riding the vintage tubes is a complicated undertaking by modern standards. Nixie tubes require high voltage and multiplexing, which is a pain. To address these issues while maintaining aesthetics, 4Dcircuitry built this clock that uses fake free-form circuit Nixie tubes.
Each of the "Nixie tubes" used in this project are actually made entirely of 1206 SMD (surface mount device) LEDs. But instead of soldering them onto PCBs, 4Dcircuitry attached them to 0.8mm formed brass rods to create tiny circuit sculptures. These plug into custom PCBs that arrange the circuit sculptures, each a single segment, in a horizontal stack. Glass tubes cover each stack, making them look like Nixie tubes when viewed from the front.
An Arduino Nano board controls the LEDs. It doesn't have enough pins for each segment, so the circuit uses shift registers. A DS3231 RTC (Real Time Clock) module provides accurate timing. The base of the unit is a piece of wood milled on a CNC router, adding to the retro minimalist aesthetic. Although not a requirement, 3D printed jigs help shape the brass rods into the proper shapes, which would be difficult to do entirely by hand.
Arduino Team — March 14, 2023
Everyone loves a nice Nixie tube clock, but Nixie tubes are expensive and hard to find. Even if you can pick up a working set, riding the vintage tubes is a complicated undertaking by modern standards. Nixie tubes require high voltage and multiplexing, which is a pain. To address these issues while maintaining aesthetics, 4Dcircuitry built this clock that uses fake free-form circuit Nixie tubes.
Each of the "Nixie tubes" used in this project are actually made entirely of 1206 SMD (surface mount device) LEDs. But instead of soldering them onto PCBs, 4Dcircuitry attached them to 0.8mm formed brass rods to create tiny circuit sculptures. These plug into custom PCBs that arrange the circuit sculptures, each a single segment, in a horizontal stack. Glass tubes cover each stack, making them look like Nixie tubes when viewed from the front.
An Arduino Nano board controls the LEDs. It doesn't have enough pins for each segment, so the circuit uses shift registers. A DS3231 RTC (Real Time Clock) module provides accurate timing. The base of the unit is a piece of wood milled on a CNC router, adding to the retro minimalist aesthetic. Although not a requirement, 3D printed jigs help shape the brass rods into the proper shapes, which would be difficult to do entirely by hand.
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