Comments by "Keri Szafir" (@KeritechElectronics) on "The Numitron: An obvious idea that wasn't very bright" video.
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"Wasn't very bright" haha, that's a nice pun!
3:05 wait until you see an IEE (not IEEE - let alone SMIEEE!) Nimo tube... Hey, where's Fran? Again in the lab?
She got me to love all those vintage display technologies, even if most of that stuff is out of my reach economically.
Beautiful closeups here! :)
Don't let incandescent segments (or bulbs in edge-lit and projection displays) go completely cold - use biasing resistors to pass a low current; shoot at a value where they're still dark, but when they light up, that'll reduce the thermal stress, prolonging the filament's lifetime.
VFDs are going down - as far as I know, only Futaba or Noritake Itron make them, and with war in Ukraine, production there was halted. Sad news...
I've never built a clock using any old display technology - apart from my MTZVFDCLK project (Multi-TimeZone Vacuum Fluorescent Display CLocK) that's not finished yet, and is more about telling time in a specified timezone than telling time per se. I intended it as a tool to check the local time of youtubers doing livestreams, because it can get confusing really fast if I need to calculate it myself. Knowing that someone is e.g. in Sydney, Philadelphia or Austin, I could just choose an option in some web interface or send a command by MQTT... and the clock would show me the time anywhere in the world.
But I've used Nixies in a bunch of projects, from thermometers to a little art installation.
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