Neon Ring Counter Clock.avi

Neon Bulb clock made out of IN-3 neon bulbs arranged in 8 ring circuits and IN-12A nixie tubes to display the time. The clock is powered from 240v AC @ 50HZ. The transformer produces 125v AC, which is rectified to aprox 170V DC. The 50HZ signal is divided by the 10 bulbs of the first ring circuit and outputs 5HZ. This is further divided down by each ring circuit to produce seconds, minutes, tens of minutes, hours and tens of hours. The last 4 ring circuits are connected to the nixie tubes to display the time. The video shows the clock being set to 2 minutes to midnight to show the clock rolling over at midnight. The time is being set by the application of a magnet which is tripping two read switches inside the perspex case.

[@DanafoxyVixen]

This is awesome, i love the idea of electronics that dont rely on modern transistors or some black-box IC. you can actually see how this works and counts. awesome, thanks for sharing :3

[@Jeffrey314159]

Very clever!

[@whoopjohn]

@NoCampersFluffy Thanks for sharing your experiences. Did you find the glass on many of your IN-3s went darker after you had aged them?

[@whoopjohn]

Very very nice. I have a few hundred IN-3s aged in preparation for a similar venture. Are you willing to share your circuit schematic? Did you get many problems from mismatched IN-3s? Some of the ones I have seem very prone to flickering.

[@computerkiller1494]

hey man, i don't know if you still need the advice considering i'm late 12 years, but here it is: if the glass becomes darker after a couple of days of aging you are probably doing it too intensively. You need to characterize the bulbs before using them as they have very differing striking voltages, in my lot of 100 nixie tubes i found striking voltages as low as 55v and as high as 89v. You need to characterize them and use similar batches for the same counter, because if you use mismatched tubes the counter will not work properly, if at all. If some tubes are prone to flickering you should give them a little more current, at least that worked for me. What is the constant current that they are subjected to? it should be close to 0.8mA to work properly. I chose about 0.7 mA to extend their usable life (nixies are near, just using a bit less current will extend by a lot the lifespan of the tube).

[@adaikkalarajece41]

super

[@MattKeveney]

I too would love to see this circuit. Is that web page done?

[@richfiles]

Are you using an optical detector to activate your Nixie tubes, or is this a direct drive circuit? Is there a schematic that can be downloaded? Very cool! I've built the chip based version of this circuit, but I'd LOVE to do the all neon variant! :D
I also find I like to divide the 5/6 off the 50/60 Hz AC line frequency first, as that gives you a proper 0.1 second pulse, incase you want to use it for something. You could put a dekatron in for tenths of a second, and small nixies to show seconds, if you wanted to get REALLY showy! ◔ᴗ◔