I would get with glassslinger TH-camr that hand makes tubes. He has has made his own Nixie tube and may be able to repair the faulty tube. Very good channel for tube fans!
I'd probably try putting smallish resistors in the emitter of the BJTs, given a fixed logic high voltage the emitter will sit the BE drop lower. Looking at the datasheets of the MPSA42 and B-7971 the segment current it 1.5 - 3 mA, the beta of the MPSA42 is around 75 in the 2 mA drain current region at room temperature so the base current will be around 27 uA, given your 10K base resistors that drops about 270 mV from the 5 volt logic and the BE voltage will be 700 mV at that current, therefore about 4 volts on the emitter. Around 2K resistors in the emitter will set the segment current at 2 mA.
mmmm - drives me krazie! I was taught to put them all the same as we used a Comparascope to visually check a known "good" pcb with a newly completed unit. If a resistor was wrong it flashed quite brightly at you! Could only spend an hour or so on the machine before a headache set in. Oh, the good old days 🤣 (1974 ish).
"Where's that thing?" I am, no doubt, the only guy with this problem, but I find myself scrolling down while watching so that I am not distracted by Fran being her stunning Fran-ness. Anyway, she is the most interesting and "how it's done" pedal tutor I've come across.
Want 4 more? Grabbed some a few years back, and I have no idea what I planned to do with them. They might as well go to someone who will do something cool with them.
Get in touch with Dalibor Farný (he makes nixies and he has a YT channel), he might be interested in getting your defective nixie for reverse-engineering purposes, and if we're lucky, he might even start making some :-)
I worked at a TV station in NYC (WNEW Ch-5) in 1966 that used big Nixie tubes like these in their Visual 2000 on air switching computer. It brought back memories for me.
Those tubes used to be cheap and common on the surplus market. No longer. I had one in my junk box years ago. The sockets were always hard to find, you have TWO of them. Most people just soldered wires to the tube pins, or used socket pins from tube sockets.
Many years ago when working in R&D, I was given an Oscilloscope to repair from the test department. I repaired the scope, and as I was lifting the scope off my bench (I'd coiled the fixed mains lead in one hand and then lifted the scope) accidentality dropped it, but managed to stop the scope from hitting the floor by gripping on the mains lead, however the scope swung and hit me on the knee. I thought I'd better test the scope again before giving it back, and found that it didn't work. It turned out that the jolt caused when I dropped the scope had bent one of the electrodes inside the neck end of the CRT causing a short. I never thought I'd ever see another short inside a once working tube, until the one Fran has just shown.
Cool device. The number of different displays that were used from the 50's to the 70's is amazing. I miss the innovation. There hasn't been anything really new for 30+ years now.
BS. TFTs, LED, OLED, e-ink. We have gone from CRT monitors the depth of your desk to bright, colorful, full HD screens held in your hand. I think you're taking a whole ton of innovation for granted.
@@benmodel5745 But I still sort of agree with Hot Puppy. The technology to display images has changed, but not *how* we manifest what we want to be shown. All those technologies you mention come down to just a bucket load of individual pixels. Now contrast that to the difference between a flip-clock, a magic eye and a Numitron.
@@iamjadedhobo I agree that there's certainly something appealing about older display technology. I've even designed and build a clock using soviet IV-22 VFD tubes. But to say there hasn't been any innovation is nonsense. I think rose tinted glasses are in full effect here. My clock required 3 separate power rails just for the display, and luckily they're all low voltage (
@@CommodoreGreg there's 8MHz internal osc. Serial upload works fine. Just give it the bootloader for a "Lilypad" and select that when uploading and all is good :)
I have 6 of these B7971s too. Positively massive when compared with the tiny JAN7977 that I'm working with right now :-) As for the single anode resistor causing uneven brightness, I thought about a possible solution some time ago, though I never tested it: 1) remove the anode resistor altogether (connect the anode directly to the HV supply); 2) move the resistors from the base to the emitters of the transistors. The bases can be connected straight to the micro or, optionally, use some additional resistors to limit the current drawn from the micro if the emitter resistors are too low value. The micro will drive the bases to either 0V (off) or to whatever voltage it runs at (presumably 5V). The emitters will be about 0.65V lower than that, which means that the voltage across the emitter resistors will be fixed (around 4.35V). Fixed voltage across a fixed resistor means constant current, most of which comes from the collector, i.e. the Nixie cathode. Tailor the emitter resistor values to the segments that they are connected to (higher resistance for the physically smaller segments) and you have a constant current driver circuit with uniform brightness for each segment and less parts than the current circuit (if the base resistors are omitted).
Outstanding Fran! I have a Raymond Weisling “4 letter word” clock with B7971tubes. I, along with several other folks was also ripped off by Mr. Weisling by paying for the second or perhaps it was the third revision kit and never receiving it. I really enjoyed this video, Brought back memories of lots and lots of soldering.
That's is what i bought these tubes for .. the underline is used with 4 tubes for the seconds progress 15 seconds per tube. i have a number of Ray's clocls i build including the 4 letter word "clock"
To get current limiting for each segment try operating the driver transistors in common base mode. Connect all the bases to a fixed voltage (+5V) and connect each emitter to the Atmel output port via a suitable limiting resistor. When the port is high the transistor and segment is off but when the port is low there will be ~4.4V across the resistor so the segment current will be the same as the resistor current. 12K emitter resistors would limit the current to 360uA per segment if that's acceptable. Unfortunately the Atmel outputs will need to be inverted compared to the original program so reprogramming required 😞. The anode resistor is no longer required but a lower value resistor configured to turn on a pnp transistor which in turn shuts off the 200V supply if excess current is detected would be useful additional protection.
I love NIXIEs and retro-tech in general. Back in the day, if you wanted alpha-numerics then by god you had to earn them. Nothing was particularly simple back then.
@@oldmech619 They are all over the former Soviet Union, They kept making them into the 1980's even while they were already drifting towards LED's like everyone else. That's why most of the NIXIE clocks like the one I own come from those countries. They have warehouses full of them that never got used. I'm not sure why you're having difficulty locating them. They're pretty abundant, I've seen them all over eBay
@@bobholt5081 Thanks Bob. There are some NIxie tube clocks on Amazon but are expensive. That’s what I was going by. eBay does have some at a more “affordable” price. I had not checked with eBay in years. Thanks.
It looks like the "traces" on the mica circuit board inside the tube are the same sheet metal that the segments in a more traditional Nixie tube are made from. I had always assumed the segments were etched in the same way that you etch the copper on a PCB since they would be too fragile for punching. It would make sense for Burroughs to re-use the process.
@@mrnmrn1 I would think long term out-gassing would be almost unavoidable with a paint. I suppose it could be vacuum deposited, but my understanding is that those are really, really thin unless you leave them in the chamber forever and might not be up to carrying the required current.
@@ElectricGears The whole inside of the funnel of CRTs is painted with conductive paint. So there are some vacuum safe paints around. But they should be baked before sealing the tube.
If you drive the base directly with 5 volts (output from the 328P) and instead put a resistor on the emitter, you have a constant current source. Resistance, power loss and power loss at the transistor have to be calculated.
Fran, that defective tube is very easy to fix. All you have to do is tape it to a broom handle or a large diameter wooden dowel rod and whack it against the floor a few times, (the broom handle side not the tube side) The broom handle will take the impact but it will shock the crossed cathodes apart. It may take a few attempts but it works. I've done this many times with 100% success. I have over 80 of these tubes in various clocks and also have it's little brothers the 8971 and 5971's. If you need help I'm in Delco, very close to you.
Great to see this running. I like the fact that they included a cursor electrode too. The hours spent on that led test board are not lost on us either Fran. :o)
Splendid! That is so cool. IIRC, there are similar-sized vacuum fluorescent single-character alpha-numeric displays, but when I just looked all I could find were the large 7-segment variety.
You're the Queen of tinkering! And I love this Nixie tubes. Probably, it comes from my childhood: My father worked for Omegä sports timing in the early 70s and he had a lot of these displays. There also were displays consisting of thousand of tungsten bulbs and arm thick cable bundles. I think it was for the Olympic Games in Munich 1972!
Bally Midway made the last gas display I worked on, I use to repair their pinball machines among all their other commercial arcade machines, Thanks very much for this video and project, I really enjoyed it Fran👍
9:07 The Y is on a slant because the datasheet is shared with the smaller B-5971. That tube only has 13 cathodes; it omits the underline and optimises to two vertical cathode in the centre down to just one. So displaying a Y with a vertical stem wouldn't have been possible on that tube. But Y is the only character in the A-Z, 0-9 set which would conceivably need the central cathode to be split top to bottom. It makes you wonder why they went to the trouble! Anyway, thanks for the inspiration to finish my FLW. I've had the tubes for years and they now seem to be twice the price I paid for them. PCB designed and ordered from jlc.
Ma Bell hookup wire. I left my bench and my parts stash at my parents house when I moved out Most all of it was destroyed in a flood a few years later. Many years have passed now and the thing I regret not going back for was a box of small skeins of the color coded wires pulled from the large cables in an obsolete Horizon PBX. Having such a broad choice of color combos made troubleshooting so much easier.
Fran - I have fixed MANY tubes with the shorted pins as you've pointed out. It happens a lot even in simply shipping the tubes. You basically have to smack the tube into the palm of your hand. I have even taped them to (for example) a 2x4 board and kind of let them fall a short distance to the ground. I have been lucky enough to never having any break on me, but had a few I didn't dare risk hitting any harder. The corners (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right) seem most susceptible to this happening. They have never gone back to being shorted. My guess is that it happened during shipping to you.
A friend made a clock with the giant Burroughs tubes in the 70's, long before it was retro cool. I was totally memorized by it when I was a kid. When I started into college he called me and said hey I have some stuff for you and I ended up with the key parts to build my own. Sadly he passed away a few years ago after I had moved to FL and I missed the estate sale which would have been awesome.
Oh man, I had three sets (6 tubes, three boards) about 7 years ago, but we had to severely downsize so I sold them on eBay. I wish I had been following you on TH-cam back then; I would have been glad to send them to you. Aw well, c'est la vie.
Back in the mid 1970's one of my fellow soldiers and I decided we wanted to build an electronic catalog of radio frequencies for our communications section, we were with HHQ 3RD Armored Cavalry stationed at Fort Bliss at the time. So we sat about and began trying to build a setup using just diodes and some of the smaller versions of those nixi tubes which were, at the time affordable enough to play with. We worked months trying to figure out how to get the device that was becoming larger and larger every week to display our frequencies with unit designation but it was quickly becoming a rats nest of wires, most everything was point to point wiring and back then we really didn't have a great understanding of how to properly use diodes and transistors to get our device to have a hard wired memory. About the time we had it working for just the HQ frequencies the inspector from the NSA appeared in his black suit, sun glasses and ever present brief case filled with frightening regulations. He looked at our project and played with it for a few minutes, then pulled a sticky label from his brief case and stuck it across the top of the device, the label: SECRET CRYPTO! and that was the end of it. We could not take it out of the vault, and the NSA scanner said it was capable of being read from outside the vault so it could never be turned on again. I asked him if I could pull all the parts we paid for out of our own pocket, he replied that it must remain in the condition it was when he applied the classification. Then to add insult to injury, when he left, he decided our device was to dangerous to leave in some back water Regimental Headquarters on the Mexican Border, and took it, taking it back to his HQ in Va. Weeks, nay MONTHS of hard work, out the door because some damn bureaucrat decided he liked our toy and took it away from us. I guess when you get down to it, though, the numbers we were playing with were indeed classified so perhaps we did it to ourselves.
Nicely done. A Nixie tube demo and a work of art. Wouldn't it have been cool if the equipment that originally used these had gone through a Fran-style animation on startup. That surely would have brought a smile to the equipment operators.
Nixie tubes are so fascinating for some reason. I finally bought an in-12 kit from Ebay via Ukraine to the states. It only took about a week to come to the east coast
I have 4 of those built into a clock, driven only in 7-segment mode unfortunately, by a GIM AY-5-1224 Clock chip. They cost £1 each at the time, as did each socket! I built it in the '70's and it ran for years in my University lab. Took it home in the late '80's and still have it upstairs!
Have you ever heard of or seen a Charactron tube? Apparently it was a dual stage deflection tube that had one deflection stage that aimed the electron beam at a character stencil plate, and a second deflection stage to then direct that character shaped beam at the desired position on the phosphor face of the tube. Just dropping this here after coming across a reference to the device.
That is very cool, and really took me by surprise! I did not realize that such a thing had ever been made. I prefer the looks of the traditional Nixie tube, but this one is still a fun innovation that later led to modern LED displays.
another lovely video Fran! you've got me sticking around to see the post-credit scenes! waiting for them instead of skipping ahead makes it all the better 😂
I built a 6-digit direct-drive clock with these back in 2007. The prices on these have skyrocketed. I sold my 6 for 100.00 each 5 years ago, and they go higher!
YAY on getting yours running. Please note that the spec sheet gives SEVERAL cathode currents depending on the length, should you use a resistor per segment instead of the anode.
I have a device I built in 1975 with 6 of these. It scrolls the message "EAT HERE". I used a single 14-pin 74141 driver IC intended for a small numeric tube. To keep the IC from burning out immediately, since it was delivering at least 20 times its rated capacity, I had to dim the tubes. Since the IC had 10 states, I was able to time the 10 states of my display such that the IC can last about an hour. (The duty cycle of each driver output is only 10%). Each tube in turn shows "E-A-T-blank-H-E-R-E-blank-blank", which is the 10 states. I made a board of about 75 250V diodes, with 10 ground points which directed the current to the appropriate pins. The main problem I've had with the device is corrosion on the pins and sockets. I'm sure there's some substance I could coat the pins with to help them conduct, so if anyone reading this can tell me what to use, please reply. I'm not an electronics whiz, just a retired programmer who isn't afraid to tinker. By the way, my device could have been made with any number of tubes, but I reasoned that it would be difficult to read with fewer than 6. I made a simple 1-tube device from a microscope box as a wedding present. It had no logic, just a transformer and 16 switches so you could draw a shape, like a peace sign.
Fran finds yet another old interesting gas tube display. The 1 would look better without the bottom bar as that makes it look like an upside down T. The 5 is exactly the same as an S so the suggestion from Burroughs for the 5 would be worth using. The version of Y looks better than the suggested one.
When I was a kid (early 70's), the cheezy UHF station here in St. Louis didn't run any programming during the day. They simply pointed a camera at several lines of these things scrolling stock ticker symbols and prices. I don't know if the display was local, or it was simply a video feed from another location... Fascinating stuff, for about 30 seconds. lol I also remember B-7971's being available in the later 70's through various surplus dealers...
Heh, I have a carton of 5702s that would do the job. Easy to breadboard with, and just enough transconductance to drive from a MCU. Will need a couple amperes for the heaters alone!
If you're going to change out ATmega chips on a regular basis, I would suggest putting a ZIF socket in the original chip socket..... much less wear and tear on the chips and the original chip socket.
id like to hear you teach us more about the use of mica in electronics. Im from an area where they used to mine mica WAY back in the day and that tube is the first ive ever SEEN it used. that sheet of mica litterally looks like rocks ive found on the ground and that is super neat.
OMG! I used to have a bunch of these! Sadly, they were all lost in a flood. I wish I had them now. I think the ones I had even had the top and bottom segments split into 2... can't recall. Thanks so much, Fran! I was using them for a pinball display.
That micro-controller have internal RC oscillator. If you don't mind less precise timing, then you can just enable it and there will be no need to add external oscillator + capacitors.
Cool video this channel is cool with the retro 70s and such plus being born in 67 the 70s and 80s are close to my heart................are you ready for th summer! Are you ready for the good times and such .😁👍
"Lamperts, that's a really word, lamperts"? That whole thing, lol.... Love it. Also, I guess if you wanted to italicize your digits, you could just tilt each tube to the same degree in your overall display fixture.
I own a Sony Sobax 500 calculator. I saved it from getting thrown out at my old company. They just thought it was an old piece of junk. And it works perfectly. Of course it is Nixie tube.
If you have nimble fingers you can wire the proto board with "wire wrap" size wire. The advantage is that the holes are big enough to take a component wire AND the connecting wire. (too many "wires" in this comment?)
Watching you makes me regret getting rid of an ancient, massive o-scope from Bell Labs, a few years back. It had some tubes in it...maybe some that would have been useful. I enjoy your videos!
Just saw you use the plastic tool for bending leads on components at the right place and wondered how the hell I didn't know about them. Off to fleabay to find one as soon as I finish this. Oh, yes. I want one of those tubes to play with, so cool.......
This is so cool! This looks like something you would find in the TVA !
I would get with glassslinger TH-camr that hand makes tubes. He has has made his own Nixie tube and may be able to repair the faulty tube. Very good channel for tube fans!
I'd probably try putting smallish resistors in the emitter of the BJTs, given a fixed logic high voltage the emitter will sit the BE drop lower. Looking at the datasheets of the MPSA42 and B-7971 the segment current it 1.5 - 3 mA, the beta of the MPSA42 is around 75 in the 2 mA drain current region at room temperature so the base current will be around 27 uA, given your 10K base resistors that drops about 270 mV from the 5 volt logic and the BE voltage will be 700 mV at that current, therefore about 4 volts on the emitter. Around 2K resistors in the emitter will set the segment current at 2 mA.
Very cool! I have a pair of these tubes given to me when I was kid by an uncle who was a scientist at Bell Labs... they are a treasured keepsake!
so lucky a really treasure !!
I can't believe the color bands on your resistors are facing random directions! :D
Ooh, burn!
I always do that deliberately. I also put resistors in diagonally on occasions. Good for tormenting people.
@@mbak7801 It's like telling someone to not be a spelchecker.
@@mbak7801 What sort of monster are you? 🤣
mmmm - drives me krazie!
I was taught to put them all the same as we used a Comparascope to visually check a known "good" pcb with a newly completed unit. If a resistor was wrong it flashed quite brightly at you! Could only spend an hour or so on the machine before a headache set in.
Oh, the good old days 🤣 (1974 ish).
"Where's that thing?" I am, no doubt, the only guy with this problem, but I find myself scrolling down while watching so that I am not distracted by Fran being her stunning Fran-ness. Anyway, she is the most interesting and "how it's done" pedal tutor I've come across.
Last year my wife got me a Nixie tube watch Big fan of nixie tubes Awesome project looks really nice
Tubes are wonderfully bright, bright in a wonderful way.
Though not as wonderful nor bright as my fav host Fran Blanche! 🤍🤍
Be sure to watch this one until after the Patreon credits. If you've seen the credits many times, it's O.K. to fast forward over them. 😀
21:24
:D
I come for the education, I stay for the funky credit music :)
@@RobCarraviation Exactly that and you never know what Easter Egg she puts in at the very end! ;)
Wow, it's incredible to learn that Fran, her lab and projects are CGI animations created by a 401 persons team.
Want 4 more? Grabbed some a few years back, and I have no idea what I planned to do with them. They might as well go to someone who will do something cool with them.
Out of curiosity, how much did they cost you? And how long ago? (give or take)
@@loukashareangas4420 $5 each. Garage sale about 5 years ago. I feel kinda bad about how little I paid for them.
Yes, I do. Of course!
@@fletcherreder6091 YOU LUCKY @#!$%^&*
@@FranLab ok, I'll get them packed up.
Get in touch with Dalibor Farný (he makes nixies and he has a YT channel), he might be interested in getting your defective nixie for reverse-engineering purposes, and if we're lucky, he might even start making some :-)
I worked at a TV station in NYC (WNEW Ch-5) in 1966 that used big Nixie tubes like these in their Visual 2000 on air switching computer. It brought back memories for me.
Thats interesting to hear how people have stuff like this used in their life.
Those tubes used to be cheap and common on the surplus market. No longer. I had one in my junk box years ago. The sockets were always hard to find, you have TWO of them. Most people just soldered wires to the tube pins, or used socket pins from tube sockets.
Many years ago when working in R&D, I was given an Oscilloscope to repair from the test department. I repaired the scope, and as I was lifting the scope off my bench (I'd coiled the fixed mains lead in one hand and then lifted the scope) accidentality dropped it, but managed to stop the scope from hitting the floor by gripping on the mains lead, however the scope swung and hit me on the knee. I thought I'd better test the scope again before giving it back, and found that it didn't work. It turned out that the jolt caused when I dropped the scope had bent one of the electrodes inside the neck end of the CRT causing a short. I never thought I'd ever see another short inside a once working tube, until the one Fran has just shown.
Cool device. The number of different displays that were used from the 50's to the 70's is amazing. I miss the innovation. There hasn't been anything really new for 30+ years now.
BS.
TFTs, LED, OLED, e-ink. We have gone from CRT monitors the depth of your desk to bright, colorful, full HD screens held in your hand. I think you're taking a whole ton of innovation for granted.
@@benmodel5745 But I still sort of agree with Hot Puppy. The technology to display images has changed, but not *how* we manifest what we want to be shown. All those technologies you mention come down to just a bucket load of individual pixels. Now contrast that to the difference between a flip-clock, a magic eye and a Numitron.
@@iamjadedhobo I agree that there's certainly something appealing about older display technology. I've even designed and build a clock using soviet IV-22 VFD tubes. But to say there hasn't been any innovation is nonsense. I think rose tinted glasses are in full effect here. My clock required 3 separate power rails just for the display, and luckily they're all low voltage (
You can even run the ´328P with internal oscillator, so even less supporting components :)
Yup. 32KHz if I remember. I remember some negative side effects on older arduino though. Maybe it breaks the serial sketch uploading?
@@CommodoreGreg there's 8MHz internal osc. Serial upload works fine. Just give it the bootloader for a "Lilypad" and select that when uploading and all is good :)
This has to be in the background in all your videos now. It's completely mesmerising.
I have 6 of these B7971s too. Positively massive when compared with the tiny JAN7977 that I'm working with right now :-)
As for the single anode resistor causing uneven brightness, I thought about a possible solution some time ago, though I never tested it:
1) remove the anode resistor altogether (connect the anode directly to the HV supply);
2) move the resistors from the base to the emitters of the transistors. The bases can be connected straight to the micro or, optionally, use some additional resistors to limit the current drawn from the micro if the emitter resistors are too low value.
The micro will drive the bases to either 0V (off) or to whatever voltage it runs at (presumably 5V). The emitters will be about 0.65V lower than that, which means that the voltage across the emitter resistors will be fixed (around 4.35V). Fixed voltage across a fixed resistor means constant current, most of which comes from the collector, i.e. the Nixie cathode.
Tailor the emitter resistor values to the segments that they are connected to (higher resistance for the physically smaller segments) and you have a constant current driver circuit with uniform brightness for each segment and less parts than the current circuit (if the base resistors are omitted).
I want to give this a thumbs up, but with "555" up-votes showing currently, I couldn't bring myself to change it. Thumbs Up Fran!
It went above, I think you can handle pressing the like button now. =)
If you added another like then it would be 556. That's two 555s in the same package.
I absolutely love all these displays.
Outstanding Fran! I have a Raymond Weisling “4 letter word” clock with B7971tubes.
I, along with several other folks was also ripped off by Mr. Weisling by paying for the second or perhaps it was the third revision kit and never receiving it. I really enjoyed this video, Brought back memories of lots and lots of soldering.
That's is what i bought these tubes for .. the underline is used with 4 tubes for the seconds progress 15 seconds per tube. i have a number of Ray's clocls i build including the 4 letter word "clock"
To get current limiting for each segment try operating the driver transistors in common base mode. Connect all the bases to a fixed voltage (+5V) and connect each emitter to the Atmel output port via a suitable limiting resistor. When the port is high the transistor and segment is off but when the port is low there will be ~4.4V across the resistor so the segment current will be the same as the resistor current. 12K emitter resistors would limit the current to 360uA per segment if that's acceptable.
Unfortunately the Atmel outputs will need to be inverted compared to the original program so reprogramming required 😞.
The anode resistor is no longer required but a lower value resistor configured to turn on a pnp transistor which in turn shuts off the 200V supply if excess current is detected would be useful additional protection.
Watching that Nixie tube working is so satisfying....
Really satisfying to watch this tube work !
I love NIXIEs and retro-tech in general. Back in the day, if you wanted alpha-numerics then by god you had to earn them. Nothing was particularly simple back then.
Back then, I really enjoyed them. I still do. Too bad they are hard to find.
@@oldmech619 They are all over the former Soviet Union, They kept making them into the 1980's even while they were already drifting towards LED's like everyone else. That's why most of the NIXIE clocks like the one I own come from those countries. They have warehouses full of them that never got used. I'm not sure why you're having difficulty locating them. They're pretty abundant, I've seen them all over eBay
@@bobholt5081 Thanks Bob. There are some NIxie tube clocks on Amazon but are expensive. That’s what I was going by. eBay does have some at a more “affordable” price. I had not checked with eBay in years. Thanks.
It looks like the "traces" on the mica circuit board inside the tube are the same sheet metal that the segments in a more traditional Nixie tube are made from. I had always assumed the segments were etched in the same way that you etch the copper on a PCB since they would be too fragile for punching. It would make sense for Burroughs to re-use the process.
Might be, but I rather guess thick film printed conductive paint.
@@mrnmrn1 I would think long term out-gassing would be almost unavoidable with a paint. I suppose it could be vacuum deposited, but my understanding is that those are really, really thin unless you leave them in the chamber forever and might not be up to carrying the required current.
@@ElectricGears The whole inside of the funnel of CRTs is painted with conductive paint. So there are some vacuum safe paints around. But they should be baked before sealing the tube.
Fran's new hairdo looks very good. I want to complement her on the new BIG hair.
Stripes reference! Razzle Dazzle! Gentlemen, it's party time...battalion style.
Aaaaaaaarmy training
Yes, foot-Lamberts are a unit of luminance, it's equal to 1/pi candela/ft^2
If you drive the base directly with 5 volts (output from the 328P) and instead put a resistor on the emitter, you have a constant current source. Resistance, power loss and power loss at the transistor have to be calculated.
Thanks for sharing these rare display devices with us, I have never come across these tubes before. Good to see one in action!!
Fran, that defective tube is very easy to fix. All you have to do is tape it to a broom handle or a large diameter wooden dowel rod and whack it against the floor a few times, (the broom handle side not the tube side) The broom handle will take the impact but it will shock the crossed cathodes apart. It may take a few attempts but it works. I've done this many times with 100% success. I have over 80 of these tubes in various clocks and also have it's little brothers the 8971 and 5971's. If you need help I'm in Delco, very close to you.
The 8971 is amazing. I just managed to acquire some last year, after collecting the 7971s for a decade.
@@MattGorbet They are. I actually like the 8971 more than the 7971. I have (2) six digit clocks made with them.
That’s so cool. My Son bought me a Nixie Clock years ago
Damn Fran...those tubes are awesome...and the board is really great!
What a gorgeous tube 😍 you have such wonderful toys Fran!
Great to see this running. I like the fact that they included a cursor electrode too.
The hours spent on that led test board are not lost on us either Fran. :o)
I was wondering what extra segment was all about. Maybe Fran mentioned it, but missed that.
Splendid! That is so cool. IIRC, there are similar-sized vacuum fluorescent single-character alpha-numeric displays, but when I just looked all I could find were the large 7-segment variety.
You're the Queen of tinkering! And I love this Nixie tubes. Probably, it comes from my childhood: My father worked for Omegä sports timing in the early 70s and he had a lot of these displays. There also were displays consisting of thousand of tungsten bulbs and arm thick cable bundles. I think it was for the Olympic Games in Munich 1972!
Bally Midway made the last gas display I worked on, I use to repair their pinball machines among all their other commercial arcade machines, Thanks very much for this video and project, I really enjoyed it Fran👍
Bs, Ds and Vs are actually the most beautiful ones
9:07
The Y is on a slant because the datasheet is shared with the smaller B-5971. That tube only has 13 cathodes; it omits the underline and optimises to two vertical cathode in the centre down to just one. So displaying a Y with a vertical stem wouldn't have been possible on that tube.
But Y is the only character in the A-Z, 0-9 set which would conceivably need the central cathode to be split top to bottom. It makes you wonder why they went to the trouble!
Anyway, thanks for the inspiration to finish my FLW. I've had the tubes for years and they now seem to be twice the price I paid for them. PCB designed and ordered from jlc.
Ma Bell hookup wire. I left my bench and my parts stash at my parents house when I moved out Most all of it was destroyed in a flood a few years later. Many years have passed now and the thing I regret not going back for was a box of small skeins of the color coded wires pulled from the large cables in an obsolete Horizon PBX. Having such a broad choice of color combos made troubleshooting so much easier.
Fran - I have fixed MANY tubes with the shorted pins as you've pointed out. It happens a lot even in simply shipping the tubes. You basically have to smack the tube into the palm of your hand. I have even taped them to (for example) a 2x4 board and kind of let them fall a short distance to the ground. I have been lucky enough to never having any break on me, but had a few I didn't dare risk hitting any harder. The corners (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right) seem most susceptible to this happening. They have never gone back to being shorted. My guess is that it happened during shipping to you.
Beautiful demonstration of this tube. Very dazzle dazzle. Like the custom socket you created for that Huge tube.
A friend made a clock with the giant Burroughs tubes in the 70's, long before it was retro cool. I was totally memorized by it when I was a kid. When I started into college he called me and said hey I have some stuff for you and I ended up with the key parts to build my own.
Sadly he passed away a few years ago after I had moved to FL and I missed the estate sale which would have been awesome.
Big iron should have its own youtube channel and fan club!
Wow, those are big! My dad has a little 7-segment indicator tube somewhere that works similarly.
I remember these being in surplus flyers in the early 70's , wished I'd bought a case of them back then .
Oh man, I had three sets (6 tubes, three boards) about 7 years ago, but we had to severely downsize so I sold them on eBay. I wish I had been following you on TH-cam back then; I would have been glad to send them to you. Aw well, c'est la vie.
you’re so clever for getting this little display to work!
Back in the mid 1970's one of my fellow soldiers and I decided we wanted to build an electronic catalog of radio frequencies for our communications section, we were with HHQ 3RD Armored Cavalry stationed at Fort Bliss at the time. So we sat about and began trying to build a setup using just diodes and some of the smaller versions of those nixi tubes which were, at the time affordable enough to play with. We worked months trying to figure out how to get the device that was becoming larger and larger every week to display our frequencies with unit designation but it was quickly becoming a rats nest of wires, most everything was point to point wiring and back then we really didn't have a great understanding of how to properly use diodes and transistors to get our device to have a hard wired memory. About the time we had it working for just the HQ frequencies the inspector from the NSA appeared in his black suit, sun glasses and ever present brief case filled with frightening regulations. He looked at our project and played with it for a few minutes, then pulled a sticky label from his brief case and stuck it across the top of the device, the label: SECRET CRYPTO! and that was the end of it. We could not take it out of the vault, and the NSA scanner said it was capable of being read from outside the vault so it could never be turned on again. I asked him if I could pull all the parts we paid for out of our own pocket, he replied that it must remain in the condition it was when he applied the classification. Then to add insult to injury, when he left, he decided our device was to dangerous to leave in some back water Regimental Headquarters on the Mexican Border, and took it, taking it back to his HQ in Va. Weeks, nay MONTHS of hard work, out the door because some damn bureaucrat decided he liked our toy and took it away from us. I guess when you get down to it, though, the numbers we were playing with were indeed classified so perhaps we did it to ourselves.
What an amazing tube and build! So cool. Thank you Fran!
That is SUPER cool Fran! AND it showed up in my recommended list :)
Those are some cool displays. They look like the single plane Burroughs Panaplex display inside a single round tube envelope.
Nicely done. A Nixie tube demo and a work of art. Wouldn't it have been cool if the equipment that originally used these had gone through a Fran-style animation on startup. That surely would have brought a smile to the equipment operators.
Nixie tubes are so fascinating for some reason. I finally bought an in-12 kit from Ebay via Ukraine to the states. It only took about a week to come to the east coast
I enjoyed this segment. An ambitious project. Well done!
I want to make these tubes. These are my favorite tubes.
I'm pretty sure you can get argon - filled nixie tubes, but there pretty rare ;)
I have 4 of those built into a clock, driven only in 7-segment mode unfortunately, by a GIM AY-5-1224 Clock chip. They cost £1 each at the time, as did each socket! I built it in the '70's and it ran for years in my University lab. Took it home in the late '80's and still have it upstairs!
Have you ever heard of or seen a Charactron tube? Apparently it was a dual stage deflection tube that had one deflection stage that aimed the electron beam at a character stencil plate, and a second deflection stage to then direct that character shaped beam at the desired position on the phosphor face of the tube. Just dropping this here after coming across a reference to the device.
A component I've never seen before. Well done. Thanks. :)
these tubes are so cool. I'm really jealous that I didn't have anyone to teach me electronicals when I was interested with them as a child.
Nixies have the numbers behind each other. For me, this is more like a Panaplex tube. But it's beautiful!
Shock from less than gentle handling...
Your construction amazes me. 😘
Thanks!
Awesome job Fran! Keep up the good work!
these must have been incredibly expensive, even for nixies, in their prime, with what it took to make them at small numbers. thanks for showing this.
Love those giant NIXIE TUBES! Hope more show up for you some time and you can do a fun project with them.
That is very cool, and really took me by surprise! I did not realize that such a thing had ever been made. I prefer the looks of the traditional Nixie tube, but this one is still a fun innovation that later led to modern LED displays.
another lovely video Fran! you've got me sticking around to see the post-credit scenes! waiting for them instead of skipping ahead makes it all the better 😂
I built a 6-digit direct-drive clock with these back in 2007. The prices on these have skyrocketed. I sold my 6 for 100.00 each 5 years ago, and they go higher!
Razzle dazzle!
My favorite color! 😊
That's a lovely tube.
YAY on getting yours running. Please note that the spec sheet gives SEVERAL cathode currents depending on the length, should you use a resistor per segment instead of the anode.
The wires might be ferrous? Some kind of magnet next to the glass could bend them?
I have a device I built in 1975 with 6 of these. It scrolls the message "EAT HERE". I used a single 14-pin 74141 driver IC intended for a small numeric tube. To keep the IC from burning out immediately, since it was delivering at least 20 times its rated capacity, I had to dim the tubes. Since the IC had 10 states, I was able to time the 10 states of my display such that the IC can last about an hour. (The duty cycle of each driver output is only 10%). Each tube in turn shows "E-A-T-blank-H-E-R-E-blank-blank", which is the 10 states. I made a board of about 75 250V diodes, with 10 ground points which directed the current to the appropriate pins. The main problem I've had with the device is corrosion on the pins and sockets. I'm sure there's some substance I could coat the pins with to help them conduct, so if anyone reading this can tell me what to use, please reply. I'm not an electronics whiz, just a retired programmer who isn't afraid to tinker. By the way, my device could have been made with any number of tubes, but I reasoned that it would be difficult to read with fewer than 6. I made a simple 1-tube device from a microscope box as a wedding present. It had no logic, just a transformer and 16 switches so you could draw a shape, like a peace sign.
I have fixed a couple of those shorts in B-7971 with percussive engineering.
Fran finds yet another old interesting gas tube display. The 1 would look better without the bottom bar as that makes it look like an upside down T. The 5 is exactly the same as an S so the suggestion from Burroughs for the 5 would be worth using. The version of Y looks better than the suggested one.
When I was a kid (early 70's), the cheezy UHF station here in St. Louis didn't run any programming during the day. They simply pointed a camera at several lines of these things scrolling stock ticker symbols and prices. I don't know if the display was local, or it was simply a video feed from another location... Fascinating stuff, for about 30 seconds. lol I also remember B-7971's being available in the later 70's through various surplus dealers...
That thing is amazing, I love it.
The ending it's remarkable
What if we replaced the transistors with vacuum tubes?
Do it old school!
@@afberglund2764 Terry Gilliam's Brazil comes to mind.
Heh, I have a carton of 5702s that would do the job. Easy to breadboard with, and just enough transconductance to drive from a MCU. Will need a couple amperes for the heaters alone!
@@afberglund2764 yes!
Go the whole way, also replace the processor.....
or go super old and drive the tube with a uniselector.
@@paulstubbs2778 motorola 68000 or z80 or intel 8088 ?
Very well presented. I am thinking of making this project using LED strips instead of nixie tube.
If you're going to change out ATmega chips on a regular basis, I would suggest putting a ZIF socket in the original chip socket..... much less wear and tear on the chips and the original chip socket.
id like to hear you teach us more about the use of mica in electronics. Im from an area where they used to mine mica WAY back in the day and that tube is the first ive ever SEEN it used. that sheet of mica litterally looks like rocks ive found on the ground and that is super neat.
OMG! I used to have a bunch of these! Sadly, they were all lost in a flood. I wish I had them now. I think the ones I had even had the top and bottom segments split into 2... can't recall. Thanks so much, Fran! I was using them for a pinball display.
Wow that looks super cool.
That micro-controller have internal RC oscillator. If you don't mind less precise timing, then you can just enable it and there will be no need to add external oscillator + capacitors.
Not with the UNO bootloader unfortunately.
All cool and good. I say, run the "bad" tube at a high voltage and then use some sound waves to vibrate the piece free. Maybe.
Cool video this channel is cool with the retro 70s and such plus being born in 67 the 70s and 80s are close to my heart................are you ready for th summer! Are you ready for the good times and such .😁👍
"Lamperts, that's a really word, lamperts"? That whole thing, lol.... Love it.
Also, I guess if you wanted to italicize your digits, you could just tilt each tube to the same degree in your overall display fixture.
Awesome! Great job Fran!! Inspiring indeed!
I own a Sony Sobax 500 calculator. I saved it from getting thrown out at my old company. They just thought it was an old piece of junk. And it works perfectly. Of course it is Nixie tube.
If you have nimble fingers you can wire the proto board with "wire wrap" size wire.
The advantage is that the holes are big enough to take a component wire AND the connecting wire.
(too many "wires" in this comment?)
Watching you makes me regret getting rid of an ancient, massive o-scope from Bell Labs, a few years back. It had some tubes in it...maybe some that would have been useful. I enjoy your videos!
Anyone who can explain vintage display technology with song lyrics from "Chicago" is tops in my book.
I thought 1-2-3-4 razzle dazzle was a Stripes reference. Maybe they got it from Chicago?
I know nothing about electronics and can't understand half of what you're talking about. Can't stop watching this channel though.
Just saw you use the plastic tool for bending leads on components at the right place and wondered how the hell I didn't know about them. Off to fleabay to find one as soon as I finish this. Oh, yes. I want one of those tubes to play with, so cool.......
Loved the Razzle-dazzle from Stripes.