Engineering Lifestyle
Grandpa, tell me about old displays
Michael Dunn
2/6/2013 2:18 PM EST
OK, I'm no Grampa, but I do relish old display technology. Everything today is LED, LCD, LCD, LED, or LCD. Boring. Let's have a look at displays from a more interesting time.
There's no denying Nixie's coolness factor. Let's start there, as most of you have probably seen them somewhere. Each digit in a Nixie display is a thin-formed wire electrode. The tube is filled with neon, and works on the same principle as a simple neon lamp. There's something hypnotic about watching a changing Nixie, as the display plane is different for each digit.
Similar in name and gas, the Pixie is much rarer. I'm lucky enough to have an old rack mount "Scaler" with seven Pixie digits. One day, I'll mate it to a rubidium frequency source for a very retro, very accurate clock. Have a look at Mike's display page -- the Pixies are about a third of the way down, and include a cool animation.
Click to read the rest of this article on Scope Junction.
There's no denying Nixie's coolness factor. Let's start there, as most of you have probably seen them somewhere. Each digit in a Nixie display is a thin-formed wire electrode. The tube is filled with neon, and works on the same principle as a simple neon lamp. There's something hypnotic about watching a changing Nixie, as the display plane is different for each digit.
Similar in name and gas, the Pixie is much rarer. I'm lucky enough to have an old rack mount "Scaler" with seven Pixie digits. One day, I'll mate it to a rubidium frequency source for a very retro, very accurate clock. Have a look at Mike's display page -- the Pixies are about a third of the way down, and include a cool animation.
Click to read the rest of this article on Scope Junction.
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DarkMatter
2/7/2013 11:39 AM EST
Very cool. Building a Nixie clock has been on my project list for a while.
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