Hello all,I thought I'd share my woodworking / electronics project. I built three nixie clocks for Christmas gifts. Here's the link to the whole project.The project started with a circuit board design. This design borrows from this boost converter circuit. In order to drive Nixie tubes, you need a low amperage 170V source, and I was starting with a 9 - 12V power supply. Of course to run the Arduino, I needed a 5V supply as well, and these little guys are good for that. Everything else is shift registers and special interface chips for the nixies (basically BCD chips that can handle the high voltage -- 74141s).Using EagleCad (which everyone loves to hate, but I've kind of gotten used to it), I produced this board design.. Then I shipped the files off to allpcb.com, and received a batch of these about a week later. I populated them with various stuff from Mouser and Ebay, plugged one in, and promptly shocked the hell out of my hand (170V, even at low amperage is not pleasant).So then onto the woodwork. My dad gave me a bunch of scrap wood that he had gotten from a tree he had cut down in his yard that died. I took it to a friend's house who happened to have a nice jointer/planer, and it ended up looking like this. I also had some leopard wood and some bocote wood that my brother had given me as left overs from a project of his. I only had enough bocote for one top and bottom, but I had enough leopard wood for two.I made a jig for my router to do the box joints. I wasn't sure it was going to work, but I more or less followed the directions here, and it turned out alright.Next I needed to figure out how to mount the Nixie tubes. I settled on a design I could 3D print on my little hobbyist 3D printer. It's one of these. I used Tinkercad to design it. I needed a way to make sure the holes in the top were perfectly aligned with the tube support, so I bought one of these. A drill press would probably have been a little better, but I didn't have one of those. So after gluing everything together, and putting the holes in the top and back, I wired up all the buttons, knobs, and such. Then I put the brass inlay designs in. This was square brass stock that I found at a hobbyist store.Next was prepping the Nixie tubes to go into the tube support. The starting point was cleaning their leads of rust and debris. Then, since the leads weren't long enough, I had to solder on a bunch of extension wires. I didn't completely trust that they'd stay separated, so I put each lead in 600V heat shrink. Getting each tube ready and in the tube support was laborious. Here I was at the half way point of one support. Then I needed to get the RGB LEDs set up, so I soldered a common ground on them. The net result of all that hassle looked like this. Next I got the Arduino set up (it's actually a cheap Chinese knock off of an Arduino). I hooked up the real time clock board. and wrote the software. The project probably seems sort of space aged to some folks, but I didn't always go the meticulous route, as this pic shows. Since one of the gifts was for my sister, I wanted to make them sort of special (otherwise I didn't think they'd be a great gift for her), so I broke out my hobbyist CNC machine and routed some text on the bottoms. The text links all three clocks. One is "Faith", another is "Hope" and the last is "Love". I was originally going to do inlay for those, perhaps turquoise, but I ran out of time unfortunately.Final result looks like this.I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has. Merry Christmas everyone! via /r/DIY http://ift.tt/2pjU9LT
