Nixie Tube Clock With Arduino Mega 2560

Abstract

This project started with an old nixie tube display rack and an Arduino mega 2560 with DS1307 RTC.

This project started with an old nixie tube display rack and an Arduino Mega 2560 with DS1307 RTC. The nixies are driven with the SN74141 BCD to nixie drivers. This project was a lot of fun to build it also has a temperature and humidity sensor DHT11.

The display will show hours/ minutes in the frequency section, seconds in the noise section, and humidity or temperature in the level section.The two LED's in the center of the display are driven by the RTC 1 Hertz square wave output and blink alternately. The +/- in the noise column indicates plus for AM and minus for PM. The +/- in the level column indicates plus temperature trending up and minus for temperature trending down.

On top of the display to the left is the 5 Volt supply and the device with the heat sink is the high voltage supply and the thumb wheel is for setting the hours minutes and seconds (not shown is the push buttons for entering the selected values).

Breadboard on top of the wires is it the interface between the nixie tube card binary coded decimal inputs and the output of the Arduino Mega. On the Arduino Mega I have a breadboard shield containing the RTC and some other components then stacked on that is the mega breakout shield for the connections to the nixie display cards.

At the time of this entry I have yet to install the wiring and boards into the 19 inch empty rack space.