Aleksei Karavaev's EasyNixie Promises to Make Nixie Tube Projects Simpler, Neater, and Safer
With an Arduino library and a "smart socket" with on-board step-up converter, EasyNixie covers some common pain points for Nixie builders.
Engineer Aleksei Karavaev promises "a simpler and safer way to drive Nixies" with the appropriately-named EasyNixie, designed to bring vacuum tube-based displays to the masses without some of the traditional pain points.
"I have been fascinated by Nixie tubes ever since I discovered what they are," Karavaev explains. "So strange, so old school, so 'warm.' Unfortunately, they are also hard to control and can be dangerous if not handled properly. Definitely not a beginner's project.
"'Of course,' five years ago, when I started learning about electronics, I immediately decided to build something with them. And, I failed. I was working with a PIC16 MCU, but the code I created turned into a classic example of spaghetti code."
Five years on, Karavaev decided it was time to revisit the project — but rather than building a one-off design, opted to make Nixie tubes more accessible to all with the EasyNixie project.
Launched in the 1950s, Nixie tubes are an iconic display type using a wire-mesh anode connected to multiple stacked cathodes which glow when selected. They're undeniably attractive, but as Karavaev found not always easy to work with.
"The three hardest things about driving Nixie tubes are probably: high non-standard voltages, Nixies require 180VDC," Karavaev explains; many control pins, each digit has its own cathode, which brings 11 digit control pins and comma control pin; non-standard pin positions require special holder sockets."
The EasyNixie, then, solves this by offering a "smart socket" compatible with a wide range of Nixie tubes and an on-board step-up power supply which takes a 3.3V input and converts it to the 180V required to get the Nixie tube's glow discharge working.
A pair of shift registers serve to simplify the wiring, offering control of the high-voltage transistors linked to the Nixie tube's cathodes with just three pins. "Of course," Karavaev adds, "daisy-chain configuration allows connecting multiple EasyNixie modules."
Karavaev is planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign for EasyNixie in the near future, at an as-yet unannounced price point, on Kickstarter; in the meantime, more information is available in the above tutorial video and on the project's Hackaday.io page, with library source code and Arduino examples published to GitHub under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.