Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Prototyping an Arduino and Nixie Tube clock

I finally got an Arduino I could dedicate towards my steampunk clock project. I have an LCD display and Nixie Tubes to pair up. Here's a video of what I have working as of tonight:

You can see that on the lower left are my four Nixie Tubes showing minutes and seconds. Eventually it will just be minutes and hours, but that doesn't make for a good demo video. On the right is the Arduino and LCD shield hooked up to a Chronodot. The Chronodot also has a thermometer.

In the background is the power supply. The project is pulling 0.38 amps at 12.1 volts.

I like the LCD shield from Adafruit. I had to solder the LCD shield together, which I wasn't big on, but I like the ability to change colors and the integrated buttons:


The circuit layout is pretty simple, courtesy of Fritzing:

The software uses this Nixie Tube library, and also this Chronodot library.