[James Glanville] composed in to show of his newest tube project. It’s a clock utilizing six IV-3 VFD tubes. In addition to the tube screens the job prominently features a blue 3D printed situation which hides away all the digestive tracts of the develop including the Stellaris Launchpad which drives the clock.
Speaking of guts, you’ll want to look with a few of [James’] other messages on the project. His very first write-up on this clock shows off the protoboard as well as point-to-point soldering that makes the tubes work. To assist simplify things he went with a MAX6921 VFD chauffeur chip. He mounted it dead-bug style on its own piece of protoboard as well as then soldered all of the required connections to the larger hunk holding the tubes. There’s likewise an fascinating publish that details the switch mode power supply which ramps the USB 5V power all the method as much as the 50V utilized to drive the displays.
If you such as this you ought to inspect out the very first VFD clock he built. We featured it a while back in a links post.