21 Dec
2007
21 Dec
'07
11:19 p.m.
On Dec 21, 2007, at 5:58 PM, Tom Peters wrote:
This is off-topic in terms of the industry involved,
but not too
far off in the time period this stuff dates from.
I've got some very nice, rather large Burroughs nixies- 7971 types.
They're 4.8" high, "British flag" display which looks to be 2.5"
high inside the glass. They have 15 segments each-- 14 in the
alphanumeric display part of the tube and one sort-of cursor, an
underline character with the ends bent downwards.
I hear one can dismember D-shell connectors to get some sockets to
solder to a pc board to connect to these. But my problem is driving
them.
For the sockets I'd recommend the Mill-max pin approach; I've used
these for Russian IN-18 and IN-1 tubes in clocks.
Digikey carries a wide selection; see http://dkc3.digikey.com/PDF/
T073/P0462.pdf for info.
Anyone know a good way to drive these, four or six of
them in an
array? I need 170 volts, 21ma all cathodes, between 4.0 and 6.0ma
any individual cathode. I was thinking of a pic at each tube, sort-
of a character generator that would take an ascii code and drive
the right segments. Some sort of escape code would let you send 16
bits to be interpreted literally, i.e. turn on the literal segments
corresponding to the bits set, for more fanciful displays.