6 Mar
2007
6 Mar
'07
7:26 p.m.
My great treasure is a box of Burroughs 7971 nixies.
[...]
They have 15 segments each making designing for them a
challenge.
15? I'd na?vely expect to see eight segments radiating from the
centre, to the corners and the centres of the edges, and eight more
segments around the edge, for a total of 16. Are two of them joined or
something?
What I want it a device I can build with a PIC or two
that will
display the time and maybe the temp, plus a scrolling alpha numeric
message uploaded to it via a USB port.
Since you'll have to have a host on the other end of the USB line,
maybe just upload a stream of 16-bit values (well, 15-bit values, but
padding them to 16 bits each is probably easist) and let the host deal
with character generation?
I see USB port boards for PIC use all over the place,
but I'm fairly
daunted by the prospect of designing a circuit flexible enough to
drive 6x15 segment nixies. Maybe a character generator in addition
to the main PIC??
Why bother? Why not just generate 15-bit values for display, rather
than generating 7-bit values that mean something to a human looking at
an ASCII table and then contriving external hardware to convert them to
the 15-bit values the hardware actually needs?
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