I recently purchased a set of 6 Vintage Nixie tubes from ebay. The gentleman was very kind to offer me a good deal. I was looking for at least 4 numeric tubes but he only had two. I ended up buying 2 x IN-4, 2 x IN-15A and 2 x IN-15B. Nixie tubes are pretty cool, these were used long before the invention of Led’s or LCD’s. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about them.
To test drive these I used the MC34063 DC-DC converter as it is cheap to use and that is all I had to hand. What we need is at least 170 volts to drive one of these. AN920-D Page 28 has a step up converter schematic which suites this application. The circuit redrawn looks like:
There are many circuits on the internet but most have not mentioned the series 47k resistor, this is very important as it limits the current drawn. Without this the tube will appear brighter but can burn out very soon. The transformer details can be found in the application note mentioned above.
A female D connector was sacrificed on a bench wise for the sake of obtaining the pins that would perfectly fit the electrodes of the Nixie tubes. I don’t think soldering directly to these tubes is a good idea. Connectors can be purchased from ebay but they are expensive.
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