Month: February 2019

My Nixie Addiction

Printed Circuit Boards

In the past I have had some success with KiCad and have had boards made at OSHPark which do look lovely. Recently I was made aware of EasyEda, an on-line PCB design tool which (apparently) is easy to learn and easy to make FootPrints with – one of my difficulties with KiCad is MY ability…
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February 18, 2019 0

Spectrum 568

For nearly a year I have had a Spectrum 568 board from PV Electronics sat on the shelf waiting for the moment when I allow my self the pleasure of it’s construction. At the same time, a set of Dalibor Farnys excellent tubes have also been sat there awaiting the same moment. Having recently completed…
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February 12, 2019 0

Lixie Clock Refresh

For me, the concept of sharing the workload between a two micros, one for NTP Time Sync and sensor reading and one for running the clock in a timely fashion (SWIDT?) has worked really well so I decided that it was time to implement the same in my Lixie Clock. I re-worked the state-machine code…
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February 12, 2019 0

PIR Discovery

So, here is the issue: I would like to have a PIR connected so that when motion is detected, the clock comes on. All good so far. in the main program loop I can check to see if the status of the I/O from the PIR has changed since the last iteration and if it…
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February 4, 2019 0

Building a supercomputer

Well, perhaps not quite a supercomputer but I am working on a project to drive six Burroughs B-7971 tubes. Each tube is mounted on a ‘Smart Socket’ which has it’s own PIC micro controller which makes it relatively easy to control as the PIC takes care of what elements of the tube to light and…
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February 3, 2019 0