Open Source Russian Vacuum Fluorescent Tube Clock

ptorrone writes "Hacker extraordinaire Ladyada (whose open source hardware projects we have discussed before) has just published a complete how-to, with design document, on making your own open source Russian vacuum fluorescent clock. The vacuum fluorescent tubes aren't as dangerous as (high-voltage) Nixie tubes, and there seem to be more of them available in the world. If you're not interested in building a clock from scratch, you can also pick up a kit version. All the schematics, source code, and files are available on the project's page."

Comments

building from old parts

[Thanshin]

A long time ago I redirected my child interest in destroying and rebuilding electronics to tinkering with virtual constructs.

So I shouldn't be interested in "hardware hacking"; however, too many hours of fallout, too many zombie movies and too many post apocaliptic novels have given me a degree of interest in that part of the engineering poetry.

Time to go find an open source rifle made from old car parts.

Quite neat, actually.

[John Pfeiffer]

First off, LadyAda is awesome. I really don't need to say any more than that.

I've been wanting to make something like this for a while now. A year or two ago, I bought a big box of the same old Soviet 'vacuum fluorescent indicator' tubes, but I was always having trouble working out the hardware involved, especially the power supply. Using a boost converter is a great idea which might have occurred to me if I had had any experience with them at the time. (Other projects have since taken priority)

My enclosure design wasn't quite as...ah, 'conservative' as a nice simple laser-cut plexiglass box though :) http://media.giantpachinkomachineofdoom.com/blog/2008-06/images/clockwip3.png

Now I'm going to have to take another try at it! :D

Cute, but how about this.

[lurcher]

IMHO this has more geek points.

Re:And this is worth buidling because.. ????

[Opportunist]

Here's a gadget that is cool (from a geek point of view), that you can make yourself (provided you have the skills, you should as a geek), that makes other geeks go "ooooooh" in envy and awe, that glows in flurescent blue (that by itself is already enough) and you dismiss it as something you wouldn't want.

Please drop your geek card in the shredder by the door on your way out, will ya?

Re:"Open Source" hardware

[Max Romantschuk]

I respectfully disagree.

RMS himself, the holy fanatic of free software, has compared swapping code to swapping recipes for cooking.

Open source and by extension free software is about unrestricted access to the instructions for making something. If this something is a computer program, a piece of hardware, a meal, a knitted sweater or a bottle rocket is irrelevant.

Granted, the term open source as understood by this community is most often applied to software. But the open source model can be successfully applied to any instructions that can be shared and improved upon. I dare you to dig a little, there is a lot more of this "open source" stuff out there than software.

Which brings me to the question...

[CarpetShark]

The vacuum fluorescent tubes aren't as dangerous as (high-voltage) Nixie tubes

Why not? Can nothing be done to correct this?

The all tube digital clock.

[Animats]

That's not retro; it has a CPU in it. Look at this all vacuum tube digital clock where all the logic is tubes. 103 tubes.