There are very few constants in the world of home-made electronics. things that you might have found on the bench of a mid-1960s engineer working with germanium PNP transistors just as much as you might find on the bench of one in 2017 working on 32-bit microcontrollers. one of these constants is the humble Altoids tin. The ubiquitous mint container is as helpful a size for the transistor circuits of previous decades as it is for the highly integrated circuits of today, and has become something of a conventional form factor.
One thing you might not expect in an Altoids tin though is a vacuum tube, even one protruding through the lid. [opeRaptor] though has done just that, though, with a very nicely carried out design for a NIXIE clock in your favorite mint container. We’re writing this up as a Hackaday prize entry so at this stage in the competition the boards are still in design for the prototype, but the tough power supply to make 180 V DC from a single cell is already proven to work, as it the clock circuitry. The final clock will be a very compact device given the size of the tin, and will consist of an ESP8266 board for wireless network connectivity.
For a project at this early stage, there is frustratingly little real work to go on aside from some renders, but there is at least a video showing the PSU working driving a NIXIE, which we’ve put below the break.
Surprisingly this isn’t the first Altoids tin clock we’ve brought you, there was this much a lot more pocketable binary example.
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