Project Nixie Tube Clock

xyzio

I become interested in Nixie tubes after I bought a Netduino and tried out the ArduiNIX.  From that I decided to make my own Nixie Tube clock.  My clock, besides showing the time, also shows the date, year, temperature, has an alarm, and can communicate with a PC via USART.

Hardware

The clock is built on two PCB boards connected by two 10 pin IDC cables.  I use stand-offs to screw the two boards together, doing that makes the clock free standing and eliminates the need to build a separate case or stand.  I would have done it on one giant board but that was not feasible due to size limitations in Eagle freeware.  The boards were manufactured through OSHPark.

I use four IN-17 Nixe tubes for the display.  Although they are small, IN-17 tubes are cheap and easy to source through Ebay.  Also I had several left over from my ArduiNIX experiment.

The…

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Atmega328p Breakout PRO

MWH Projects Blog

The Atmega328p Breakout Board has been out of stock for a while. I have half of the new components in hand, and the PCBs have been shipped and are on their way. The rest of the components will be ordered in the next couple of days and, if it’s like the last time I ordered, it will arrive the next day. Friday is Good Friday so I have to keep that in mind, and hope that everything comes in by then. I’ve made the decision that I will no longer sell unassembled kits so I hope I can use this long weekend to put them together so I have a decent stock ready for the next week.

Anyways, while I’ve been waiting for the new batch, I’ve been working on something else…

To the right is the first draft of the Atmega328p Breakout Pro. The current base version will likely drop the ISP header…

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Tech Tear Down – Computer Mouse

Electrothoughts

 

I had the sudden urge the other day to tear apart another electronic device, the victim being the computer mouse that I use for my Raspberry Pi that happened to being lying so very innocently on my desk. The picture above is an ‘artsy’ flash shot of the inside of the mouse.

Taking it apart was easy. There was only one screw in the center of the undersided that I removed with my trusty old mini Phillips screwdriver. The bottom and the top plastic pieces easily came apart, revealing a PCB pressed into the bottom, connected to the wire coming out of the mouse. The PCB itself wasn’t attached with glue or screws, so it popped out easily.

You can see the little red left and right click buttons in the image below. When you click the mouse, the plastic of the shell of the mouse hits the read button…

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Meet The Machines That Build Complex PCBs

How to install Groovy on a Banana Pi or Raspberry Pi

Johannes Lorenz - Coding Snippets

The Raspberry or Banana Pi have already pre-installed Python.
If you like to stay with Groovy on these nice little devices, here are the instructions to install Groovy.
GVM makes the whole process very easy and convenient.

Open a terminal window and use these commands:

curl -s get.gvmtool.net > installGroovy.sh
chmod u+x installGroovy.sh
installGroovy.sh
source “$HOME/.gvm/bin/gvm-init.sh”
gvm install groovy

This will download and install the latest Groovy version.
Check the installed version:

groovy -version
Groovy Version: 2.4.2 JVM: 1.8.0 Vendor: Oracle Corporation OS: Linux

Happy Groovy coding on your Banana Pi,
Johannes

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DIY Ultra Wideband Impulse Synthetic Aperture Radar And A MakerBot

Roman Headgear Looks Less Silly With Lots of Blinky

Help Us Translate WordPress.com

The WordPress.com Blog

When you’re with friends and family, you probably speak in your native language.

Here at WordPress.com, we think of all of you as our family, but we have yet to master all 105 languages into which WordPress.com is translated.

To address this, we’re happy to announce a major effort to improve the quality of our translations.

We’ve deployed a brand new tool, In-Page Translation, to allow you to participate more easily in the translation process — you’re part of the family, after all.

Here’s how it works:

1. On any WordPress.com dashboard screen or blog with its language set to something other than English, hover over your name and avatar on the Admin Bar.
2. Click “Translate WordPress.com” link.
3. A new sidebar with translation tools will appear on the left.
4. Choose one of the rows, enter your translation, and hit “Submit.”
5. Your suggestion is now sent to GlotPress.

Submitted translations will…

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Retrotechtacular: ROTOPARK is a Futuristic Parking Structure from 40 Years Ago

Dual Port RAM Teaches an Old NES New Tricks