Nixie tube experimentation with IN-12

Introduction

I have always wanted to try out Nixie tubes in one of my projects, and here we go. Nixie tubes come in many different sizes and there are both top view and side view nixie tubes out there. I settled on some russian IN-12 top view nixie tubes as they are cheap, and should fit nicely on a front panel (for example on a radio).

The IN-12 was originally used in russian multimeters, radios, frequency counters. This R-155A Brusnika Radio Station serves as a good example on how nixie tubes were used in the cold war era.

Recently, this particular tube has been used for many hobby purposes such as clocks, geiger counters, etc. While I am mentioning it, the major page for steampunk and Nixie-fans is Bad dog designs having loads of excellent clocks using nixie tubes. Ok, enough drooling over other designs. Back to my modest attempts.

Testing a nixie

I purchased a 110-180V power supply kit from ebay. I highly recommend this kit from seller lumos-sk. It comes with an excellent build manual and was very easy to assemble.

The assembled power supply was set to 170V...

...and the IN-12 glows fine.

A PCB for four IN-12 tubes.

To control the nixies, I made a PCB in Eagle. The circuit uses two 74HC595 shift registers to drive four K155ID1 decimal decoders.

The schematic is shown above.

It is possible to cascade several of these boards to drive eight, twelve, sixteen, etc Nixies from just three pins on the microcontroller. I ordered the PCBs from OSH-park, and they were excellent.

However, I should have read Kevin Ryes blog before creating the PCB. I just took it for granted that the Eagle IN-12 part was correct, but as Kevin Rye found out, it is not. The pin numbering on the silk screen is wrong and the anode is connected to pin 5 instead of pin 1. However, if one ignores the numbering, my PCB works if the IN-12 is mounted on the back side of the board (i.e. mirrored). 

Originally I planned to use IN-12 sockets (purchased from Ukraine) but since the IN-12 part was mirrored, the mounting holes were on the wrong locations and it made no sense to use the sockets. In addition, the parts I got were used, so I had to desolder chunks of 30 year old wiring. Totally boring work. So instead, I went back on Ebay and ordered some pins from the old Soviet Union (see picture above). They were excellent for this purpose.

To test the shift registers, I copied the Arduino code made by Imperkins over at Instructables. The only change was to add support for an additional shift register.

The above film shows the Nixie PCB in action.
As mentioned, it is simple to cascade several PCBs to control more nixie tubes. My secret plan for the future is to use eight nixie tubes as a frequency display for a HF radio, such as Farhans Minima.

Further Reading

1. http://scott-bot.com/nixie-bot/
2. KiCAD library
3. IN-12 datasheet (in Russian)
4. IN-12 geiger counter (with laser cutted parts).
5. IN-12 clock (shares Eagle files and svg of front panel cutout)