I have been making nixie clocks for some time now. I still have hundreds of various nixie tubes and dekatrons in my inventory, but I feel like taking a timeout from the clock projects for a while now and maybe focus on something else.

I have tons of project ideas written down in my TODO list. Unfortunately, I don’t have an infinite amount of available time for these projects, so I will have to prioritize a bit.

Not quite sure what comes next. Maybe a battle bot, maybe something autonomous. I still haven’t had time to take my new Dynamixel controller for a serious spin in the body I have designed for it. The inverse kinematics is making my head explode - even though it’s just basic trigonometry. I have been making some progress, though :)

We’ll see what happens.

To wrap things up a bit, regarding the nixie projects, I decided to make a couple of more in-depth videos about some of the clocks that I have made in the past.

In the first video, I look at the first clock that I made over a decade ago. The enclosure was cast in concrete and the internals were a horrible hack. Still, it made it to the Make blog at the time :)

The video also shows the detailed contents of the Raspberry Pi Nixie clock kit that I made some time ago.

In the second video, I show the shematic for the Raspberry Pi Zero clock internals. I also present two different firmware examples for the clock.

I made a few kits based on this clock design. All these are now gone and I am not planning on making any more. Since I got several requests for these kits after having published these videos on youtube, I decided to opensource everything. I’m not planning on getting rich by selling Nixie clock kits. But I do get that warm and fuzzy feeling for each successful build :)

If you are feeling adventurous you can still build the clock, though. All the schematics, PCB layout, BoM and also assembly instructions are available from my GitHub repository.

The first clock that was built entirely from the sources in the GitHub repository has already appeared in the US, so I guess that it is safe to start sourcing materials and start building :)