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pnn32 — VFD Compact Clock (design concept)
#chips #clock #digital #glass #designconcept #electronics #fluorescent #hardware #nixie #clockdesign #nixietube
Published: 2015-08-25 11:42:50 +0000 UTC; Views: 2400; Favourites: 33; Downloads: 70
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Description
VFD Compact Clock design concept
These VFD (vacuum fluorescent display) tubes has outer diameter of 11mm and digits has a size of 6 by 9mm.
Board has size of approx. 112x28 mm.
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Some tech details about tools:
Paint.NET 3.5.10: minimal postwork on some pixels and final image composing
Blender 2.69: modeling and UV mapping separate parts and entire device
Octane Render 2.23.2: materials setup and rendering (HDRI lighting; pt mode with maxdepth=16/16; 8000spp)
Related content
Comments: 30
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Here is >> pnn32.deviantart.com/gallery/4…
my entire gallery of such works... if you are interested in...
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I like the mix of a technologic clock and old style thing, awesome concept work!
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Sorry, the ordering isn't possible
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Honestly: I would LOVE to have such a stunning clock...
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Hey man! Uber Awesome!!
This is the stuff I like. I studied electronics, but all post Tubes. Had old taperecorders from Tandberg and Revox with Tubes. Loved them to bits. Due to money issues I had to sell them with great pain in my heart.
Have you ever seen this: www.frankbuchwald.de/custom/ni…
Have a look. This guy actually builds these lights and has the nixie machine clock. Soooo coool!!
Thanks for this render!
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I looked at them... nice devices, but they can mostly be described as 'steampunk' style
I prefer later digital electronic devices, from beginning of 80's to 90's
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What I like about the machine lights is how they are made. All hand crafted and machined from 'raw' materials. The craftmanship of this artist and his team. Fell in love with it from the first time I saw it.
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Только вот про подключение питания забыл 
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I thought it was interesting that you used a crystal for a time base, rather than a uA 555 or 556, which were pretty accurate if you ran them at high frequencies. The 555 was certainly cheaper than a crystal and the stuff to get it to oscillate, and then to do the count-down on it.
Do you ever actually build any of this stuff?
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AFAIK, the 555 still requires some kind of stable oscillator (RC-based oscillator is depends on temperature at least) and shown crystal is actually 4MHz or something like it, but clocks are traditionally based on 32768Hz tiny oscillators (again, this is concept, there was no actual PCB tracing, parts selection and so on).
Yes, I've build IRL some electronic devices, based on AVR MCUs and featuring various sensors and communication ICs (for RS485 and Ethernet interfaces) - some kind of home automation / just for fun. But they are much simpler in terms of actual assembling and soldering (software implementation of most functions in single tiny chip, mostly serial one- or two-wire digital interfaces, and so on).
Such devices as shown looks nice, but... impractical for me. Too hard to find such parts, develop and assemble board, tuning their analog circuits. But they can nicely act as art objects
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The 555 was a stand-alone oscillator. And it was actually pretty stable if you chose a high frequency. The temperature sensitivity could be tamed a bit by using 0.1% tolerance, wire wound resistors, which used to be easily available (at least back when people still did a lot of analog stuff...) You could also feed it with a free-running LM101 op amp--which had a fairly stable 10Mhz output if you didn't put a cap between pins 1 & 8. 
Yeah, I really did do some of this stuff.
One of my 'projects' was to build an LED clock/timer... It didn't have to be super accurate, but it had to be easily readable from across an operating room. I cheated a bit there, and used a spare output from the step down transformers (120VAC to 12VAC & 5 VAC) that powered the DC power supply to make a timing pulse--I just ran it through an RC network to reshape it and put a blocking diode so the negative going pulse was blocked. I ended up building about 2 dozen of them for the 20 operating rooms we had. The LED readouts were the old fashioned red ones, and each block was about 5 inches high. Mahogany was cheap then, so I made nice little mahogany boxes for them to live in.
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So, it used power line frequency (60Hz?) as clock source... totally like source of synchronization in very first TV broadcast systems
The nowdays typical solution is the using of crystal oscillator with minimum acceptable quality and synchronizing device with NTP server or GPS signal 
(actually seen on several laptops and industrial PCs - with their very inaccurate system clocks while running without network connection 
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Line sync was about the most stable source you could get in the 1970's when I was designing & building all kinds of weird stuff for medical research. There was exactly one publicly accessible atomic clock--and that was the US Navy's WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado. It was available on 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 MHz. We had a master clock at the hospital which 'listened' and synced to the WWV signal. It knew exactly how far away it was from Ft. Collins, and adjusted for the few microseconds of light-speed lag. Which was overkill... but from there, the master clock send out timing pulses to every wall clock in the hospital. It was all extreme overkill. Any clock with a synchronous motor would have been fine. But some slick salesman... LOL...
Interesting that you've had laptops with bad clocks. My ancient Acer laptop, which I just fired up again for the first time in months, was only one second off.
I used to enjoy building all of the weird little gadgets, and it gave me a budget to experiment with...
Some of the experiments were quite successful. A buddy & I at the hospital designed the first 'contact' heart rate counter, using an array of 5 near-IR LED emitters and one IR sensitive 'receiver'. We got it down to something you could attach to an adult's finger. Unfortunately, we left the prototype sitting out on the workbench, and a service engineer from one of our vendors took it. The company he worked for--no names so I don't get sued--reverse engineered our work, finished developing it into a viable product and made millions. We got nothing...
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