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So, I tried to free form a similar clock I free formed earlier this year, except it includes the hours, minutes, and seconds. I wanted to see if I could possibly improve my free forming builds compared with the first clock I built, but honestly, it still came out ugly to me.

At any rate, I kinda like the scraggly look of Freeform/dead bug electronics assembly. I’ll never be as good as Mohit Bhoite, Eirik Brandal, etc. However, I noticed that building stuff like this is calming to me. It’s difficult and stressful, although I find that when my job is pissing me off, I spent 15 minutes working on this clock to calm me down.

The awesome part was after I assembled everything onto the base, I decided to just power it up and see if it worked. At first, I set my power supply to 12v and limited the current to 100mA. It powered up and hit the 100mA limit. I slowly increased the current, and when I hit 250mA, all the nixies counted down from 9 to 0, then counted up from 0 to 9, and displayed the time. Sort of. I had to ‘reset’ the DS1302 RTC, installed the button cell battery, and cycled the power…and it just worked. I set the time, and there it was, a working nixie Freeform clock! At first I was excited, then thought, “but now I have nothing to troubleshoot…”

Where do I go from here? I don’t know; I may be seriously thinking about free forming Keith Bayern’s design, a discreet component nixie clock. That kit contains over 1,000 components, but it might be doable and pretty impressive lol