Reddit:Electronics

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

Need to try still if it works

Left one is bought from Mouser for about 6$ each and the right one was less than 1$ from Alibaba. Right one couldnt handle 200V drain to source. While its rated for 600V.

I know they are not the same part but watch out for culprits when buying mosfets. I read some legit suppliers got fake ICs back when there was silicon shortage.

Made by kingbright