Reddit:Electronics

The flux arrived early, as well as some cheap helping hands. I used wire instead of blobs and actually repaired the traces instead of the in between this time.

The wires are made out of a torn up desoldering wick, and I used an insulated cable below because I accidentally ripped part of the trace off.

Using flux is amazing, everything just starts sticking to where it needs to go (the wires spontaniously allign).

I cleaned everything with some vodka afterwards.

All buttons on the drone controller work again :)

STM32F103, CR2032, 15 leds, 3 resistors, and one day of work resulted in this.

digital pot

Right before I packed up the device to get it mailed out, a fault showed up in the hours section where one of the hours nixie was displaying a 0 and a 6 at the same time, ended up doing last minute debugging, reinforcing the frame supporting the components, adjusted the wires on the 5vdc power rail to prevent shorts, etc. Mailed the device out yesterday, and am waiting on bated breath that the thing shows up in Hawaii in working order. Fingers crossed!

At any rate, based on some questions on my original post, some people wanted the schematics to this clock. I tried to scan the schematic as an image and will post it here for reference. Note that the microcontroller came preprogrammed and I don’t have the source code. The most important thing is the BCD decoder and nixie drivers. You can use any generic MPU or controller you want.

In this implementation, the only inputs to the BCDs are the serial clock (SCK), receive clock (RCK), and serial data (SI) for each hour and minutes display. Serial clear (SCLR) are tied hi to 5v rail, and the output enable (G) is tied low to ground, basically always keeping the outputs enabled to the nixie driver. There are many many things you can do with a 8bit BCD; a nixie clock is one of those things. For this implementation, you’d just have to write a program for your favorite controller (arduino, esp32, etc) to provide the SCK, RCK, and SI signals (as per the timing diagram outlined in the HC595 data sheet) for each hours, minutes, and seconds of the nixie display.

I also posted another picture of other clock kits I bought from AliExpress. I can’t stop buying shit from that place. It’s like a drug lol. With that said, I really miss the clock I sent off to my grandpa, and I kinda want one for myself. So much so, that I’m planning to buy another kit from fecking AliExpress and give this another go to see if I can make this one better, or it’s still going to be ugly haha

In honor of workbench Wednesday --- here is my home lab

Finally bought a house with space for a big workbench. Modeled this up in fusion 360 and built it this past weekend. A big step up from my old set up.

done with a 4$ iron, unleaded solder and no flux

This was inside my fortune cookie at lunch today.

Nope, I'll leave it in place. Utterly equivalent to spaghetti code programmaning.