Before buying the board just for the tubes and their sockets, I tested them in case they were outgassed with my HVAC circuit (see my posts about CCFL laptop inverter in end-2015), and they all happily glew.
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| The board on a printout of the schematic diagram for U4 board. |
Looking at the schematic diagram I realised that the symbol Nixie will display only plus, minus or tilde (AC) and that the thousands tube is wired only for 0 or 1: out of the box I cannot make a 9'999 counter, or a 24h clock with it. On the other hand a 12h clock will fit.
Nevermind, I have to light it up first.
Everything on the board is clearly marked, and it matches what is drawn on the diagram I found.
The digital logic needs a +5 Vdc while Nixies call for +180 Vdc. 5V/GND are clearly marked on the board, while HVDC can be reverse engineered to be fed at pin #20. If I was to use the analog part I would have to provide more voltages, like +/- 12 Vdc, but I am not going down that route.
So, 5V is easy. 180V were picked up from my biNixie clock PSU. Fire both and ... there you are!
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| The board greeting me with a reassuring quadruple 0 AC :) |
Then I grounded one of the AC/DC selector pins and a minus sign appeared:
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| DC configuration without input signals. |
According to the shematic, points P and /P are where a counting signal is supposed to be, the output of the ADC process. I will throw in a square wave and see what happens.
