{"id":5082,"date":"2012-11-21T07:41:10","date_gmt":"2012-11-21T15:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/?p=5082"},"modified":"2012-11-21T19:32:49","modified_gmt":"2012-11-22T03:32:49","slug":"2012-11-21-nixie-tube-driver-powered-by-single-aa-cell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/?p=5082","title":{"rendered":"2012-11-21 Nixie Tube Driver Powered By Single AA Cell"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I got an email from amzfx&lt;at&gt;email.com with <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.google.com\/site\/wayneholder\/nixietest\">a link to this picture<\/a>.\u00a0 I thought it was cool enough to blog.\u00a0 I figured that most Nixie tubes are driven by high voltage transistors such as the MPSA42, which are only a few cents apiece.\u00a0 In this case, it looks like the tube is driven by ten optoisolators.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t think that most optoisolators were able to handle 150 volts.\u00a0 Maybe these are optoisolated SCRs?\u00a0 Nah, SCRs don&#8217;t work on straight DC.\u00a0 The opto&#8217;s are superior to the high voltage transistors because they isolate the Nixie&#8217;s high voltage from the rest of the circuit.\u00a0 But it&#8217;s hard to justify using them since they cost a lot more than high voltage transistors and the transistors do the job okay.<\/p>\n<p>Another thing I hadn&#8217;t thought about is that since Nixie tubes don&#8217;t have filaments, they don&#8217;t take much power.\u00a0 In this case, it looks like the AAA cell is powering a single transistor DC-DC converter in the lower left, which supplies the high voltage.\u00a0 Since only a single digit is on at a time, I would guesstimate that the high voltage has to supply a current that is much less than 1 milliamp, or much less than 100 milliwatts from the battery.\u00a0 The controller doesn&#8217;t take much power, so the whole thing is really not a strain on the single AAA cell.<\/p>\n<p>However, I will say that it&#8217;s impossible to beat the LCD displays for efficiency.\u00a0 I bought an indoor\/outdoor thermometer with a LCD display from Ratio Snack over ten years ago and it&#8217;s still displaying the temperature 24\/7 on the same AAA battery I installed the day I bought it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got an email from amzfx&lt;at&gt;email.com with a link to this picture.\u00a0 I thought it was cool enough to blog.\u00a0 I figured that most Nixie tubes are driven by high voltage transistors such as the MPSA42, which are only a few cents apiece.\u00a0 In this case, it looks like the tube is driven by ten<a href=\"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/?p=5082\"> <\/p>\n<p> (Read More&#8230;)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronic-components","category-joule-thief-smps-dc-dc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5082"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5084,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5082\/revisions\/5084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}