u/MrGuccu

My old base is the leftmost part.

This is my humble collection as a college student.

It's a Citizen Tsuyosa and a Seiko SBSA303 JDM I picked up in Japan this winter. Absolutely love these two watches, but I think I need some more "all around" watches you know.

Any watches are appreciated! :)

Bought these 3x calculators from the thrift store and pulled out their boards w/ the VFDs attached. These 3 all use different VFDs. Paid $21, which I figured was worth the experience. I got 3x transformers as well which is a plus.

SHARP EL-2630P: Futuba 13-LT-48GNYM

This one has the biggest ones so I'm most interested in driving these. The board comes with 3x M54531P transistor arrays which could definitely be helpful.

SHARP EL-1801P: Futuba 13-LT-63N

This one was the brightest at the thrift store. The board has no ICs which I can use.

Canon MP11DX: ????

This one seems most advanced, and has a ton of useful ICs. There are 3x ULN2003 transistor arrays, and 2x 74HC373D Octal D-type latches. I'm not sure which VFD this one uses.

Have any of y'all figured out how to drive these? Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks! :)

Hello everyone! About 2 months ago on a whim I ordered 6x of these IV-11 VFD tubes from eBay, and decided I wanted to design and build my very own VFD tube clock! After getting good tips and feedback on reddit, prototyping everything on a breadboard, designing a custom PCB, and soldering it all together, here's the finished result! This is my first real personal project as a new EE major and I'm thrilled with how it turned out.

The clock runs on an Arduino Nano Every with 6x daisy-chained 74HC595 shift registers and UDN2981A high-voltage source drivers, one pair per tube. The anode and grid rails run at 25V from a boost converter, and the filament runs at 1.5V from a buck converter, all from a single 5V USB supply.

A full writeup covering design decisions, schematic, and PCB layout is on my GitHub Repo. Stars are appreciated! :)

Hello everyone! About 2 months ago on a whim I ordered 6x of these IV-11 VFD tubes from Ukraine, and decided I wanted to design and build my very own VFD tube clock! After getting good tips and feedback on reddit, prototyping everything on a breadboard, designing a custom PCB, and soldering it all together, here's the finished result! This is my first real personal project as a new EE major and I'm thrilled with how it turned out.

The clock runs on an Arduino Nano Every with 6x daisy-chained 74HC595 shift registers and UDN2981A high-voltage source drivers, one pair per tube. The anode and grid rails run at 25V from a boost converter, and the filament runs at 1.5V from a buck converter, all from a single 5V USB supply.

A full writeup covering design decisions, schematic, and PCB layout is on my GitHub Repo. Stars are appreciated! :)

Hello everyone! About 2 months ago I made a post asking for tips on how to build a VFD clock, and after prototyping on a breadboard, designing a custom PCB, and soldering it all together, here's the finished result! This is my first real personal project as a new EE major and I'm thrilled with how it turned out.

The clock runs on an Arduino Nano Every with 6x daisy-chained 74HC595 shift registers and UDN2981A high-voltage source drivers, one pair per tube. The anode and grid rails run at 25V from a boost converter, and the filament runs at 1.5V from a buck converter, all from a single 5V USB supply.

A full writeup covering design decisions, schematic, and PCB layout is on my GitHub Repo. Stars are appreciated! :)

Thanks to everyone who helped two months ago!