i've been getting more and more into vintage electronics displays recently and i thought i'd make a project using nixie tubes the most useful thing i thought of a clock i planned this all on my head but it's not completely thought out yet but i think it would be cool if the nixie tubes were on top of a box and on the front of the box would be a kumiko panel [Music] after rough milling my strips down to size i could take them down to final thickness using my thicknessing jig then using this 30 degree sled that i saw mike farrington use i could cut the lap joints to make the frame to make all the various angles on the infill pieces i made a series of shooting blocks that i can use with a hand plane or a chisel to slowly shoot down those ends at the right angle and slowly to the right length with the built-in depth stops some may say it's sacrilege but i'm adding a dab of glue as i assemble the frame and the infill pieces after trimming off the excess on the bandsaw i barbarically flushed everything up on the edge sander you know for my first attempt at making kumiko i think i have a usable piece next i am going to use this piece of curly maple to make a box that will go around the kumiko panel now if you've never worked with curly maple before or hard maple in general it's not very fun [Music] [Applause] [Music] after a quick pass over the jointer i decided to change my mind and build a really small river table but then i realized i didn't know how much time it would take for the epoxy to cure and then i remembered i still needed a clock to figure that out so i'm back to plan a after scraping off the excess epoxy i could proceed to mill it down to final dimension i couldn't use my planer or jointer for this because i couldn't get it so that it didn't tear out therefore it's the old renaissance way [Music] i decided i'd use miters for the box joinery and that i'd cut them on the router table to do that i had to glue on some temporary hardboard for the router bit bearing to ride against [Music] unfortunately i don't think my router is fully trained vertical in my router table so i had to go back and adjust the miters with the block plane [Music] i used a box joint blade to create a rabbet on the inside front of the box for the kumiko panel to recess into [Music] the nixie tubes sit within a socket that has to be mounted underneath the top of the box but because of the thickness of the box i have to create these recesses for the sockets to sit within [Music] i had a last minute thought to make the kumiko panel appear as if it's floating on the front of the box i did this by making another rabbit within the first rabbit i'm really glad i decided to go through with the second rabbit because i really like the way the floating look turned out and you know what else i like this video because i clicked like down there and yes you can like your own videos and you should click like too to feed into my own vanity and while you're at it you may as well hit the subscribe button before i glue up the box i'm going to pause and start working on the electronics that will go inside i want to make sure everything will fit and i probably should have figured this out before welcome to my office where i want to show you how this clock is actually going to tick you may have heard of an arduino which is a board like this one that contains a microcontroller and a bunch of other components that i really don't need for this project therefore the logical choice is just to simply use the microcontroller by itself and assemble a board with only the components that i need i chose to use this pic16f886 8-bit microcontroller it has 24 ins and outs and a whopping eight kilobytes of program memory but that is more than enough for my needs this is a prototype of the clock i'm going to make and i made it on a breadboard so i can make sure that my idea is going to work even though the pick has a built-in clock it's not accurate enough to keep time over a long period so therefore i'm using this external quartz crystal so it will do the job much better so let's talk about my goal here this is a nixie tube and i want four of these to display the time now in each nixie tube if you look real close you can see that there are 10 different elements or 10 different cathodes on the inside and they each are in the shape of a number 0 through 9. now one method of doing this would be to output binary from the microcontroller and convert it into something that the nixie tube can understand so the way i have prototyped this clock is to display each four bit binary number in its own color so we can read four different digits the two hour digits and the two minute digits so when i program the microcontroller to turn on it will initially display 12 o'clock as most clock radios do when you turn them on and as you can see here our first hour in amber here is a one in binary and our second hour or least significant hour i should say is displaying a two so we have one two or twelve so twelve something in this case it's zero zero so twelve o'clock so additionally there are going to be four switches or two of these double momentary switches that are going to connect to for the input and they control the time this one is wired into the minutes right now so i can increase the minutes like such so now it reads 1201 two three four five and likewise i can also decrease the minutes by going the other way four three two one zero like i said before i won't be using these leds in the final project but each 4-bit digit will be sent to a nixie tube but since the nixie tube doesn't display binary the 4-bit binary needs to be decoded into something the nixie tube can understand which is where this old soviet integrated circuit is useful all these really contain is a series of logic gates that will output a dc signal to each cathode digit within the tube the anode of a nixie tube requires quite a high 170 volt dc potential for it to turn on or fire as they say the way i'll achieve that is by using this cheap converter that inputs 12 volts and outputs anywhere from 140 to 250 volts dc so since that converter uses 12 volts as an input voltage i want a way to convert 12 volts down to 5 volts for the microcontroller and the way i'll do this is by using a voltage regulator such as this one now i'm not going to show you all the details of the code because it's really boring and i don't want to lose your attention i borrowed this code from jens and his channel is called friendly wire and i want to thank him because a lot of this project was based off of his binary clock build and if you want to learn more about microcontrollers i highly suggest you check out his channel because i learned a lot from there now that i've showed you the prototype and i verified that it works exactly how i wanted to i can go ahead and make a permanent by soldering it all down to one of these perf boards i got started by laying out my ics on my pcb and marking where the 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