Category Archives: phosphor

This Nearly NIMO Clock Fakes it and Makes It

Posted on by

Pity the aficionado of rare vintage displays. While Nixies and VFD tubes get all the attention and benefit from a thriving market to satisfy demand, the rarer displays from the mid-20th century period are getting harder and harder to find. One copy of an especially rare display is hard enough to find. Six copies for a clock? That’s a tall order.

That doesn’t mean you can’t fudge it, though, which is how this faux-NIMO clock came to be. [Paul Bricmont] was inspired by [Fran Blanche]’s NIMO tube primer, wherein the rare, single-digit CRT display was put through its paces. We’ve …read more

Continue reading This Nearly NIMO Clock Fakes it and Makes It→

Trashed Vector Game Console Revived With Vintage IBM Monitor

Posted on by

We’ve all had the heartbreak of ordering something online, only to have it arrive in less than mint condition. Such are the risks of plying the global marketplace, only more so for used gear, which seems to be a special target for the wrath of sadistic custom agents and package handlers all along the supply chain.

This cruel fate befell a vintage Vectrex game console ordered by [Senile Data Systems]; the case was cracked and the CRT was an imploded mass of shards. Disappointing, to say the least, but not fatal, as he was able to make a working console …read more

Continue reading Trashed Vector Game Console Revived With Vintage IBM Monitor→

Persistence of Phosphorescence Clock Displays YouTube Stats Too

Posted on by

Looking for an eye-catching and unique way to display the time and date? Want the flexibility to add other critical information, like the number of YouTube subs you’ve got? Care to be able to read it from half a block away, at least at night? Then this scrolling glow-in-the-dark dot-matrix display could be right up your alley.

Building on his previous Morse code transcriber using a similar display, [Jan Derogee] took the concept and went big. The idea is to cover a PVC pipe with phosphorescent tape and rotate it past a row of 100 UV LEDs. The LEDs are …read more

Continue reading Persistence of Phosphorescence Clock Displays YouTube Stats Too→

Not Your Typical POV Clock

Posted on by

Persistence of vision displays are fun, and a natural for clocks, but they’re getting a little Nixie-ish, aren’t they? There are only so many ways to rotate LEDs and light them up, after all. But here’s something a little different: a POP, or “persistence of phosphorescence” clock.

[Chris Mitchell] turned the POV model around for this clock and made the LEDs stationary, built into the tower that holds the slowly rotated display disk. Printed from glow-in-the-dark PLA, the disk gets charged by the strip of UV LEDs as it spins, leaving behind a ghostly dot matrix impression of the time. …read more

Continue reading Not Your Typical POV Clock→

The Nixie Tube Killer That Never Was

Posted on by

With the wealth of Nixie projects out there, there are points at which Hackaday is at risk of becoming Nixieaday. Nixie clocks, Nixie calculators, Nixie weather stations, and Nixie power meters have all graced our pages. And with good reason – Nixie tubes have a great retro look, and the skills needed to build a driver are a cut above calculating the right value for a series resistor for an LED display.

But not everyone loved Nixies back in the day, and some manufacturers did their best to unseat the venerable cold cathode tubes. [Fran Blanche] came across one of …read more

Continue reading The Nixie Tube Killer That Never Was→

[Daito Manabe] Interview: Shocking!

Posted on by

We’ve loved [Daito Manabe]’s work for a while now. Don’t know [Daito]? Read this recent interview with him and catch up. Is he a hacker’s artist, or an artist’s hacker?

My personal favorite hack of his is laser painting apparatus from 2011. The gimmick is that he uses the way the phosphors fade out to create a greyscale image. Saying that is one thing, but watching it all come together in time is just beautiful.

Maybe you’ve seen his facial-electrocution sequencer (words we never thought we’d write! YouTube link). He’s taken that concept and pushed it to the limit — …read more

Continue reading [Daito Manabe] Interview: Shocking!→