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This is my 3rd Nixie clock.  I obtained some Burroughs B-5870ST tubes and wanted to make a clock with them.  These are awesome quality tubes made in England.  The mesh is super fine and the numbers are very well formed.  They are nice and bright and supposedly ultra long life. I also wanted to incorporate HV5530 chips for driving the tubes.  These allow for greatly simplifying things and also occupy less space on the PCB.  It will also simplify things in respect to dimming the display as there is a blanking pin that can just be turned on and off thus easily adjusting brigness of the display.

 

 

Links to various sections of this article:

• Schematics
• Making PCB's (Main Board)
• Making PCB's (Tube board)
• Pictures during assembly and when assembled
• Some simple code to display the clock

 

SCHEMATIC FOR MAIN BOARD (click for PDF version):

The part of this schematic that does the 12V up to the 190V used for the nixie tubes is based off a module I got from ebay.  I just used the components (Discarding the PCB) and copied it's schamtic for it into my overall schematic.  (Click here for the ebay link).  I also wanted to use an ESP32 microcontroller to take advantage of its power and built-in WiFi and BLE.  The rest is pretty straight forward :  some power regulating, the HV5530's, buttons, potentiometers and passive components etc.  I had never used an ESP32 before (not even a dev bopard) so it would be interesting to incorporate this directly into a project and getting it working :)

The reference schematic from Espressif was straight forward so there shouldn't be any problems apart from the different document versions and conflicting component values! :)

 

 SCHEMATIC FOR TUBE BOARD (click for PDF version):

NOTE : The schematic still shows 5V from when I first drew it up however it should actually be 3.3V wherever it says 5V

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