why not simply use channel design. route one tube and clone the rooms ?
10 channel nixies, 8 chennel drivers.
so: bad electrical design. should have used 10 channel drivers. now the software is also going to be a mess to control this. why not make a proper single tube drive module.
That is also part of pcb design ... compartimentizing the design , even if you sacrifice some parts it may in the end turn out to be cheaper due to less board work and less complicated software work ...
What complete and utter nonsense. Software is trivial - just a lookup table.
Even if there was a suitable 10 channel driver, it would still be a non-trivial mapping to 8 bit bytes.
And if a 10 bit driver existed, it would almost certainly be more expensive and less common than an 8-bit one, simple because 8 bit parts are much more widely used.
Oh, and there is no such thing as "bad design" - only more or less appropriate for a give set of constraints.
nope. i don't agree. There are dedicated nixie tube drivers. all you need is a 4 bit register , slap an 4 to 10 decoder (74142) followed by a hv driver (can be a transistor array). now you can simply directly shift out nibbles. no need for lookup muckery tabely thingies.
a simple 8 bit shift register can drive two nixies.
so one 'module' would be one 8 bit shift register, two 74142 and an array of HV drivers. it would be a nice compartimentalized module ready for cloning. you could even use an i2c io expander instead of a shift register.
drive two nixies directly from an i2c bus.
That is how i would design it. the modules are now reusable ,i only need to layout one block and replicate it as many times as i want and my software becomes very simple.
With nixies you will only drive one grid at a time so there is no need to wast that many bits to have fine grid control. a 4 to 10 decoder will do nicely.
anyway. to each his own. my design approach is different. i like reusable blocks. makes layout simpler.
to be fair : i wouldn't muck around with any of this. i'd use a supertex high voltage 32 bit shift register in plcc44 ... drive 3 nixies directly. leave 2 outputs unconnected.