A digital-analog-digital nixie clock

[ynfo]

Yes, a pretentious title for yet another Nixie clock project 

However this is a bit different from other projects in that I'm using an un-modified 1970's multimeter. The idea is to display a voltage equivalent to the time, so e.g. 12:45 becomes 12.45V. The block diagram is RTC -> Arduino -> DAC ->Multi-meter where the arduino reads the time, calculates the required voltage and sends it to the DAC.



I was concerned about the last minute digit flickering or being off by one and showing silly times like "12:60" and although this does happen occasionally it's not a problem in real world use. And the clock is still usable as a multimeter!

I haven't seen this approach used before so I thought I'd share.

More details/pictures at http://ynformatics.com/2016/nixie-voltmeter-clock/

[edavid]

Nice!  You can do the same thing with a frequency counter.

[rrinker]

 

Neat idea. I want that meter.