Crimping connectors and waiting blue smoke

After a full day of work I have the electronics for the clock complete, or so I hope. And not a day without accidents; I spilled some Earl Grey to my Thinkpad T42’s keyboard, and now the m-letter is not working: I had to remap it to dead acute button. Now I need to get 300€ to buy thinkpad X60/x61(my X40 has a dead southbridge and writing with T42 without proper m-letter is very annoying). But back to the project.

Now I have the internals of the clock nearly finished. I fastened a mainboard to the bottom of the case because didn’t find the same L-mounts I used with the nixie control board. I also made a little board for the nixie psu. 

The mainboard is on the left. I originally wanted to install it the same way as control board but decided then screw it up to bottom of the case with spacers because this way it’s much more accessible. I positioned 170v psu to the bottom right corner with it’s own board in order to avoid shorts and interfere. Previously I somehow sorted 170v to 5v and burned all but russian K155ID1 IC’s. Soviet quality ;)

I am still waiting for a new atmega 16 (because the one in board seems to be broken too), and new usbasp programmer.

Mainboard for nixie clock and burned fingers

Finally I got time to continue the nixie clock. This week is the annual autumn break so hopefully I can make most parts of the clock ready. Writing program code is so time consuming that it is necessary to leave it for a later time. Yesterday I started to assemble the mainboard  for the clock. It went mostly without any problems (I dropped my N900 phone which broke down and burned my fingers as usual), and I finished it tonight.

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First post, opened the new blog!

Hello world! This is my first post to this WordPress- based blog. My original blog is terrible, coding sucks, layout is from the 90’s, and I started writing in Finnish, and never got around to translating the articles. So now I’m starting from a clean slate. Maybe this time I will get it right. Only time will tell.

Coming soon: I will try to make a dedicated page for my nixie clock, and maybe translate some old interesting articles from the old blog.