The case consists of a empty 1HE server power supply. To make it a bit more interesting I added some handles, mesh and elements I scraped from an old case I found on the flea market. By assembling the case of the clock I managed to break two of the tubes. The case was quite tight and caused some pressure on the glass tubes.
Luckily I had two spare tubes so I replaced them and added more space in the case. However unsoldering the broken glass tubes was quite stressful.
This project is a Numitron Clock based on an Arduino Nano, a DS3231 RTC, some ws2812b RGB LEDs and four shift registers to drive the Numitron tubes. The clock was built as a cheap and easy alternative to a Nixie clock.
The clock consists of:
To keep the design simple I decided to adjust the time only with a serial command. Most of the logic comes from the DS3231_set example code. The Arduino listens on the serial connection with 9600 baud. It accepts the following string: YYMMDDwHHMMSSx
YY= two digit year (example '20') MM=two digit month (example '10') DD=two digit day (example '26') w=separator HH=two digit hour (exampel '19') MM=two digit minute (example '10') SS=two digit second (example '20') x=sparator at the end Full example would be: 201026w191020x for the 26th of October 2020, 19:10:20 To set the date with a Linux computer just type:
