EL Wire Nixie Tube Is In Your Reach





Stick around for a video of it in operation.

[Thanks Guillermo!]

17 thoughts on “EL Wire Nixie Tube Is In Your Reach

  1. Interesting build but the numbers are a bit obscured by the wires as you said, maybe this would work better for a seven segment display (although I know this is meant to simulate a nixie.)

  2. 1. The blinking is annoying… (I had the sound off; he may have explained why it blinks.)
    2. It’s a Mason jar (named after the inventor). A “masonry” jar would be quite heavy and hard to seal due to the joints between the bricks/stones ;)

  3. quote: “For those that don’t know, see Nixie Tube is a vacuum tube primarily used in Russia and Eastern Europe to display a digit”

    bzzt! wrong. but thanks for playing.

    the US used a lot of nixies. the brits did. the germans did. you see all of those on ebay as NOS. the russians have the most stock LEFT but everyone who could use them, did, back then.

    1. So.. something I have been wondering for a while… did Nixies commonly show up in regular consumer products? If so then what? Or was it just test equipment like high end frequency counters that used them.

      1. They (along with the electronics to drive them) were far too expensive for consumer products. At the time nixies were popular, a digital frequency display on a radio would have been an order of magnitude more complex than the radio itself.

  4. Original author here.

    The blinking is annoying, which is explained in the video narration. The shield doesn’t cut power to each of the digits cleanly, so the power bleeds over when the digit changes, until the inverter is power-cycled.

    There is some obscurement, but it looks better in person.

  5. Awesome concept, however, EL wires/sheets tend to ‘burn out’ and dim after awhile. I’ve had 3 keyboards with EL backlighting and it seemed that about a year after first use, they seem to be about %70 dimmer than when I originally used them. EL isn’t practical for use in things where the light is going to be on more than a few hours a day.

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