Burroughs Sphericular or Omni Ray M40 displays

[Richard Scales]

I have completed a designed to drive these displays based on the idea of removing the original incandescent bulbs and simply plugging in suitable LEDs in their place.

My problem is that I only have four of these displays and my design is for six of them!

The six digit design is for a fully functional 6 digit clock with time, date, temp, pressure and humidity displayed with NTP Sync and web gui for settings.

The purpose of this post is two fold:

I would really like to get hands on two more of these displays - the Burroughs one ideally though the Omni Ray will sit well next to the Burroughs. If anyone has a stash of these then I would readily trade a kit for the clock for two of them.

Then, if anyone does have a stash of these displays and wants to make them tick then my design can do the job, that is assuming that you are happy to replace the bulbs with suitable LED's (they simply plug in/out so it's not damaging anything).

Also, I know that, for the Burroughs versions at least, they support a left and right hand DP. My design supports up to 4 DP's which could be used as 'colon separators' or decimal points in temp display etc.

Here is a picture of a full 6 digits in action - I came up with the design for this person who had 6 of the displays (after he kindly sent me his remaining 4):

- Richard

[gregebert]

Interesting. I have a similar type of display (IEE350 single-plane) which uses incandescent bulbs. They are a lot smaller than the more-common 327 or 328 bulbs that are easily converted to LEDs, so I imagine you faced a similar challenge.

How did you make your LED replacements pluggable ? For the 327 bulbs, I had to remove the bulb from the base with a heatgun, then solder an LED in it's place making sure the polarity is correct. External dropping resistor is required (I actually use an NPN current-limiter). The bulbs in my IEE displays are too small for this, so I drive them with a current-limiter. There are hopefully enough extra bulbs (this is a clock, so not all numerals are used. Of 60 total bulbs, only 45 get used) to last me thru the years. Despite this, I dont run the clock very much and there is preheat/cooldown hardware and software to extend the lifetime further. Supposedly, these bulbs rated to last about 100,000 hours because this display was intended for cockpit usage.

[Richard Scales]

On the Burroughs displays then bulbs simply push in to sockets and I pulled the bulbs and pushed the LEDs right in - perfect fit!

 - Richard