Battery-powered Nixie clock?

[Zachary]

Has anyone made a battery-powered Arduino-driven Nixie clock? If so what kind of battery did you use and how long does it last? I was thinking of making a small portable IN-4 clock.

[gregebert]

You can estimate battery life by knowing the capacity and the power drain; in  my case the battery was a 3.7V Li-ion, rated at 1100mA-hr.

If there are 4 nixie tubes, drawing 2mA at 160V, then each tube requires 320mW. Which means 4 tubes will need 1.28W.

The battery above is about 4 watt-hours of capacity (3.7V x 1100mA-hr = 4070mW-hr), so at 100% efficiency, the clock would run about 3 hours of continuous display time.

The demo board for my nixie watch ran for about 6 years on a single charge because I rarely turned on the display. And that was with a well-used cellphone battery, so it certainly did not have the full 1100mA-hr capacity. 

[David Forbes]

I have made a lot of Nixie watches. The battery life depends on how often the display is activated, and the operating current of the tubes. You can use an Arduino if you turn it off when not displaying the time, and have a DS3231 or similar RTC chip to keep time. You can rig a pushbutton and a flip flop driving a MOSFET to turn on the Arduino power, and the Arduino can turn itself off after a few seconds. 

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 7:56 AM Zachary <zacharyl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Has anyone made a battery-powered Arduino-driven Nixie clock? If so what kind of battery did you use and how long does it last? I was thinking of making a small portable IN-4 clock.

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