Device with 28 nixies

[newxito]

We recently had a photovoltaic system installed. I thought it would be fun to build a nixie device to monitor the real-time power flow. 

[Adrian Godwin]

Great ! Clocks are nice and all  but it's good to see something different

On Wed, 17 Jul 2024, 12:52 newxito, <axt...@gmail.com> wrote:

We recently had a photovoltaic system installed. I thought it would be fun to build a nixie device to monitor the real-time power flow. 

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[Peter Hall]

Luv it.. Brilliant 👍

From🚨Peter Hall😁 insidiousnixies🦘Utube

On 17 July 2024 7:52 pm, newxito <axt...@gmail.com> wrote:

We recently had a photovoltaic system installed. I thought it would be fun to build a nixie device to monitor the real-time power flow. 

[Nick Andrews]

Very cool!

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[Mac Doktor]

On Jul 17, 2024, at 7:52 AM, newxito <axt...@gmail.com> wrote:

We recently had a photovoltaic system installed. I thought it would be fun to build a nixie device to monitor the real-time power flow. 

Nice. I take it that the decimal points in IN-12Bs are too small to see at a distance.

Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"

https://www.astarcloseup.com

"If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes."—Roy Batty, Blade Runner

[Nicholas Stock]

What a great idea! I presume you're using an API from your solar vendor to get the info? Looks so much more interesting than a phone app to monitor production/battery etc, not that I dislike mine, but using nixies is always better...!! Any animations to prevent cathode poisoning?

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[newxito]

Thanks for the nice comments!

IN-12B: I don’t have many of them, so I’m using my IN-12A stock.

API: yes, I use the inverter’s direct access API. It consists of simple HTTP GET requests and JSON responses. For security reasons, I have set up a separate VLAN for the inverter. Since there is no Wi-Fi access point on that VLAN, this is my first nixie device with an ethernet port.

Animations: yes, my first idea was to wire only the symbols I needed but eventually I decided to wire them all to be able to prevent cathode poisoning.

I have implemented a 4-color backlight mode with a range rating for each value (poor, fair, good and excellent). I added a much simpler two-color mode (green or red for all nixies) because the first reaction I got was: “Nice, lots of numbers and colors but what does it all mean?”  So, now, if this thing lights up green, everyone is happy :-)

[Roman Hoffmann]

nice! What kind of inverters are you using? I'm thinking of making a PV display like this for my fronius inverters.

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[newxito]

I'm using the GetPowerFlowRealtimeData request from the fronius inverter solar api. We just have one, I don't know if this request works over multiple inverters. 

[Benoit Tourret]

Very nice and very clean hardware.

Is it your design ?

[newxito]

Yes, I designed the display part specifically for this project. It consists of 5 daisy chained “board sandwiches” (driver, LEDs, nixies). The sandwiches are essentially identical, except that the LED board is alternately rotated 180 degrees.

The controller board is a slightly modified version of a board I designed some time ago for a calculator project. The modification was necessary because I wanted to use an ethernet connection.

The power supply is based on the LT3757 datasheet flyback design. I usually use the DA2032 transformer, but this time I used the beefier DA2034, because the neons and nixies consume up to 75 mA.