IN-28's in real life...

[Nicholas Stock]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-HUGE-Industrial-NIXIE-secondary-clock-110x40-cm-IN-28-based-magic-eye-/173902111454?&_trksid=p2056016.l4276

Never seen one like this...cool. I have a boat load of these and may well recreate something similar...

Nick

[Tyler Bourne]

That is cool!  I've submitted an offer.

[Tyler Bourne]

If I get the clock I will have to design a replacement board.  Since they come in packs of 5 or 10 I would have a bunch of extra...

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 3:29:24 PM UTC-4, Pramanicin wrote:

[Bill Notfaded]

Did you get it?

[Tyler Bourne]

I did!
I will reverse engineer it and make a replacement board.  I will order 10 of them unless anyone else wants to buy(or trade for) some.

In the pictures it looks like there is a board that holds the tubes and a driver board on the back.

I will try and make the tube boards as universal as possible so people can connect their own drivers.  I might also design a modern driver board as well to go with it.

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 10:11:41 PM UTC-4, Bill Notfaded wrote:

Did you get it?

[Tyler Bourne]

The clock has arrived!  It's Huge!  

It seems like the clock was in the process of being stripped for parts when it was saved.  The tens of hours board was covered in nasty flux, probably the plumbing kind.  I've cleaned it up and put it back in.

I've created a schematic for the display board and will start working on a replacement.  While the display boards are all the same the control boards attached to the back of them are all different depending on which digits are needed.  I can tell this is a 12 hour clock since the tens of hours digit can't form a 2, interestingly most for the tubes on that board have never been used.

Since the display boards and the controller boards are separate I can replicate the display board the way it is.  I will create a replacement control board for my clock and will also create a more modern control board for use with the spare display boards I will have. 

The IN-28 is an odd nixie, it runs at a higher voltage and has a control grid.  All the groups of control grids are connected to the HV supply through a 3.9M resistor and to the chips through a 1M resistor.  I'll have to figure out what all these chips are and find a modern equivalent.

If any Russian speaking members of the group can help identifying the chips I would be super grateful.

[Tyler Bourne]

[Tyler Bourne]

To see the images at full size remove the =S400 from the end of the URL.

[David Speck MD]

Tyler,

The board markings are incongruous.

The resistors in one photo are marked R1 through R6. but the character "R" is not in the Cyrillic alphabet. 

There is also a "V1" designation, which is not a Cyrillic character, either.  Voltage would have been designated with a "B" character.

The markings on the ICs are consistent with Cyrillic characters, and the IC designs look typical for Russian chips of the era.

It's interesting that there are date codes ranging from '73 to '80, but I don't see any obvious signs of rework on the PCB.

Anything else in Russian you need help with?

Dave

[alb.001 alb.001]

I tried clicking on one of the links then deleted the =... at the end of the URL but Google still blocks viewing.  Could you just add them to a copy of your email.

Thanks Phil

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[Tyler Bourne]

I think all the black writing was done later.  Might have been a repair person or someone trying to do what I'm doing.  It was shipped from Latvia so maybe someone there was using English (or at least the same letters for Volts and Resistors).

The date on the manufacturer label on the back of the clock is 1980.  I will post a picture of it, it has the manufacturer logo/factory symbol on it.

Google has been giving me a hard time with the pictures.  I told it to show them full size but I guess that won't work.  I'll send a few pictures in separate messages.

[Tyler Bourne]

Tens of hours board

Tens of Minutes board

 

[Tyler Bourne]

Minutes board, This one will be the one I replicate since it can display all digits and should be the same as the missing Hours Board.

Mainboard chips

These pictures should appear full size when opened in a new tab.  I hope.

[Nicholas Stock]

Nice. I think a board that can drive a matrix of these would be more versatile?

Sent from my iPhone

On May 23, 2019, at 13:14, Tyler Bourne <speedy...@gmail.com> wrote:

Minutes board, This one will be the one I replicate since it can display all digits and should be the same as the missing Hours Board.

<IMG_20190523_091640.jpg>

Mainboard chips

<IMG_20190523_091746.jpg>

These pictures should appear full size when opened in a new tab.  I hope.

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<IMG_20190523_091640.jpg>

<IMG_20190523_091746.jpg>

[Tyler Bourne]

A matrix would be more useful. Could make them tileable too.
I have to make a replacement for this clock though so I will have extra 7segment boards of this shape.

[ZY]

What is your plan for powering this display? I ask because I also have 4 modules that I'm trying to get to work.

As far as I can see, at 13mA per tube, lighting all 23 digits requires 0.3A, which at 175V is like 52 watts? And that's just one of the digits.

[Paul Andrews]

These things won't light reliably at 175V. In my experience you will need more like 240V.

[gregebert]

My big clock simulates clock-hands with 306 NE-2H bulbs; during self-test, all of them light-up and you can actually feel the light on your face. It's a weird sensation because the bulbs dont actually heat-up and re-radiate in that short of time.

[Bill Notfaded]

Sounds like you could light up a stadium with it!

[Tyler Bourne]

I haven't gone over the power supply yet. It looks like the main transformer is missing. If I can figure out what voltages it needs I can find/make a replacement. The wires from the socket to the transformer look incredibly thin. With all digits lit it must draw around 150-200 watts if each one draws around 50W. The draw would depend on the time but I'm not sure how those thin wires handled it. It might have some sort of multiplexing going on so that all segments are not lit at once.

[Terry Kennedy]

On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 5:59:48 PM UTC-4, gregebert wrote:

My big clock simulates clock-hands with 306 NE-2H bulbs; during self-test, all of them light-up and you can actually feel the light on your face. It's a weird sensation because the bulbs dont actually heat-up and re-radiate in that short of time.

When I ran the computer center at St. Potato's (see https://www.glaver.org/blog/?p=926 for some background) we had acquired a donated Gandalf Quad PACX IV which was a 1024-terminal to 512-host-port concentrator. Each port had 4 red LEDs, so a total of 6144 LEDs. It also had a "lamp test" button. I bet you can see where this is going... Those LEDs gave off enough IR that you could feel it from quite some distance away - we'd have people stand there with their eyes closed and hit the lamp test button. I wonder how much of the power supply capacity was in there just to handle the lamp test function. Of course, IBM 370 systems had incandescent lamps and the CPU "lamp test" button would light up everything on the CPU and most peripherals - but that CPU had a 3-phase 60A power connector.

I eventually got a trade-in credit from DEC to replace the PACX with a bunch of DECserver 550 units. Between that credit, the educational discount, and some special discounts I applied creatively, they actually paid us to take the DS550s. And then we made them haul away the PACX, because it was a trade-in after all.

[Charles MacDonald]

On 2019-05-31 10:36 p.m., Terry Kennedy wrote:
> Gandalf Quad PACX IV which was a 1024-terminal to
> 512-host-port concentrator. Each port had 4 red LEDs, so a total of 6144
> LEDs. It also had a "lamp test" button. I bet you can see where this is
> going... Those LEDs gave off enough IR that you could feel it from quite
> some distance away

I was always sad about Gandalf, they kinda Zigged when everyone else
zagged. Way Back when I recall showing one of their engineers one of
the First HAYES modems -and I asked why Gandalf was not in the market.
He answered that PCs were Kids stuff, and that they only made products
for data centers.

I also recall lightly hacking a PACX one time. The computer I wanted
at a certain local site had limited dial up lines, but the site where it
was had other lines for commercial users - dialing up that line the PACX
asked me to provide the "CLASS" I wanted and was happy to connect me.

--
Charles MacDonald Stittsville Ontario
cm...@zeusprune.ca Just Beyond the Fringe
No Microsoft Products were used in sending this e-mail.

[Terry Kennedy]

On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 11:02:10 PM UTC-4, charles wrote:

I was always sad about Gandalf, they kinda Zigged when everyone else
zagged.  Way Back when I recall showing one of their engineers one of
the First HAYES modems -and I asked why Gandalf was not in the market.
He answered that PCs were Kids stuff, and that they only made products
for data centers.

To be fair, that wasn't just Gandalf - that was the mind-set of most of the industry. In the product space that Gandalf occupied there were also companies like Case and DCA, neither of whom were able to successfully transition to the new market. DCA did a quick save by purchasing the IRMA company, who made 3270 adapters for PCs (and later Macs and also standalone units). So they had a new market, pretty much all to themselves, while continuing to have sales / support income from legacy customers.

On the other hand, those established companies were selling their products at much higher prices (the 4-port terminal-side board for the PACX IV was $600, and most of that was profit) and they also had partnerships with established modem vendors like ComData and perhaps didn't want to disrupt those deals in order to get into a very price-sensitive market of unknown (at the time) size.

There wasn't a lot of movement in the other direction - of the early low-end modem makers, US Robotics was probably the only one to get any sort of sizable penetration of the host-side market. Part of this was a complete lack of understanding about how sales were made on the host side - I don't think any of the low-end modem makers offered reasonable quantity discounts to end users, none offered lease / financing options, and all of them wanted MORE for a rackmount unit (which was a bare board - no case, manual, software, power adapter, cables, etc.) than they wanted for a standalone unit, and of course they also wanted big $ for the rackmount chassis. The sole example was Microcom, who graciously sold their rackmount modems for the same price as the standalone models.

[Bill Notfaded]

When I was in college at OSU we ran a 12 node ringdown BBS with all USR 16.8 modems. We used node PC's connected by netware 3.1. Each PC ran two USR 16.8 modems online simultaneously and we had 6 node machines on the network. We ran a proprietary underground BBS software called celerity. Most days our 12 telephone line were tied up and we had people calling our BBS from all over the world. Our project was self funded by our members who would donate $ and hardware to our project. It was a lot of fun. It's funny when we had the phone company come to the house we were living in. They mounted a box on the brick wall outside the second story window that could contain up to 128 phone lines to host our 12 phone line ringdown.

US Robotics were the Kings of modems... Every BBS like ours ran USR 16.8 because while everyone else had 14.4k or slower modems we could all talk 16.8k... the good ol' days for sure!

Bill

Fixed some phone spelling errors that irritated me..

[Tyler Bourne]

I've gotten back to work on fixing this clock but I'm stuck on a chip.

It's a 134РМ1.  I found a sort of datasheet here:  https://eandc.ru/pdf/mikroskhema/k134rm1.pdf

Translation doesn't really help much with this one though, something about storage elements.

Can any of our Russian speakers help me out?

[n1ist]

I don't speak Russian, but it looks like a quad D-type flip flop.  Almost like a 74LS175 but that has a common clock while the part in question has separate clocks per pair of flops.  I guess you could try a pair of 74LS74

/mike

[kosbo.com]

I do speak Russian and Yes Mike is right, it's  quad D-type flip flop with TTL level input/outputs... 

[Tyler Bourne]

Thank you both!

One more i'm not totally sure of:

http://ielekt.ru/products_html/134lb2a.html

Might be quad NOR gates?

[Dekatron42]

There is a list here of Russian ic's showing which western TTL ic's they correspond to, that has helped me before: https://ganswijk.home.xs4all.nl/chipdir/soviet/ttl.htm

Yours are not on that list as they are of a somewhat different type, but by using Google Translate with the text in the datasheets or the links you can get a somewhat understandable translation, the last link translates to:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fielekt.ru%2Fproducts_html%2F134lb2a.html

translating the PDF-file results in:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Feandc.ru%2Fpdf%2Fmikroskhema%2Fk134rm1.pdf

/Martin

[kosbo.com]

No, it's not  quad NOR gates.

Looks like  It has 3 different elements in one case:

4inputs NOR gate

4inputs NAND gate

1input inverter

[Tyler Bourne]

Thanks Dekatron42  didn't know of that list.

Google translate does give me some information but it can still be hard to follow since Google translate is not very good with technical documents.

Thanks again Kosbo, the translation makes more sense now.  Too bad the old datasheet doesn't list which pins are for which gate lol.  I'll have to power up the board and probe it.

So a К134ЛБ1 would be 2 2input NAND gates and 2 2input NOR gates.  https://eandc.ru/catalog/detail.php?ID=6671

Thanks for all the help.

[Tyler Bourne]

Odd this site shows the К134ЛБ1 as  quad NAND gates?

http://ivatv.narod.ru/zifrovaja_texnika/1_02.htm

[Konstantin]

No, It does not. It says that  picture 1.15 is for K133LA3/K155LA3

 

And you are right К134ЛБ1  is 2 2input NAND gates and 2 2input NOR gates

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[Tyler Bourne]

Adventures with IN-28s.

I have determined that in this clock the IN-28s are operated in the following way:

The anode is connected to half wave rectified 240V AC, the cathode is grounded through a 4.7K resistor.

The grid is connected to the control board through a 1M resistor with a 3.9M pulldown.  I assume the grid voltage is around 160-170V

The original transformer is gone so I will have to make a new one.  This isn't too bad since I can make it with a 120V primary.

[Keith Moore]

Indeed, I like these nixies. If you make a board, I'll get some more 28's and build it. This is a FANTASTIC find!  Congratulations! 


On Thursday, May 23, 2019 at 12:15:55 PM UTC-4, Tyler Bourne wrote:

The clock has arrived!  It's Huge!  

It seems like the clock was in the process of being stripped for parts when it was saved.  The tens of hours board was covered in nasty flux, probably the plumbing kind.  I've cleaned it up and put it back in.

I've created a schematic for the display board and will start working on a replacement.  While the display boards are all the same the control boards attached to the back of them are all different depending on which digits are needed.  I can tell this is a 12 hour clock since the tens of hours digit can't form a 2, interestingly most for the tubes on that board have never been used.

Since the display boards and the controller boards are separate I can replicate the display board the way it is.  I will create a replacement control board for my clock and will also create a more modern control board for use with the spare display boards I will have. 

The IN-28 is an odd nixie, it runs at a higher voltage and has a control grid.  All the groups of control grids are connected to the HV supply through a 3.9M resistor and to the chips through a 1M resistor.  I'll have to figure out what all these chips are and find a modern equivalent.

If any Russian speaking members of the group can help identifying the chips I would be super grateful.

[Paul Andrews]

I just got these boards. Have one more on the way. They are just the display boards and look quite simple. A bunch of diodes and current-limiting resistors with control pins coming off the bottom. Looks like they were meant to be powered from, say 240V AC.

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 3:29:24 PM UTC-4, Pramanicin wrote:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-HUGE-Industrial-NIXIE-secondary-clock-110x40-cm-IN-28-based-magic-eye-/173902111454?&_trksid=p2056016.l4276

Never seen one like this...cool. I have a boat load of these and may well recreate something similar...

Nick

[Tyler Bourne]

Nice boards.  Looks like they are driven quite differently than mine.  Diode steering maybe?

[Paul Andrews]

It actually looks like the diodes are used for tubes that are shared between segments.

On Oct 9, 2019, at 4:14 PM, Tyler Bourne <speedy...@gmail.com> wrote:



Nice boards.  Looks like they are driven quite differently than mine.  Diode steering maybe?

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[Paul Andrews]

Here's one lit up. I had to fix a few traces on the back. The board has been repaired in the past too - some tubes were replaced. That is 251V at 237mA. Thanks to Bill for discovering those power supplies!

On Wednesday, October 9, 2019 at 6:27:51 PM UTC-4, Paul Andrews wrote:

It actually looks like the diodes are used for tubes that are shared between segments.

On Oct 9, 2019, at 4:14 PM, Tyler Bourne <speedy...@gmail.com> wrote:



Nice boards.  Looks like they are driven quite differently than mine.  Diode steering maybe?

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[Bill Notfaded]

I was going to say sweet power supply you got there Paul!!! The IN-28 board looks awesome lit up brother... really really neat!

Bill

On Wed, Oct 9, 2019, 7:43 PM Paul Andrews <pa...@nixies.us> wrote:

Here's one lit up. I had to fix a few traces on the back. The board has been repaired in the past too - some tubes were replaced. That is 251V at 237mA. Thanks to Bill for discovering those power supplies!

On Wednesday, October 9, 2019 at 6:27:51 PM UTC-4, Paul Andrews wrote:

It actually looks like the diodes are used for tubes that are shared between segments.

On Oct 9, 2019, at 4:14 PM, Tyler Bourne <speedy...@gmail.com> wrote:



Nice boards.  Looks like they are driven quite differently than mine.  Diode steering maybe?

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[Bill Notfaded]

I just bought another one of those power supplies Paul! They're awesome and work perfectly for what we love! The ten turn potentiometers and going up to 500 volts works great for even dekatrons! I like the design of them too... they have that old school feel with the knobs, build quality, solid, strong... even the handle on top is awesome! The outputs fit the standard two banana plug connectors. What more could you ask for except maybe size but with those beautiful big LED displays I say bring it on brother! Had anyone made a six digit clock with that IN-28 boards yet? Wow it's BIG but hot dang!!! That's some cool stuff there!!! I love it!!!!!!

Bill