Nixie-style EL display

[John Rehwinkel]

This is kind of cool, someone has bent EL wire into numerals to yield a nixie-ish display.

https://theledroom.wordpress.com/2017/02/11/el_nixie-tube/

- John

[Roddy Scott]

I habveb seen similar ones in Instructables but this looks realistic compared to them. Obviously a lot more care was taken in forming the numerals. Just a pity that electroluminescent wire does not have a great lifespan.

Nice work though! 

[Roddy Scott]

Dumb thumbs!

[Paul Andrews]

Looks great!

[Ian Sparkes]

I've been thinking of making some Numitron type large displays with LED filaments, but this looks interesting as well. Driving the large number of filaments is going to be a pain in the butt though, and shame about the relatively short lifespan...

[Mark Moulding]

I did a project like this for Burning Man, making Really Large "Nixie" tubes using 2-liter soda-pop bottles with the labels removed. and large-diameter (5mm) orange EL-wire for the digits.  To drive them, I used a little AT89C2051 microcontroller for each digit, driving a bunch of MAC97A6 sensitive-gate triacs to switch the output of an off-the-shelf EL-wire driver.  The micros communicated via a serial daisy-chain at 2400 baud.

The whole thing worked pretty well.  It was a little tricky to assemble the digits in the bottles - sort of a ship-in-a-bottle challenge.  I made it easier by cutting back the neck of the bottle somewhat, since that part wasn't visible anyway.  I used bonsai wire for the rigid structure for the digits.

The big problem with the EL-wire is the low light output.  They're really only usable at night - in the daytime, you can't even tell that they're lit.  You can play games with the excitation supply; I've custom-made some of my own, and by tuning the frequency for the length of wire being excited, you can increase the current flow somewhat (obviously, increasing the voltage does too)>  Even at the brightest I was able to get, though, they still weren't suitable for daytime use, and the lifespan is essentially linearly related to the current flow, so I decreased the usable life (the light output tapers off) to only a couple of hundred hours in this mode.

~~
Mark Moulding