I might have mentioned previously that I recently bought an Arduino Duemilanove. It’s pretty damn cool and I’m amazed at the amount of power you can get for such small price (and form factor).

My first month or so was spent hooking it up to LED’s and the Ethernet Shield. I wasted a bunch of time on a poorly thought out messaging system. I had LED’s hooked up to PWM outputs and was controlling their brightness independently from my computer. It was a great learning experience and the perfect way to remind me how to write C. Luckily for us all, that code has been scrapped (it can probably be found at the first revision on Github).

This week I got a package from Canada. “What comes from Canada?” you might ask. Not much, but there is a place that loves to ship NOS Russian Nixie tubes. Ogi Lumen has been a pleasure to deal with, and provides a top quality kit. Assembling the Nixie Driver kit took about an hour, and getting it up and running was smooth as can be. Ogi Lumen provides a concise and well written library with only a handful of functions for the developer to learn.

Tomorrow I’m giving a lightning talk at work about all this. I’ve spent the better part of the evening putting together some code to help with a demo. I’ve cleaned up the messaging protocol a bit (it still needs major refactoring, but I’ve opted to keep it simple). Now I have a few different kinds of messages, as well as minor error handling. I’ve set up a simple way to clear the Nixie tubes, a command to left justify some digits (and continuously shift them to the right) as well as right justify the display (with no shifting). But my ace in the hole is a demo command I’ve put together that will do some cool cycling of content across the tubes.

Ok, so it’s still not all that exciting, eventually I’ll buy more than two tubes. First though, I have plans to conquer this beast: Neon Bar Graph. I’ve placed an order from Digi-Key for a few discrete components to get myself started, eventually building a shift register/DAC driver similar to the Ogi Lumen Nixie Tube Driver kits (probably without the cool boards though).