My local electronics parts supplier finally succumbed to economic pressure and replaced its modest parts inventory with cell phone batteries and accessories. It’s a sound business decision for the owner, but my prototyping costs just doubled because small orders from online suppliers are a costly affair. As I’ve mentioned in this column, it looks as though kits are the wave of the future of electronics experimentation — unless you’re good at teardowns.
It knows when you are brushing by the accelerometer that gets attached to the brush and tells you where you should be brushing and when it’s time to move to the next section of your mouth. This gadget may seem a bit far fetched but I can see this being fun enough that kids would use it.
Andrew Gehringer originally saw this project on HackADay.com but decided to make his own using a PIC18F2520 and a graphical LCD (128x64, KS108B based). The internal oscillator is running at 8MHz to run the program and an external 32.768kHz crystal to drive the Real Time clock.
These nixie tubes are NL-5440A’s. The banana sockets were replaced with switches to set the hours and minutes. When the rotary switch on the left is set to OP, the clock is off, when it its set to AC, the clock is on (but can’t be set) and when the switch is set to DC, the clock it still on and you can set the time using the push buttons. The ohms adjust dial on the right controls the brightness of the blue up lighting (fully off to quite bright!).
