[Kevin Ballard] built this Nixie counter on the company dime. Tubes like this are getting much more and much more challenging to find since they’re no longer being manufactured. but when the Bossman hands you a corporate credit report card those kinds of concerns take a back seat to your parts-shopping impulses. start to finished this WiFi enabled counter took six weeks to build.
Connecting the board to the Internet was very easy thanks to the electric Imp that drives it. The challenging part comes in building a chauffeur board and sockets for the tubes. We don’t see a lot of detail on how he’s generating the high voltage. but you can get a good feel for the tube connectors from the picture. He’s using an adapter PCB from Kosbo which breaks the tube pins out to two rows of 0.1″ pitch pin headers. The acrylic base has a port for each made of pin sockets spaced by a thick chunk of acrylic. Wiring harnesses wrap around the back side of the base to mate with the chauffeur hardware. It’s programmed to count some type of company metric (it was funded by the corporation after all). They should be fairly successful because those numbers are flying by in the demo video.
[via Reddit]