--- In NEONIXIE-L@..., "Terry" <terry+yg@...> wrote:
--- In NEONIXIE-L@..., "figureloop" <crobc@> wrote:
Did you buy those from Sphere's? Their Russian stuff is overpriced. I made the mistake of buying some IV-22 (for $12/ea!) from Sphere. I thought they were something special until I discovered all the Russian stuff being liquidated on Ebay. I only buy stuff that is truly only available from Sphere's now.
No, I picked up a couple large batches on eBay and some others from a private seller I found. My average price for the thousand or so I got was 57 cents each.
What are you planning to do with them? I am working on a 12 IV-17 PCB and somewhat universal VFD driver that will be done soon (hopefully, but I keep wasting time on the internet).
I have enough tubes to sell a few boards with tubes, then keep a few for my own amusement. I figure I'll make the boards available bare if people like them, once I run low on IV-17 tubes.
Do you have a www? I don't right now, but will probably get one going again within the next year.
That is a great price. Now I have a dillemma. The IV-9 has mediocre Russian quality, whereas the western made stuff is really quite precise. The Nocrotec clock, for instance, is truly beautiful.
But the price to get two sets of western tubes is 10x the price of the Russians'. Ugh!
I've had a dozen or so IV-9's running continually (including the decimal points) for 14 months now and there's no appreciable dimming and no segments have burned out.
That's encouraging for a numitron. I have been thinking about how I might make a constant current driver, but for each segment that's a lot of parts and work! Apparently filament life is inversely proportional to volts to the fourth power, so a large change in lifetime can be afforded by just a slight moderation in voltage.
I expect that the lifetimes of the Russian parts (including VFD's and the Nixies with mercury added) are vastly underestimated in the published data sheets. Someone on this list (or was it the smartsocket list?) did an accelerated-aging test on the IV-4 (datasheet lifetime: 1000 hours) and found no discernable difference in brightness. The IV-17 is the same part as the IV-4, but with a longer rated lifetime.
I hope that's the case for all Russian VFD's, as I have a bunch of the ¨¨??I_1/7's (I have no idea if the Cyrillic will make it into this message in one piece - I believe that's ILTSI-1/7 in English) which are 5.5" tall single-digit 7-segment VFD tubes. The datasheet says "To be determined" for useful service life.
Well I hope the VFDs last as well!
Good day!
