EL Wire “Nixie” tubes

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Oct 152011

Catarina helped me build a prototype of a “Nixie” tube illuminated with electroluminescent wire. Unfortunately the wires are too dense and too dim to work well with the ten layers of thickness, so the prototype is a beautiful failure. The number frames are based on Futura and cut on our Epilog laser using my opensource epilog driver. Side view and SVGs follow.

http://profiles.google.com/phooky Adam Mayer

If you grab some of that stuff Bill had, maybe you could just edge-light with leds.
- http://twitter.com/tensory Ari Lacenski
  
  I gave that a try. It doesn’t work as well as you’d hope. It works a lot better if you frost them with sandpaper, of course.
- http://twitter.com/tensory Ari Lacenski
  
  I gave that a try. It doesn’t work as well as you’d hope. It works a lot better if you frost them with sandpaper, of course.
Johnathan_weisner

I like the idea.
philleb

I have to order elwires . Great idea. ty .
http://twitter.com/hnrkisbn hnrk isbn

Really nice prototype.
Michael Audette

Very cool concept. Why not just make a side driven LED version that would lite up the clear lexan digits from the side/bottom where they mount. I was thinking of trying the EL wire approach myself but unlike the thin wires of the tubes stacked very close together the EL obstructs the digits behind too much.

I took a Neon bending class and wanted to make a GIANT neon nixie tube with clear glass tube digits – but ran out of time. There is also some really small diameter tube you can use to make a scotch bottle sized one…but the big glass is hard enough to bend.
http://www.paperbagcowboy.com Charles Johnson

It looks like there’s some sort of plastic coating on the wires… Can they be stripped?
- EL fan
  
  no- that’s PVC coating protecting the phosphors that surround the copper wire core.
Mike

Found this through the makezine link- Soem EL wire is brighter than others- IIRC the greens are nearly twice as bright as some of the others. I wonder if it would be worth trying to change the colour.
Mike
Pingback: Beautiful failure: EL wire nixie » BuildLounge
Jack

Great idea.
Do you think this would work on a larger scale, ie making the letters perhaps a meter high?
Jack

um, that shoudl be 6, not 7
Jack

Of course alternatively, an LED segment display would work, perhaps with the segments as outlines. But I think you could do better with the ability to overlap elements. I’m sure there’s a set of segments, that would allow the beautiful rounded fonts, but without having 10 different figures. parts of 8 could be shared with 7, 2, perhaps 5, and so on.
Anonymous

You could tweak the font so there is less overlap, and you need a dark enclosure with a tinted window (even with real nixies).
Rick Winscot

You should give side-emitting fiber optic a try.

http://www.fiberopticproducts.com/Sideglow.htm

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