peteg's blog - hacking - nixie clock - 2010 02 15 Assembly

Putting it together.

/hacking/nixie_clock | Link

Replacing the anode driver transistor was entirely routine. Its friend survived. As I was having one of those rare days when the crappiness of earlier decisions on this and other topics was not only manifest but within reach of correction, I decided to assemble the hardware. Here's some photos, taken with the Olympus μTough 6010 on Daz's shonky tripod.

It's running on one of Andrew T's old power supplies, as my old-school LM7805 arrangement couldn't handle the heat. These devices have good failure modes for the most part, but overheating manifests as a loop: the ts7250 draws less current when the CPU is idle, so when the regulator comes back from a shutdown due to heat the processor gets to run for a few seconds before the regulator overheats once more. Nasty.

I discovered the ts7250 puts out enough current on the USB port to power the WiFi and audio adaptors.

It seems that Google's Android platform is attracting a lot of people to ARM platforms.

Software-wise things are still on the slow. Debian's armel port features a working dropbear SSH server, so I reckon there's something fishy with my cross-compiler setup, maybe the C libraries. Conversely nothing ALSA-ish wanted to run. Generally things are looking pretty likely.