What a find! On offer is a working example of what was a wonder of the age, a six digit decade counter/timer implemented entirely with vacuum tubes! The tubes are the legendary Philips E1T tubes, you can see how they indicate the time in the last photo. The count can be made to reset, count, stop by pressing the appropriate front panel buttons. The timebase was crystal controlled, and one E1T tube is used internally as a prescaler, so the instrument actual contains seven tubes.
I think that this instrument was used in some sort of nuclear physics instrument, and the counter has some multiway sockets on the back with short cables clearly intended to attach to something, but what it was I have no idea.
Power required is 220/240V. Cosmetically the front panel is in nice shape, a few marks but no ugly scratches. There is a clear plastic screen over the tube faces that is not original, but is is easily removed. The top and bottom panels of the chassis are missing. There is no power cord, I make it work with a "death lead", a power cord terminated with croc clips. Everyone should have one!
I will ship worldwide, but be advised that the shipping weight is about 20 Kg, and I shall send the E1T tubes seperately, extremely well packed in plastic pipe, to make sure that they arrive unscathed.
Michael B. just completed a beautiful B7971 based clock and four-letter-word machine based on a design by Peter Hand. (Once I can find more information on Peter's kit, I will post it here for the rest of the community.) In the mean time, find more information here and be sure to check out the rest of his amazing collection.
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The Acrylic Nixie is more than a clock, it is a random four letter word generator modeled after the Ray Weisling creation called the Four Letter Word Clock. Unfortunately, Weisling has angered a lot of folks in the Nixie ‘community’ by reneging on numerous transactions, so his clocks are basically no longer available. The electronics used here are a kit designed by Peter Hand in Las Vegas, NV. IMHO this is a superior product to the original for several reasons. The design is much simpler (both clocks are multiplexed) and yet it is just as full featured as the FLW. It incorporates a SuperCap back up so you don’t have to reset the clock when the power is interrupted, it has an option whereby you can connect a motion sensor to turn the unit on/off when someone enters the room (essentially a tube saver), it actually has a larger word library than the FLW and it has some nice animated transition effects between words like a ‘slide’ from the top/bottom/right or left and a ‘razzle dazzle’ transition too.
(Images and text a owned by Miachel B. and used with permission. Thanks for sharing!)
Here is a really cool industrial looking 6 digit numitron clock. I can't seem to find much information about it but the starting bid is $70 - which actually seems like a good deal. If you win this, send photos!
Josiah H. has another great clock that he made - a blue-phosphor neon lamp based binary clock. It is a 6 by 4 display of neon tubes that are directly driven to avoid dimming due to multiplexing. The design is based on the ATmega328 and we developed on an arduino. He event was as far as writing all of the software himself including the clock/timekeeping arduino libraries that are available. As far as driving the displays go, a 24 bit shift register drives a series of MPSA42 NPN transistors to actually drive the displays.
As usual, he has a great writeup on his site.
