Everybody loves nixies, they have a retro-futuristic look to them despite being used more than 60 years ago, and the soft warm glow and 3d view they have as they shift from digit to digit is uniquely theirs. Nixies are absolutely a dated technology though, and come with all the struggles of old hardware sometimes; they can be hard to power with high voltages, they're sometimes delicate, and most importantly, they're hard to source too. 

I wanted to build a clock using them for the longest time, but I'm still just a beginner, so using 170v is very daunting to me until I learn more proper PCB routing and how to protect and isolate the lower voltage components that control them. 

There does exist an alternative, and it's almost a cousin to the nixie tube, the numitron and minitron. Numitrons more closely resemble a nixie, but use a seven segment digit to display numbers instead of several plates. While they still need a lot of voltage, minitrons can actually run at a much more reasonable 5v and in a smaller square package. Still, they have some of the issues older hardware always does. They're hard to find, and with age the small package tends to lose that crucial vacuum that it needs to run. 

Thankfully, in the modern age, there exists some alternatives and recreations of incandescent filament. A lot of us have likely seen it too in those en vouge Edison bulbs. They're made of led dies put directly on to a ceramic backer, then covered in silicone. Depending on how the LEDs are configured in parallel and/or series, they can easily be run with 3v, 12v or even 24v. 

That brings me to my idea, what if I used led filaments to recreate the look of a numitron as close as I could? They'd be a lot more durable and safer to drive considering the voltages you can drive them at. With a quick draft in CAD, it honestly looks promising!