VFD Experimenter

Basically an Arduino Uno/Nano combined with a boost converter, high voltage serial shift registers, and I2C RTC to experiment with VFD tubes

sjm4306

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Description

Basically an Arduino Uno/Nano combined with a software controllable closed loop boost converter, high voltage 32 channel serial shift register, and I2C RTC to experiment with VFD tubes all on a single development board. In my case I plan on using it to design clocks based around different types of VFD tubes.

Files

Tiny_VFD_Supply.ino ATTINY Firmware to closed loop control boost converter ino - 2.99 kB - 05/31/2023 at 15:54		Download
VFD_Experimenter.ino ATMEGA demo program to write serial characters to 16 character 14 segment VFD ino - 8.10 kB - 05/31/2023 at 15:53		Download
VFD_dev.sch sch - 1.74 MB - 05/30/2023 at 19:04		Download
VFD_dev_2022-04-26.zip x-zip-compressed - 440.58 kB - 05/30/2023 at 19:04		Download
VFD_dev.brd brd - 235.00 kB - 05/30/2023 at 19:04		Download

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Demo Video
sjm4306 • 05/30/2023 at 19:06 • 0 comments

So there ended up being a few issues with v1.0 of the VFD Experimenter. The biggest was that the h-bridge chip I selected to drive the filament with squarewave AC ended up not working as I expected so I ended up hot wiring it for simple dc drive with a current limiting resistor. The second issue was the components for the boost converter are a bit undersized (and thus why the multiplexed tube shown in the video was dimmer than I would have liked). Other than these two pebcaks though the board was pretty useful for experimenting with different random VFDs I pulled from various appliances.