A Dancing Cowboy Nixie Tube

If there were four words you never expected to hear in sequence, they would probably be “Dancing cowboy Nixie tube”. But that’s just what [Glasslinger] has made, and it’s exactly what it sounds like – an encapsulated cowboy that dances.

We’ve placed the resulting video below the break, and in it we see a compelling tour through the construction of a Nixie, and the specialist tools required. Little touches such as the need to insulate with glass capillary tube whose wires which shouldn’t glow, the construction of the envelope and stem, and the painstaking layout of the various cowboy components on a sheet of mica are carefully explained.

The tube takes shape in front of us, a driver PCB is etched, and the whole arrangement is placed in a custom wooden box. This is old-school construction at its finest, with the only touch of modernity coming from an Arduino Uno that schedules the various segments. It’s not beyond imagination though to see in time gone by that a Honeywell mechanical sequencer might have been used for the same task.

We’ve brought you [Glasslinger]’s work before of course, but we’ve also seen some more conventional self-made Nixies.

Thanks [Lars Haeh] for the tip.

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