Dalibor Farný's Custom Nixie Tube Spells Its Message Out in Letters, Not Numbers

Dalibor Farný has built a custom, one-of-a-kind Nixie tube with a twist: Instead of displaying the numerals 0-9, it spells out a company name in glowing letters.

Dating back to 1955, the Nixie tube is a form of cold-cathode display typically used to display blowing numerals in the days prior to the creation of seven-segment LEDs. Based on the same principles as a neon lamp, the iconic aesthetic has kept the tubes popular long after the technology had been superseded — typically for numerical devices like tachometers,clocks, and even wristwatches.

Nixie specialist Farný, though, has recently built something a little different: "Recently, I got an interesting order — a custom Nixie tube for a YouTube channel of Keysight Technologies," explains Farný of the project's origins. "I normally try to focus on our regular Nixie tubes and clocks (there are still lots of improvements waiting for realization). However, in this case, there were several unexplored fields — like mesh cathodes — promising getting new knowledge. I couldn't resist."

The result is a Nixie tube which displays not numerical digits but instead the letters of Keysight's name — which required the creation of a wholly-new, never-before-seen, extremely large Nixie tube, documented in Farný's 14-minute video.

The whole process from beginning to end is laid out in the video, though there was a final bit of tweaking that didn't make the final cut: "There is a process called 'burn-in' done on every tube after filling with gas," Farný explains. "This process makes the glow around the cathode uniform.

"This particular tube is different to our normal tubes, so I had to tune also that process. It was simply not finished when I was making the close-ups. I will show whole tube and complete T in the next video."

The video is now available on Farný's YouTube channel.