Scrolling Matrix Display Designed Using 384 Neon INS-1 Tubes
The Neon Pixel is equipped with hundreds of neon bulbs, which are driven by an ESP32 and attached to an aluminum plate with 3D-printed legs.
There are plenty of great projects that have been made with the venerable and versatile Nixie tube, including dice (random number generator), a hypnotic music visualizer, and a myriad of differently designed clocks. Electronic technician Pierre Muth moved beyond Nixie tubes for his Neon Pixel matrix display, instead opting to utilize INS-1 bulb dot indicators, which are generally used as a colon separator in Nixie clocks.
The Neon Pixel is a scrolling matrix display of sorts that shows the current time and date on a series of INS-1 bulbs that Muth says he created to mimic Adafruit’s NeoPixel. He built his display using 384 of the tiny bulbs, which he painstakingly soldered to a custom PCB he designed outfitted with a PIC16F15313 microcontroller (one bulb to a board). He then grouped them into six 8 x 8-pixel segments (64 each), which are tied together on an aluminum backing with 3D-printed legs.
To control the Neon Pixel, Muth chose to go with an ESP32 coded it using the Arduino framework and Platform.io IDE, which allows him to adjust the display and buffer size, as well as the scrolling by changing the coordinates in the view frame. Muth states there’s around 20mA per pixel at full brightness, which translates to almost 8A with 384 bulbs. Everything is also 5V, so 40 watts are needed to drive the display that's supplied by a 10A 5V power supply.
Muth has uploaded a complete walkthrough of his Neon Pixel on his project blog for those interested in recreating the project.