As a big enthusiast of glowing neon, I had to do something with the INS-1 (ИНC-1) tubes. Disclaimer: this project is inefficient in many aspects, fortunately plenty of time was available during the 2020 lock-down.
INS-1 / ИНC-1
Fortunately, these single dot tubes are still easy to find in large quantity and rather cheap. Made by Gazotron, it seems they build up a large stock at that time. The INS-1 has the advantage to be small and produce a nice dot due to the lens-style front. Plus its striking voltage is maximum 100V, lower than regular Nixies.
I’m using an ESP32, with the arduino framework, and the Platform.io IDE. The nice thing is I could extends the AdafruitGFX lib. So all the work of drawing, fonts etc, is yet done.
I added the notions of display size and buffer size. With a bigger buffer size, I can make easy scrolling by changing the coordinate of the view frame.
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