I scored some second hand Cisco 7940 and 7960 handsets to start experimenting with Asterisk. They look very good for the price.

Had a bit of fun today with my site after discovering nearly 2000 spam comments. Thankfully the comments go through an approval system first before they are visisble.

I also threw django-grappelli on for a pretty admin area. It looks quite neat.

By adding a newer jQuery and jQuery-UI to the admin section I also broke the Zinnia tag autocomplete. I rectified this by replacing the autocomplete_tags.js which utilised Jörn Zaefferer's jQuery plugin with code to call jQuery UI autocomplete.

Some of the brewing gear got justified today in the blackout as we could enjoy hot coffee in the morning with no power.

Oops. This is what the tube looks like if you get the pin mixed up. But be cautious - as this can damage the tube. In this case the decimal point is being used as the anode instead of the actual anode.

Wow, that tube looks awesome running.

I set up the improvised high voltage supply to 250V DC per the data sheet and then dug about for about half an hour to try and find a 22K resistor which was 1W or larger. No joy, but I did manage to find some resistors that match the tube. Some 12K 2% resistors, they look like maybe 2W. Put them in series and we get 24K, or 23.5K in ths case because they aren't in spec (although now that I think of it, they probably are - just, It's about 500ohms out, the 2% gives you 240 ohms leeway each)

With that in place I measured the short circuit current at 8mA. I adjusted it down a bit further to get the current down and ended up with just over 6mA and just over 180V under load.

Next I quadruple checked the datasheet to ensure I had the right pin for the Anode and applied the 180V to the Anode. Then I grounded each Cathode and watched the digit light up. You can see in the photo the number 5 lit.

Wooo! A Nixie Tube. =) Thanks Dave!

This is one of the larger Nixies, it's a GR-211. It has a 170V 5mA strike voltage. We didn't get a chance to try it during the BBQ.

In anticipation of my mate bringing a Nixie tube over to look at I knocked up a quick variable high voltage supply.

It has a massive unloaded voltage of 418V in the photo.