The Nixie Tester Project by Marcin Saj, comprises an enclosure/power supply/receptacle and a matching family of plug-in socket adapters. There are now over 30 different sockets available to accommodate any nixie tube in existence. I have been working my way through assembling my collection of 20 or so sockets, and realized that documenting the process would be beneficial to others.
Beginning with the box containing the socket adapter components:
The parts contained in the box, comprising the PCB, socket pins, header pins and hardware, and acrylic panels:
The acrylic panels were numbered for assembly. I used these numbers through the remainder of the process. I did not remove the protective plastic film on the panels until later:
All the laser cut remnants were removed or punched out of the laser cut holes in the acrylic panels. Neglecting this resulted in difficulties with assembly later on.
These were the parts needed for the initial PCB assembly. There were two steps to this:
- Inserting and soldering the nixie socket pins
- Inserting and soldering the header pin strips
The idea is to hold the pins and headers in the correct position for soldering so that they will align with the nixie tube pins and the sockets on the tester. To do this, I used various combinations of the acrylic panels, held in position with the standoffs and screws provided in the kit. To begin, I assembled the PCB along with Panels 4 and 5 thus:
Next I inserted some of the socket pins through Panel 4 and into the PCB. Then fitted Panel 5 over Panel 4 and the socket pins. I could not easily get all 13 pins to align simultaneously while fitting Panel 5, so I did them in two groups:
This process of inserting, fitting/aligning and soldering the pins was repeated for the second group:
Once soldered, all the pins were trimmed on the bottom side of the board thus:
I removed the acrylic panels from the top of the board, and fitted Panels 4 and 3 to the bottom of the board, together with the header pins. The two Panels, together with the previously soldered socket pins ensured that the header pins were aligned properly:
I clamped the header and panels into position using the previously soldered pins and ten soldered the header pins.
Next, I removed all the Panels and soldered the cathode resistor:
At this point I donned nitrile gloves and removed all of the protective film from the panels. This prevented dirt, fingerprints on and scratching of the acrylic panels during assembly. Then I assembled bottom Panels (1 and 3), inserted the long screws through the Panels and PCB and secured the whole bottom stack and PCB with the plastic stand-offs on the top side of the PCB:
To complete the top side assembly, I fitted Panel 2, which is just an outline “frame” around the PCB from the top side.
(Note: Not all kits contain this frame). Then I fitted the remaining Panels in order from the PCB: Panel 4, Panel 5 and Panel 6. Panel 6 was secured with the short screws into the stand-offs from the top side. I did not over tighten any of the screws. If they were too tight, the acrylic would crack (over time) from the applied stress.
This completed the assembly of a typical socket adapter. Finally, I checked the socket using the tester base and a compatible nixie tube.