Assembly notes: IV 22
- Assembly should be pretty straight forward, use figures below as a guide. Pay attention to components orientation, there are dots on silkscreen to help with that. High-resolution images are attached in the Images folder.
- See schematic for some detailed notes regarding setting voltages etc.
- Double and triple check that USB connector and headers are placed at the correct side of the pcb! Fixing this is a nightmare.
- Solder the SMD components
- Solder the headers and USB connector
- Solder the VFDs
I suggest to hold the two pcbs together with headers attached (applying some force), solder two pins at the ends of each header. Then you can solder the rest of the pins. Doing this makes sure that the two pcbs will fit together perfectly.
After the headers are soldered on, you can detach the top deck and go ahead with soldering the VFDs. I suggest to solder VFDs after this because the top deck can nicely stand on the header pins, supporting your soldering efforts :) WS2812 leds can be reflown beforehand or you can solder them afterwards.
IV-22 VFDs are hand-made and therefore, each tube differs in shape quite a bit. There are two ways to go about this. You can either align the tubes by glass which results in completely misaligned digits (see here https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3392024) or by the inner digits (highly recommended). You can see this on the image below. Digits are aligned but the glass shells are all over the place, most apparent on the first digit.
Legs are often bent from shipping or just misaligned. You should carefully bend them in place and make sure they face straight down from the inner digit, ignore the outer glass shape as it can mislead you! Imagine how the digit will be placed in the socket and adjust according to that. By doing this, you will tremendously improve the final look of the clock.
The legs are often covered with oxidation which causes bad connection to the socket. You can fix this with a fine sandpaper and bit of patience as this takes some time. Carefully sand all legs until they seem clean enough.
First attach the pins to the legs and then place all nixies in the sockets, solder bottom-most socket from the top and play with the digits alignment until you're satisfied with it. Take your time and retouch the pin if needed, you won't be able to change this after the rest of the pins are soldered :) Then solder the remaining sockets.
You can wiggle the VFDs around to slightly change their positions and height and you can bend the legs to rotate them a bit if they aren't aligned just right.
See thingiverse link below for notes regarding printing the enclosure: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4744087