Nixie VU meter

Most of my projects seem to deal with lights and music.  VU meters are not fashionable anymore, and the few commercial products I found don’t look too stylish at all. Therefore I decided to build my own using six Soviet IN-9 nixie tubes I had lying around.

The schematic is not too exciting at all. The audio input is connected to a MSGEQ7 graphic equalizer IC which I got from Sparkfun. Its output is processed by an Atmel ATmega88 microcontroller which sends commands to a M62359P DAC. The DAC outputs drive the tubes using a current sink described in “Driving IN-9 Neon Displays” by Dipl.-Ing. Jan Philipp Wüsten. The specific DAC was chosen because it was one of the few 8-channel DACs in DIP package that I could find without spending a fortune on shipping. Nixies are powered by a 1363 power supply. I had to connect a filter to its output (the large Teapo cap + a small resistor) to stop it from whining.

As the nixie tubes require a lot of space, a large enclosure was bought from TME. The mounts in the enclosure were quite far apart so the PCB became quite large. For that reason I etched the PCB myself, which I do quite rarely these days.

For future improvement I could check whether the MSGEQ7 output is linear or logarithmic – I’m thinking it’s linear as the sometimes the readings shoot way up without a great difference in perceived volume. Still, I think that the meter looks great and I’m quite pleased with it.