![]() It was to show off the glorious insides of the counter, introduce us to some cool new RF tools, and as always with ’s videos, to educate and inform. The end result is the world’s most complicated 24-hour clock, which honestly wasn’t even the point of the build at all. Externally, an ERASynth++ programmable signal generator was used to send a signal to the counter from 0 Hz to 23,595.9 kHz, ramping up by 100 Hz every second. Internally, added a divide-by-ten card to allow the counter to use an external 10-MHz reference. Turning it into a clock non-destructively required adding a little bit of gear, though. It’s a wonderful piece, and still quite accurate after all these decades, although it did need a bit of calibration. ![]() To gut this device, which hails from the early 1960s and features some of the most beautiful point-to-point backplane wiring we’ve ever seen, would have been a tragedy, one that wisely avoided.Īfter a bit of recapping and some power supply troubleshooting, the video below treats us to a tour of the Nixie-based beauty. We mention the fate of this instrument mainly because we’ve seen our fair share of cool-looking-old-thing-gutted-and-filled-with-Arduinos projects before, and while they can be interesting, there’s something deeply disturbing about losing another bit of our shared electronic heritage. Beautiful hand-wired backplane in the HP 5245 counter. In fact, if anything, the HP 5245L electronic counter came out better off than it went into the project. Notice: no vintage Hewlett Packard test equipment was harmed in the making of this overly complicated Nixie clock.
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