Determined pinoutįor demonstration purposes I reverse-engineered the two aforementioned VFD’s pinouts. Single segment glowing on Futaba 9-BT-22ZK.
VFDs have advantage over nixie tubes that they don’t need separate driver for every digit. Shorting the grid to the cathode shuts the whole digit down. To light the segment up, you have to supply voltage in range 30 - 50 V to both anode and the grid. grid - fine wire mesh between the anodes and the filament.anode - the glowing segment, covered with phosphor.filament, heater or cathode - several tungsten wires spanned along the length of the display.The principle of operation is described in detail on Wikipedia, cashier equipment - bright, dot-matrix, capable of displaying textĪside from the display, it’s good idea to salvage power transformer because it often has dedicated windingįor powering the filament.old desktop calculators - just numeric digits with decimal separators, often more than six, capable of displaying time with 1-second resolution.microwave ovens and other kitchen equipment - simple 4-digit suitable for real time clocks.VCRs or videotape recorders - custom made, often multi-color, small digits.The good news is that they are quite easy to reverse-engineer. They are usually custom-made for specific device so their datasheet is not publiclyĪvailable.
They are not as iconic as Nixie, but they do nicely as retro display. Everything I know about Vittorazi Easy/Evo 100 paramotorĭetermining the pinout of the unknown vacuum fluorescent display.Extracting security codes from car radios.Eavesdropping USB communication and writing driver in Python.Determining the pinout of the unknown vacuum fluorescent display.
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