I‘ve always been fascinated by lights and all kinds of displays. Nixie tubes certainly are no exception. So I had to built my own Nixie clock as probably every EE does.

So a few months back I ordered five Nixie tubes. Not just any tubes, but the beautiful R|Z568M built by Dalibor Farny. Although I really enjoy to such electronics projects, after seeing the calming glow of those tubes I wanted to be done with it as quickly as possible... One feature I wanted to include this time though: WiFi.

I'm not the biggest fan of the ESP series microcontrollers, so I decided to go all in and use a Raspberry PI Zero W. One of the issues with this approach is boot time. Also, I didn't feel comfortable to handle critical tasks (e. g. cathode poisoning prevention) on the RPi. So I ended up recycling much of the STM32 design (and code) from a previous IN-8 based Nixie clock and just adding a RPi to it. The RPi provides access via a REST API written in Python and sends simple commands to the STM32 (I2C). The STM32 does all the actual work. Way too complicated if you ask me, but still fun.