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Okay, December is over, 2018 is over, 7.1% of 2019 is over.. It’s high time I wrote a December update 🙂
Burn-in machine
Probably the most single amount of time was invested into building of the new burn-in machine. This project is completely on Sebastian, I am just a source of information about current burn-in methods/parameters. And he does extremely well! We estimated 2 months to build it, it is already over 4 months now – that delay became a normal scenario now and it seems it no longer stress. When building a new machines or digging more into principle of nixie tube operation, we always find some interesting facts that needs to be explained/udnerstood before carrying on the build. The burn-in machine is now in a phase of working prototype, we tune the electrical parameters and work on data gathering/evaluation.
Details about the operation later, for now just briefly.. The burn-in phase unify electrical parameters of the tubes by running them at high current just after gas filling process. The initial intention was to take existing burn-in device, which was built by me and add advanced features. This way we would be able to control the process better, with less human attention, less prone to human error, it would result in more consistent burn-in results. At the beginning Sebastian asked me if I want to collect data from the process – like initial/end breakdown voltage, burning voltage, currents etc.. Implementation of this feature meant significant complication, but we decided to do it as there is always a chance we will learn something new. So we did it and actually found many interesting information (too much writing for blog for now) – I expect we will be able to use these information from burn-in process to evaluate purity of the gas inside the tube automatically. This will significantly help us in case we want to scale up from current lab scale production 🙂
Filming equipment
Another project running is the filming setup for documenting our progress on Youtube.. This is also quite a challenge, not that technically difficult, just time-consuming. I sold the metal etching kit (which I purchased for making lab samples of sheet metal parts in-house) because I was not using it anymore (we have a supplier who can does that efficiently for us) and used the funds to buy camera gear and some other filming stuff.
I took on lessons of conversation with native english speaker – I need to improve my speaking skills.. Speaking was never my strong side, the more I need to work on it!
I signed for Adobe Creative cloud subscription so now we can use all Adobe applications.. Like Fusion 360 increased our productivity in designing mechanical stuff, Adobe software will help us improve productivity in making the videos – and time is the most valuable asset!
See you at the next blogpost 🙂