A hypnotizing music visualizer inspired by those little bars in the top of iTunes. Fourteen Russian IN-13 Nixie bargraph tubes are used as the display.
The length that each nixie tube lights up represents the volume of a certain frequency in the music, 7 different bands for both the left and right channels.
I designed and built this over a month my junior year in high school. This instructable will go over my design process and the construction, hopefully aiding anyone who wants to build one of their own.
The length that each nixie tube lights up represents the volume of a certain frequency in the music, 7 different bands for both the left and right channels.
I designed and built this over a month my junior year in high school. This instructable will go over my design process and the construction, hopefully aiding anyone who wants to build one of their own.
Remove these ads by
Signing UpStep 1: Design Process
The goal is to make an interesting display that would show the volume levels of various frequency bands in an audio signal, as in many music players and on the front of some hi-fi audio equipment. There are three major points the project would focus on:
- Minimizing cost: In the process of designing the visualizer, I found this simple VU meter with a nixie display utilizing an exotic IC to convert an audio signal into a volume level. While convenient, it's manufactured by a small company, and each piece would cost over $5 (for me, nearly $80 in those alone!) For simplicity and for my wallet, this only uses simple, cheap, and mass-produced parts. Also because of cost, I decided that 10K ohm resistors would be used for just about everything, so I could buy a few hundred for around $3.
- Analog only: Using a digital signal processor was a possibility, but programming a DSP is fairly difficult, and the cost of DACs for the input and ADCs to drive the output began to raise the price too far. So only analog parts such as op-amps and comparators would be used.
- Adjustability: After Nixie IN-13 tubes were chosen as the display, I realized that the only documentation was in Russian (or poorly translated English) and not very informative. Not knowing anything at all about how much it took to light it up any specific length (aside from less than 4 milliamps ), everything about this design would be adjustable.
Visit Our Store »
Go Pro Today »
Oh, and I was wondering a couple things. Could you use, say, five LEDs instead of the tubes and make it small enough to fit in a pair of headphones (I could always add a bit to the sides, bottoms, or even the chord itself)? I was thinking of making a headset mod with a circular visualizer on the side. Any ideas? Thanks in advance! And good luck in the future!
The only things you need to add more is more power, and redesign the filters to cover the audio range better. In other words, you need math.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0NJhbx9IYM
This guy did something similar, but he went digital with it (FFT) and has some crazy power boards.
online mastering
I have been looking for exactly this for a different project i am working, my only problem is that i need a variable voltage between 0 and 5 volts instead of your 12v current system. Can anybody here help me in acheiving this. Its a bit over my head, so i would really appreciate some help.
14x 100uF electrolytic polarized capacitor 25v
14x 4.7uF electrolytic polarized capacitor 25v
18x 1uF capacitor 25v
Are the below capacitors multilayer ceramic, or mica? Would ceramic suffice (I didn't see polarity noted for any of them)?
13x .1uF capacitor (should this be 14?)
8x .01uF capacitor
4x 1000pF capacitor
Thank you for writing and shareing this project. :)