Making of:

The Divergence Meter Project

An anime inspired Nixie Tube Clock

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................................... 2
1

Inspiration ............................................................................................................................................. 3

Design Process - Planning ..................................................................................................................... 4

Design Process Circuitry and PCB ....................................................................................................... 6

3.1

Schematic Design .......................................................................................................................... 7

3.2

PCB Design .................................................................................................................................. 12

Assembly Process ................................................................................................................................ 14

4.1

Structure How Its Held Together ............................................................................................ 15

4.2

Structure Button Array ............................................................................................................. 16

Programming ...................................................................................................................................... 17
5.1

Random Number Generator and World Line Rolling .................................................................. 19

5.2

Display Driving ............................................................................................................................ 20

5.3

Settings........................................................................................................................................ 20

Distribution And Documentation........................................................................................................ 21

Gallery ................................................................................................................................................. 22

1 INSPIRATION
Every project begins with an idea, this project was no exception. I love watching anime 1 and the scifi genre just hits the jackpot, here we have Steins;Gate and its time travelling journey that brings tears,
joy, silliness and more importantly the pinnacle of laboratory equipment the Divergence Meter to the
table which is in fact a device (of course fictional) that can calculate the differences between the World
Lines(Multiverse or alternate timelines if you will) and quantify it in percentages, which is then
displayed on a Nixie Tube Clock.
Being the electronics enthusiast I am, I have set out to build this eye dropping device with all its
glory. Not to mention my sister had given me some IN-14 Nixie Tubes prior (thanks a lot), so it was the
perfect time to start building one. I also give thanks to Tom Titor for being one of the Divergence Meter
pioneers, without his prior work and very great documentation this would have been multifold harder,
not impossible but much more harder.
One other reason is that I have my own code to follow which is to try and make something yourself
(of course within your power) before buying some commercial product, this is my maker spirit. Not to
mention the commercial product were talking about is nothing like the device itself presented in the
visual novel/anime. Like seriously, it doesnt. see?

Top left: As seen within the Visual

Novel/Anime
Top right: Official commercial product
2% true to the original
Right: And finally my version
95% true to the original

Japanese Animations

2 DESIGN PROCESS - PLANNING

The initial planning for the Divergence Meter ran just like any other project. I first write down what
features and functionality I wanted out of the project, I also write down any limitations that the project
might have. So to quote my blog post on this topic:
1.

Additional Features:

5 switches possible! Could be less if you tweak the software

Buzzer/Speaker output :D hurray for alarms in the morning

Light Sensor to detect night time to conserve power and extend Nixie tube life (could probably
act as a basic motion sensor with some software magic)

2.

Improvements/Slight changes:

Should be able to fit 2x9V batteries instead of one so more portable cosplay time :D

Should be able to fit 2xAA RTC backup battery so it keeps track of time accurately for
theoretically over a year.

Interrupt based instead of Polling to conserve even more battery

Uses the larger but cheaper and more available version of the HV5622

Integrated switching power supply instead of a bought module

Uses an AVR instead of a PIC (I chose it because it can be reprogrammed by AVR tools and a
PICKIT2 if you happen to have any of those)

3.

Mostly SMD parts to make look all good when your showing off the innards XD

Miku silhouette included

Limitations:

Can only use the DS3232 RTC and not the DS1307

Anyways thats what sums up what my expectations were during the start of the project, so some
of those features might not be implemented.
Another thing during planning was that I wanted this to be an Open Source/Open Hardware
project, in spirit of sharing with the community and so that anyone could easily create or modify their
own Divergence Meter, which is the reason I used an AVR instead because the compiler tools were more
free (sigh XC8 -.-) with no limitations and hey why not? This is actually the first time Ive programmed
an AVR and it was a good learn, I actually prefer them now! (Fanning the AVR vs PIC wars \o/)
I also considered the cost of making one and new places to source my parts, this should be one of
the cheapest Divergence Meters out there! I sourced my parts from TaoBao 2, finally thanking that I live
in Hong Kong. The parts were significantly cheaper than other sources like Digikey and Element14, the
total shipping was also so much cheaper. Any parts I couldnt find, I just bought from RS, they have free
local delivery so kudos to them. I must also mention that I did request some samples from Maxims
Integrated, Microchip and Texas Instruments (and they approved), so I guess some parts I did get for free . I cant thank them
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A Chinese E-commerce platform akin to EBay

enough for that and hope that enough people build Divergence Meters to cover for their losses. If
you dont want them to go bankrupt or the part series to discontinue, please support the manufacturer
by buying their products.though I guess I should tell myself first.
I actually designed the circuitry and PCB before I started considering the case, I just thought that I
could slap a case around it after assembling the main parts and so I did, so take this with a grain of salt
and plan carefully!

3 DESIGN PROCESS CIRCUITRY AND PCB

The tools I used were DipTrace, pen and paper, my brain, the internet and hell lots of datasheets, I
find that during electronics design 90% of the time you will be reading datasheets and not actually
drawing anything. All datasheets will be linked in at the end.
The process was simple, draw a schematic of the system and layout a PCB accordingly. Cant be
harder than that right? As a newbie to SMD design (my first in fact) it is quite the big step to take.
Here I present to you the Block Diagram of how the system is composed:

3.1 SCHEMATIC DESIGN

I read the datasheets and calculated component
values and carefully connected the pins of each
component. A nice feature I find in DipTrace is
the Hierarchy Block functionality which allows you to put a module on a single page and on another
page treat it as a single component. This is good for designing and use within the program,
unfortunately the PDF export is just terrible and hard to read.
The board is comprised of 2 boards, the Main Board and the Nixie board. The Main Board contains most
of the logic and power electronics while the Nixie Board is the PCB that contains the shift registers and is
the one that the Nixie tubes will mount to.
Fig.1-7 are Main Board schematics while Fig.8 is the whole of the Nixie Board

Figure 1 "Main" Microcontroller Schematic

Figure 2 Button Block

Figure 4 Real Time Clock Block

Figure 3 Speaker Block

Figure 5 Low Voltage DC-DC Converter Block

Figure 6 High Voltage DC-DC Converter Block

Figure 7 Light Sensor Block

Figure 8 Nixie Board Connector Block: Connects the Main Board to

the Nixie Board

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Figure 9 Nixie Board Schematic

3.2 PCB DESIGN

Now this is the part that I think was the hardest but also the most fun, here comes the PCB
layout! My layout skills arent the best and if you saw any layouts of the boards I have designed in the
past, the pros would probably be laughing their pants off >.< Back to reading schematics again! This time
not looking at the component values but the dimension and PCB layout section! Thankfully Texas
Instruments is an awesome manufacturer (I mean it!) and provides some optimal/recommended
layouts, and taking those as reference I soon finished designing the PCB. The things that I mainly thought
of were:
1. Dimension of pads especially the inductors to make the PCB more forgiving of various
inductors from different manufacturers, mainly for other people who plan on making the
device.
2. Thermal dissipation, I put some extra copper under the DC-DC converters just in case.
3. Physical location of batteries, connectors and sensors.
4. IMPORTANT: Noise prevention and traditional high speed analog design, the DC-DC
converters are especially sensitive to noise, I also made sure to separate the digital and
analog signals/ground. I followed a lot of guidelines from the datasheets and online technical
documents.
The end result is two nicely designed PCBs. Though there are definitely still some places that can be
improved and I may work on those in a future update.

Figure 10 Main Board 3D Render

Figure 11 Nixie Board 3D Render

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These were sent to a PCB fab 3 and arrived at my house 1.5 weeks later, boy they were fast. It
was the first time I have ordered PCBs instead of etching my own and the difference in quality is
tremendous, the price isnt that bad either. Normally I would buy some photosensitive PCBs and etch
them with a Hydrochloric Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide mix but after this experience, Im probably going
to be ordering PCBs from now, this should save me the worrying caused by bad traces when etching.
Also when designing PCBs another thing to note is that other than electrical and noise
requirements, you also need to make sure the PCB fab you are buying from can make them. Usually they
have a list of Design Rules which you can input to your EDA 4 software, then check for design rule
violations before saving!

Figure 12 Main Board

Figure 13 Nixie Board

3
4

Short for PCB fabricator

Electronic Design Automation

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4 ASSEMBLY PROCESS
This process is pretty straightforward, just look at your schematics/design and use some creativity
to join the pieces together. This is a breakdown on the steps I took:

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The Main and Nixie board were assembled by reflowing SMD components onto the board and
soldering through hole components by hand. SMD reflow is a process where solder paste is applied to
the pads of components, and then components are put on the pads. The entire board is then put in a
specialized oven in which the solder paste melts and mounts the components onto the board
permanently as if soldered by hand. As daunting as it seems, this process however is easy to do at home
with a simple cooking pan or toaster, no need for that specialized oven. The key is to keep the
components time exposed to heat as small as possible to prevent damage, therefore as soon as all
solder paste melts and reflows you must remove the heat source immediately! Also to note is that
preheating the board to 90C for a while is recommended to drive off any moisture within the
components, otherwise they will explode like popcorn! (The moisture expands too quickly)
Not everyones build is the same, there are just so many options on places to mount buttons, DC
jack, switches etc. so I encourage the use of creativity in this part to build your own Divergence Meter!
However there are two sections that I think might need some inspiration/details:

4.1 STRUCTURE HOW ITS HELD TOGETHER

The way the device is held together is that there are two groups of hex nuts.
The first is the inner group, these hex nuts cannot be seen from the outside and
are solely used for keeping the breadboard, Nixie Board and Main Board together.
You can see that the Main and Nixie Boards have five silver rings, the hex nuts go
through these rings and connect them together, they also serve as a path for ground,
so I recommend using metal nuts instead of nylon ones. As you can see in Figure 14,
the top hex nut is glued to the bread board with two-part epoxy and the other layers
are subsequently screwed on.
Figure 14 Inner set

The second is the outer group, some parts of these

hex nuts can be seen from the outside and is used to fix the
steel casing to the inner sandwiched parts. Once again it is glued onto some
slightly sanded steel with two-part epoxy. It connected to ground via the DC
jack.

Figure 15 Outer set

The dimensions of the steel plates used are as follows:

Length
Width
Qty
7 (184.15)
1 (38.1)
2
2 (53.975)
1 (38.1)
2
7 (190.5)
2 (57.15)
1
Dimensions are in: Inches (Millimeters)

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4.2 STRUCTURE BUTTON ARRAY

Now the buttons are quite tricky, there are five buttons in total and these five were soldered onto
a small piece of scrap breadboard, unfortunately I dont have a photo when I was assembling this crucial
part. However I do have a photo and simple diagram:

Figure 16 That red part is

actually the button array!

That means before soldering any Nixie tubes you must sandwich the array! Also test the array
thoroughly and use good quality push buttons, or else you will be in a world of pain, you will have
to desolder ALL the tubes to fix any problems >.<! There is probably a better way of putting buttons
on the device but I did it this way anyways.
And also in Figure 16 you see that I have carefully wrapped the array in electrical tape (for the
love of electronics why do I not have any heatshrink?), just in case something shorts out.

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5 PROGRAMMING
This step was done quite swiftly and the progress of coding can be followed on the GitHub commit
page:
https://github.com/waicool20/Divergence-Meter-Project/commits/master
The I2C library was written by Peter Fleury and can be easily searched up on Google for your use,
otherwise all other code is original. Here is a block diagram on how the software works:

Of course the above is overly simplified, it does not even include the code of the different modes
and display driving code. It is much better to study the code in-depth.
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Here is some code from DivergenceMeter.c from commit fc776a2 which part of the flow diagram
is modeled on, this is specifically the timer interrupt:
/* Timer0 Interrupt Code, ran every 10ms as configured*/
ISR(TIMER0_COMPA_vect) {
for (int8_t i = 4; i >= 0; i--) {
if (bit_is_set(PINA, i+3) && buttonCount[i] < 65535) {
buttonCount[i]++;
} else {
buttonCount[i] = 0;
buttonIsPressed[i] = false;
buttonShortPressed[i] = false;
buttonLongPressed[i] = false;
}
if (buttonCount[i] > (BUTTON_LONG_PRESS_MIN_DURATION_MS / 10)) {
buttonIsPressed[i] = true;
buttonShortPressed[i] = false;
buttonLongPressed[i] = true;
} else if (buttonCount[i] > (BUTTON_SHORT_PRESS_MAX_DURATION_MS / 10)) {
buttonIsPressed[i] = true;
buttonShortPressed[i] = false;
buttonLongPressed[i] = false;
} else if (buttonCount[i] >= (BUTTON_SHORT_PRESS_MIN_DURATION_MS / 10)) {
if (settings.main[BEEP_ON_PRESS]) {
DivergenceMeter_buzz(2, 2, 1);
}
buttonIsPressed[i] = true;
buttonShortPressed[i] = true;
buttonLongPressed[i] = false;
}
}
if (buttonShortPressed[BUTTON1]) {
RNG_seed();
switch (currentMode) {
case SETTINGS_MODE:
settings_writeSettingsDS3232();
break;
case REST_MODE:
display_on();
break;
}
currentMode = currentMode < DIVERGENCE_MODE ? currentMode + 1 : CLOCK_MODE;
justEnteredMode[currentMode] = true;
} else if (buttonLongPressed[BUTTON1] && currentMode != SETTINGS_MODE) {
DivergenceMeter_switchMode(SETTINGS_MODE, false);
}
if (++clockCount > 9 && currentMode != CLOCK_SET_MODE) {
settings_readTimeDS3232();
clockCount = 0;
}
if (delayCount > 0) {
delayCount--;
}
if (buzzTimes) {
if (buzzIntervalCount++ == buzzInterval) {
buzzIntervalCount = 0;
PORTB |= (1 << SPEAKER);
if (buzzedDuration++ == buzzDuration) {
buzzedDuration = 0;
PORTB &= ~(1 << SPEAKER);
buzzTimes--;
}
}
}
if (bit_is_clear(PINA, ALARM_INT)) {
ringDuration = (ALARM_RING_M * 60);
beeps = 1;
beepIncCount = 0;
DivergenceMeter_switchMode(CLOCK_MODE, false);
display_on();
settings_clearAlarmFlagsDS3232();
}
TCNT0H = 0x00;
TCNT0L = 0x00;
}

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There is however some code Id like to discuss:

5.1 RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR AND WORLD LINE ROLLING

The Random Number Generator or RNG is a simple XOR shift algorithm called the XABC, I found
this algorithm from http://eternityforest.com/Projects/rng.php
void RNG_seed() {
randa = ADCH; //Seed with value from LDR
randb = settings.time[SECONDS]; //Seed with current second
randc = settings.time[MINUTES]; //Seed with current minute
randx = settings.time[HOURS];
}
void RNG_next() {
randx++;
randa = (randa ^ randc ^ randx);
randb = (randb + randa);
randc = (randc + ((randb >> 1) ^ randa));
}

As you can see from the above code (commit fc776a2) the initial seed is taken from the value of
the current value of the light sensor, second, minute, hour. This ensures that no two seeds are the same,
well at least in theory.
The randomized numbers are used in determining the numbers rolled onto the Nixie tubes,
almost like what a slot machine does, once again another flow diagram:

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5.2 DISPLAY DRIVING

Some code is written for aid in sending different signals to the shift registers, this includes sending
bits, latching and master off/on. The display is driven by sending different combinations of 1s and 0s to
the shift registers which in turn drive the Nixie tubes. The code is pretty straightforward and easy to
understand with some basic understanding on switch-case statements.
Brightness control is done by a timer module within the AVR which quickly switches the Shift
Registers outputs via the Blanking pin with PWM 5, with adaptive brightness on (Level 10), the PWM duty
cycle is derived from the light sensor directly, otherwise some predefined values are used.
The tubes values are stored within a struct for ease of use, it is much easier to copy a struct than
an array in this case. An array stores eight variables ranging from 0-9, two other arrays with the same
size store a Boolean value for the decimal points of each tube. Because of this the end result is similar to
Binary Coded Decimals or BCD, therefore some BCD math in some sections of the code must be used like
incrementing the value of each tube.

5.3 SETTINGS
Letting the AVR talk to the Real Time Clock or RTC which in our case is the DS3232 from Maxims
Integrated is actually very easy to do if you have I2C communications down. Instead of using the internal
EEPROM of our AVR, it is actually better to just store any user settings within the RAM of the DS3232,
luckily this particular chip does give us some few bytes of storage! This is great since RAM has an almost
unlimited R/W life at least compared to EEPROM and also it eliminates any human error for example
when the DS3232 is reset, all settings are reset to default, forcing the user to set any custom settings. If
it were left in EEPROM, any old settings would stick and a user thinking it would reset settings to default
will actually be left with some unknown settings.

Anyways that is the gist of what the software is supposed to do, and further study of the code should be
done before making any modifications or if you just want to understand how the device works.
The button interface was designed to be as human friendly as possible, the full How-To-Use Users
Manual can be found at:
https://github.com/waicool20/Divergence-Meter-Project/blob/master/Users%20Manual.md
The latest firmware for the Divergence Meter can be found at:
https://github.com/waicool20/Divergence-Meter-Project/tree/master/Software

Pulse Width Modulation

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6 DISTRIBUTION AND DOCUMENTATION

You may have noticed already that a majority of links I have given to you are from GitHub, and that
is because the project files of this project are hosted on GitHub:
https://github.com/waicool20/Divergence-Meter-Project
And Yes! As said before this project is Open Source and Open Hardware, though of course I did put
a license of them with GPLv3 for the software and TAPR OHL for the hardware, dont worry though! You
are still free to use and modify any of the files, just make sure you follow the terms of the licenses, go
google them up, there are tons of sites simplifying the terms.
As for documentation, this document is one of them, there are some more on GitHub and also on
my blog at:
https://www.waicool20.com
I have written a lot during the progress of building the device and it may or may not help/interest
you, so go on take a look! Otherwise I also post on other projects, so if you liked this one you may like
the others! Hehe shameless advertisement

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7 GALLERY

Figure 18 Early Stages

Figure 17 Early Stages 2

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Figure 19 Assembly!

Figure 20 Case done!

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Figure 22 Almost done!

Figure 21 There we go! It's complete!

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- End of Document You may stop reading now!

Divergence Meter Project by waicool20

And yes you just saw my name

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