For a few months now, I’ve been toying with the idea of taking my experience in accelerometer-enabled nixie clock construction (see Mercury Retrograde) and leveraging it into the design of a high-quality kit. This meant jumping into the world of PCB design and manufacturing, which up until two months ago, was completely alien to me. So, to get started I designed a very simple numitron-based clock using IV-9 numitrons and had the board made using Sparkfun’s BatchPCB board service. Above is a photo of the final product.

BatchPCB has proven to be a wonderful and cost-effective service. I highly recommend it if you’re only prototyping one or two boards and don’t mind waiting a little longer for your order (the site quotes an average 3-4 week delivery time, but my first order arrived in 12 days).

I’ve already submitted a completely revised prototype board to BatchPCB that may be a candidate for the first clock kits. More details to follow, but suffice it to say that the clock kit will be as nice as I can manage for a first-time product. I’m spending as much time thinking about the case (milled aluminum, acrylic and hardwood) as I am about the circuit itself.