My Projects

Plasma display data

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Published 12 May 2018

Reusing Gas Plasma Displays


Occasionally I come across old gas plasma displays that I would like to use in projects.

Overview

Nixie tubes and some early flat panel monochrome screens both use similar technology. They rely on gases being excited into a plasma state by high voltage and emitting visible light. Later 'plasma' colour TV screens use a similar discharge to produce ultra-violet light that then excites coloured phosphurs (red/green/blue) to produce coloured pixels.

Hardware description

Nixie tubes have electrodes shaped into symbols (eg '1','2', '3') or multiple segments (like numeric LED displays). Flat panel plasma displays have a matrix of cells that can be caused to discharge individually, and have electronics to drive columns of cells in a wave or scan across the panel, a bit like refreshing a CRT tube.

Recovered plasma displays

On the sidebar there is a list of plasma displays that I have recovered from various pieces of scrap equipment and the linked pages include pinouts etc.

References and Additional Resources

Datasheets

If any referenced page no longer exists, try looking for its URL on http://archive.org.





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