The Siren Board

A while back on this website's old forum, I had my friend Jerrylovesirens create a few drawings for me on how people could use their sirens as alarm clocks.

One was with a guy asleep in his bed with a thunderbolt siren sticking through his window. The other Was a Whelen Vortex siren imitating the rooster on a farm.

If you had a choice of which siren you could set up as your alarm clock, which would it be?

The Mini-T-bolt for me.

However I do use a timed Wheelock 6" vibrating bell to wake me up.

I'm fond of the T-bolt through the window, ahaha.

Even if it would cause, uhhh, deafness? It'd be worth it.

Should be very easy to rig up a simple lamp/appliance timer to activate a relay.

Somewhere on my computer, I have a schematic for activating a relay using the alarm output of a Sanyo LM8560 clock chip. The output is a 900hz square wave but it can be filtered and used though. I have the datasheet with me but I'll have to find the circuit

As for the actual siren itself; I still have my "flashlight-siren" in a drawer that I'm planning to hook up to the alarm circuit. I'm also going to build a horn for it so it resembles a mini 2001.

I'm getting to work on a project that I wanted to start a while back. Since then, I've learned quite a bit about electronics.

It's an alarm clock that will switch on a 120-volt outlet on the back of it when the desired time is reached. What you plug into it would only be limited by the amount of current available from the outlet, which would be fused of course. A contactor could be employed to allow the alarm circuit to switch on as big a siren as you like.

The thing will be built entirely of logic ICs (4000-series CMOS) and will display the time to the second on nixie tubes. The alarm will be set with 6 rotary switches. I have most of the schematic drawn up and critical parts tested, but I can't really continue until I get my hands on the tubes.

2T22

if i had a siren alarm clock i wouldnt have ne trouble getitng ^ in the morning

"^" is just as hard as typing "up" as they both use two keys.

We use words on this forum. Real words. None of this "u, ^, ur, dat" crap. People that don't learn this usually don't get to stay around very long.

I gutted an old JC PENNEY clock radio/cassette that had a fluorescent display. I removed the display, figured out the pinout pin by pin. This can be done by applying a low AC voltage to the filament, just short of making it glow orange, and then connecting a common DC supply; the negative side to either leg of the filament, and the positive lead to each "plate" lead. Mine was around the 18VDC range. Most of these clocks have a seperate filament secondary on the supply's transformer, at like 1.5 to 5VAC. Basically, the filament heats up and sheds electrons, and the plate voltage provides a target, glowing when struck by the electrons. I got individual Vacuum EL Tubes ( Electro-Luminescent), similar to Nixie's , but with a blue/green glow, and around the same operational voltage as the original display "panel". I used two Blue LED's as the colon between hour and minutes.

Anywho, mine used to trigger a Sho-Me Stealth Mini-Lightbar in my bed room with Red, Amber and Clear filters. Waking up to it got old though.

Let me know if you need help finding actual Nixie's; I have a few of them myself.

So far it looks like the best source for them is eBay. I've been spending the past few days looking at different tubes, and I think I'll probably go with the IN-14 (picture here). It's easy to find, looks nice, is a decent size (approximately 3/4" digits), and mounts vertically to a PCB (my PCB will be mounted flat). The funny thing is it uses an upside-down "2" as the "5" cathode.

I'm planning to use the two decimal points in each tube to indicate which digit is selected when setting the time.

Thanks for offering your help anyway, I appreciate it.