Almost 20 years ago I was doing some experimentation with making decorative flowers out of neon lamps. I did two versions. One with a resistor per neon so they all lit, and one with a bit of circuitry to try and create a random effect where the light moved between the flowers petals. It requires all matching neon lamps from the same batch for the best results.
In this video I put them into a repurposed glass dome base to protect them from dust and damage, and also to protect inquisitive fingers, since they operate at mains voltage.
Note that this circuit is running at 240V so if you want to try the same thing with 110V you will need to swap the 470K resistor for something much lower like 100K.
The circuit is very sensitive to ambient light and electrical fields. When first powered up a single neon may light, but when left running continually it will gradually evolve. Power consumption for several flowers is a fraction of a watt.
If you like my videos you can toss me a dollar for coffee and cookies at https://www.patreon.com/bigclive
In this video I put them into a repurposed glass dome base to protect them from dust and damage, and also to protect inquisitive fingers, since they operate at mains voltage.
Note that this circuit is running at 240V so if you want to try the same thing with 110V you will need to swap the 470K resistor for something much lower like 100K.
The circuit is very sensitive to ambient light and electrical fields. When first powered up a single neon may light, but when left running continually it will gradually evolve. Power consumption for several flowers is a fraction of a watt.
If you like my videos you can toss me a dollar for coffee and cookies at https://www.patreon.com/bigclive
Still experimenting with getting this to work on 120 VAC 60 Hz. After not getting any satisfactory results, I thought about what's different between 120 VAC 60 Hz and 240 VAC 50 Hz. The conduction angle is going to be different.
Small neon lamps ionize at voltages from 55 to 80 volts on AC and a pretty consistent 90 volts at DC. A neon can be used as a pretty stable 90 volt DC regulator. So I chose 90 volts for calculating conduction angle. Given a half wave rectifier, how much time does the power source spend above 90 volts?
For 120V 60 Hz it's above 90V for 116.2 degrees (5.38 ms) and below 90V for 243.8 degrees (11.29 ms).
For 240V 50 Hz it's above 90V for 149.2 degrees (8.29 ms) and below 90V for 210.8 degrees (11.71 ms).
I wondered if this difference was enough to prevent it from working so I changed to a full wave rectifier and got significantly better performance. There is now slow action, where the illuminated lamp changes every minute or so and non-illuminated lamps frequently show faint internal flickering.
I've also noticed that ambient light greatly improves the action. Ambient light causes the action to look much like that shown in your videos with all lamps flickering very rapidly, more rapidly than in the videos. Shining UV light on it, even from a distance, causes all lamps to glow almost steadily. When the light is removed, just one bulb remains lit and the action returns to slow changes every minute or so.
So, improvements but not there yet.
Very neat! Almost looks like a bonsai tree!
Beautiful 🌹
I built one of these last week.
Hi Big Clive. Did you do a video on building this neon flower "bouquet"? With 120V optional parts?o
Very cool, like the other ones, and a nice reveal that the idea is actually quite a time served one.
A thought that occurred, if you take out the main supply resistor, would the extra voltage mean you'd get two or three neons lighting simultaneously instead of just one? And if so, would they keep flickering, or would that essentially cause that two/three to remain steadily lit?
Oh, and "stem with the LEDs on it" – Light Emitting Devices, right? 🙂
The whole world is better off with neon in all forms. Neons always were, and always will be, FAR better than LED's. I am sick to death of led this and led that. LED's are shit boring to me. Long live Neon!
When I was a kid, the local church had an "eternal flame" which was a flickery electric thing. It was too high up to see what was actually providing the light. Could it have been something like this?
I used your circuit idea to make an 8-neon 'flower' thing – however, I split the resistive dropper in two, one half in the live one half in neutral line for ease of construction, and it seems that having the '90v neon rails' sit in between the mains rails like this causes much faster switching between neons – I swapped both droppers to the live also, so the neons are ref'd to the neutral, and I get switching more like you do. Also, with either dropper scheme I find that swapping L and N gives different effects – one way round I get switching, the other way round I get one neon lit, but if I touch another neon, that one lights permanently, and so on. Which isn't so good :o) I'm surprised that with the 'balanced' dropper scheme that mains 'polarity' matters at all – very odd. Anyway Clive, very good – the neon flower is mesmerising in dark conditions – I've ordered some neons from 2 more suppliers to see how differently they behave…
PS. YT has removed their messaging now – how the hell do people contact you to send you stuff to review, or sweets, or whatever ??? Dave
Hey Big Clive nice neon project. I don't if you had considered a slight variation on your circuit. However here are some example of circuits that would make some great displays too.
RIP projector users 🙂