NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

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Richard Hull
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NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

Post by Richard Hull »

NIM has been around since Hector was a pup. As such, its electronics has seen a vast period of evolution from the early 60's limited tube offerings, fully maturing into Transistor discrete components merging into the IC era and still, in limited offerings, in the micro controller era. NIM is like the old Medieval guy dying of the plague in the Monty Python film, about to be thrown onto the cart full of bodies headed for the lime pit, proclaiming, "I'm not dead yet!"

One of the prime NIM modules was quickly offered, early on. This was the scaler (digital counter). In a recent bit of humor related to hand crafting all of one's electronics related to neutron counting, Finn Hammer made a jab that perhaps in using vacuum tube gear one must also use a nixie tube counter.

Early nixies of the early NIM days were rather large tubes and very expensive requiring 180 volts and lots of complex circuitry. Such a NIM module would gobble up a vast number of NIM slots and thus other methods found application early on. As a modest collector of interesting NIM modules. I offer, below, what amounts to the evolution of scalers in NIM.

First a 4 slot Victoreen/Tullamore scaler of the very early days. This monster sports 8 internal cards with nearly a hundred early, large can, germanium transistors, feeding an array of decade indicators that force the user to interpret BCD coder in each decade. Advanced for its time it even included a rats nest of wiring to rotary switches to preset a stop count. The best of the early 60's here and not too expensive to implement.
.....Getting way ahead, temporally, just to the right of this unit is a 1990s-2000s single slot microcontroller based Ortec scaler... What a contrast!!!

Second is a rather thin, 2 slot true decade columnar readout. (timer/scaler) Again, all transistorized with three cards jam packed with much more modern late sixties tiny epoxy transistors. Smaller components and finer PC board traces allow for much higher electronic densities. One digit in each row illuminated by a simple NE-2 lamp, 60 lamps in all!

Third is a true Nixie tube readout with many advanced features, (timer/scaler), needing lots of cards and transistors. This highly prized unit, for its day, still gobbled up 3 slots. Probably an early to mid 70's unit as Nixie tubes got really thin. The seven segment readout was in keeping with the early LED fad and allowed for the thin nixie setup.

Fourth is a 1980's full LED scaler with dual readouts, as a timer/scaler taking up three NIM slots. IC's were creeping into NIM at this time. Currently in use regularly in my NIM system, the readout seen here indicates the total counts in 60 seconds of a hot piece of U ore. (2 -inch pancake detector).

I am on a hunt for a NIM scaler using the popular, but short lived Numertron incandescent 7 segment readout. (Very popular in the late 70's and early 80's gasoline station pumps.)

Enjoy

Richard Hull
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Do you speak BCD?....Do your sums and try and remember the totals of each digit!  Better still, just write them down as you total each decade.
Do you speak BCD?....Do your sums and try and remember the totals of each digit! Better still, just write them down as you total each decade.
Oh boy real Arabic numerals!
Oh boy real Arabic numerals!
The sweet glow of neon in seven segments!?
The sweet glow of neon in seven segments!?
Modern enough to do great no brainer counting...In this case, a 60 sec count on a chunk of U ore.
Modern enough to do great no brainer counting...In this case, a 60 sec count on a chunk of U ore.
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

Post by ChristofferBraestrup »

These strange scaler displays are really a treasure of display technology - and a horror from a human interface device point of view!

The earliest scalers from the 1940s used the cyclic dekatron tubes, which are also bizzarely beautiful.

Even into the standardization of 7segment LED displays, the human-unfriendly scaler readouts continued. This is a German Emetron scaler module - with 6 decades of 7seg's stacked vertically!
It is also my only NIM module requiring +-6V, so I haven't tested it yet..
20210404_185723.jpg
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Richard Hull
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Re: NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

Post by Richard Hull »

You mentioned dekatrons. I have two decatron counters. One is displayed below. Dekatrons were huge tubes and as such, just like early nixies were never in NIM modules. They were in use during the Manhattan project, but really came into their own after WWII 40's-50's. The one I show is probably near the end of their common use, late 50's. Sure, they are not human friendly to read, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Plus, when counting hot stuff, they are a frenetic rolling display and both fun and intriguing to watch.

Mine is made by Oak Ridge Atom Industries. (didn't last long, I think)

Richard Hull
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A rare Dekatron counter.  Note overflow mechanical counter.  Common in many early digital counters where decades were expensive and reserved for the super fast digital counting and display from units to thousands then to the slow mechanical counter for units of ten thousand counts and above.
A rare Dekatron counter. Note overflow mechanical counter. Common in many early digital counters where decades were expensive and reserved for the super fast digital counting and display from units to thousands then to the slow mechanical counter for units of ten thousand counts and above.
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

Post by ChristofferBraestrup »

That's more or less exactly the dekatron scaler I was thinking of!

Yeah, having one of those in a NIM bin world fill the entire bin!

I think fundamentally, if displays and readouts were needed as human friendly readouts, they were important enough instruments that they would have their own rack unit above the instruments they displayed data from, in a control room setting, one would also want them large enough that multiple people could read them from a variety of distances/angles.

Display technologies came and went VERY fast in the 1960's, many of which are being excellently documented by Fran Blanche on youtube.
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Re: NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

Post by Richard Hull »

I have watched a lot of FranLab videos on You tube and a lot of very odd displays are found and made operative there. Some few were so manufacturer specific, complex to implement and, therefore, expensive that they never made any real market penetration. The big market penetration splashes were Dekatrons 40's to 50's, Nixies, 60's to 70's, LEDs 70's to 90's, 2000's LCDs and later OLEDs.

Columnar decade readouts probably had a much longer run that any type of readout due to low cost of manufacture and ease of implementation. (40's-70's) I have a couple of Nuclear Chicago early 60's classroom units with three columnar NE-2 decade readouts that handle units, tens and hundreds and overflow into the much slower 4 decade, Veeder Root mechanical pulse counters. ( about 800 counts per second max rate or ~50,000 cpm)....This concept can be seen in the Dekatron counter image above.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

Post by Maciek Szymanski »

It seems that the binary counting of the GM tube pulses was one of the first practical applications of the binary system, much ahead of the real computers. In the "Procedures in the Experimental Physics" you can find some binary scaling circuits based on the vacuum tube flip-flops. That must have been the leading edge technology in the time!
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Re: NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

Post by Richard Hull »

In early vacuum tube counters, four flip-flops were needed to make a single decade with some simple diode pulse steering to illuminate the 10 neon lamps in the column and pass the carry pulse on to the next decade. 4 duo-triodes like the 9 pin,12AX7 tube were the common tube used here.

I posted an image of the massive 54 vacuum tube counter made circa 1948 which I obtained for $10 at a hamfest some time back. I will repeat that image below. Each decade had a plug in, self-contained box with 4 duo-triode tubes. 28 vacuum tubes were gobbled up in just the 7 decades!! It was a primo item for its day. It had a 16 tube time base with a heated crystal oven. The other 10 tubes were used in the power supply and pulse forming and amplification. This monster required you to put on a truss before you lifted the thing. It was made by Berkley Nuclear, (a big early instrument player). It was a combination 10mhz freq counter and plain pulse counter. Based on advertisements at the time, it cost about what a new base-level Ford automobile cost in 1948. It was truly cutting edge or bleeding edge. (take your choice)

I sold it at one of my October HEAS fleamarkets about three years ago. I really do miss it.....in some respects. It was a great space heater in the lab on cold days. Yes, those are solid aluminum, cast, bar pointer knobs!!

Richard Hull
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Beckman (1).JPG
Beckman.anno.jpg
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Bob Reite
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Re: NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

Post by Bob Reite »

I had one of those in the early 1970s! I actually used it with a frequency scaler to do service work on radio transmitters.
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Re: NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

Post by ChristofferBraestrup »

I just came across of this terrible scan of an old HP ad - that really does look like a nixie scaler/counter in that NIM bin!

Image
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Richard Hull
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Re: NIM - "Oh let me count the ways"...but how many ways??

Post by Richard Hull »

Yep. It sure looks like the larger tube nixies that has got to a a 5 or 6 NIM slot gobble up! With that in your bin you are reduced to a Mini-NIM remainder.
I have never seen or heard of HP in the NIM biz. HP was an early user of the newly created Burroughs Nixies.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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