I saw all the Nixie clocks and thought, meh -- lots of work for something tied to a desk and kinda boring. I want to make something portable, something fit for Hallowe'en. So I decided: 1d10 (that's a single ten-sided die, not 80% of a Leet idiot).

I got the idea of tying it to a simple program run from an Arduino Mini Pro or similar MCU on a board. The problem is that it needs a high-voltage driver and BCD decoder (usually an SN74141 IC).

Neon requires about 170 to 200 volts to light up the cathode grid, but almost no current. Your typical micro controller unit -- such as Atmel's ATmega and ATTiny lines, PIC, Intel 8051 old-school -- freaks out above 3.3 or 5 volts. So you need one low-voltage chip to think up the number to be displayed, then a high-voltage IC to toggle the cathodes and hand the big volts to the anode.

My goal is a device I can fit in my hand. I would shake it (accelerator) to trigger a random number generator program (or put out a specific number based on certain shake pattens). Then let the numbers whirl for a few seconds before slowing down to a final answer. Then I could say "the oracle says six! What does that MEAN? I don't question the gods. You'll figure it out."