Cold War phone Nixie clock
By Ben Everard. Posted
This article was originally published as part of HackSpace magazine, which has since been incorporated into Raspberry Pi Official Magazine.
We’ve marvelled at the work of Paul Parry (aka Bad Dog Designs) before in these pages; here’s one of his latest builds. Paul has got his hands on some Cold War-era military field telephones, and, of course, has turned them into Nixie tube clocks.

Both telephones are housed in bakelite enclosures; the lighter-coloured one (shown here) is a Russian TA-57 telephone dating from 1968–1975; the darker one is a Polish TAP-67 dating from somewhere between 1968 and 1974.
Both phones feature programmable RGB LED back-lighting to show off the Nixies in their best light, four Z570M Nixie tubes, and tell the time accurate to plus/minus one minute per year.
Ben is the Editor of HackSpace magazine. When not wrangling words, he enjoys cycling, gardening, and attempting to identify wild mushrooms.
Subscribe to Raspberry Pi Official Magazine
Save up to 37% off the cover price and get a FREE Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W with a subscription to Raspberry Pi Official Magazine.
More articles
MirrorBallBot
This trick uses no smoke but it does use mirrors
Read more →
Digital Displays in Raspberry Pi Official Magazine 170
Some projects seem more like magic to us than anything else; here’s one of them. This robot by Italian engineer/magician Andrea Favero uses a mirror to widen the field of vision of a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3, the input from which is processed by Raspberry Pi 4 and used to control three legs to […]
Read more →
Win a Development Kit for Compute Module 5
Make CM5 development easier with our competition
Read more →