Buy a Kit or Finished Unit

Not every reader of this series wants to spend a winter wiring a high-voltage supply and nursing a forty-year-old vacuum tube to life. Some want a glowing green clock on the shelf by the weekend, and they are willing to pay for it; others want to skip the firmware and the PCB layout but still enjoy the satisfaction of a soldering iron and a tube they sourced themselves. Both of those are legitimate paths, and they sit at the gentle end of the Vol 1 decision tree — Paths 1 and 2 in § 1.3, the “buy a finished clock” and “buy a controller board and supply your own CRT” options. This volume maps the buy-it landscape from the bespoke top to the ten-dollar clone bottom, tells you honestly what your money does and does not buy, and gives you a buy-versus-build trade-off you can hold up against your own patience, budget, and tolerance for the lethal voltages that every scope clock contains — even the ones somebody else assembled.

The single most important caveat lands before anything else: buying a finished clock removes the build risk, but buying a bare controller board does not. The dangerous parts of a scope clock are the high-voltage supply and the CRT (Vol 3, Vol 12), and on a bare-board purchase you still build, wire, and energize those parts. The “kit” you bought is the easy quarter — the microcontroller and the DACs. The hard, mains-derived, capacitor-holds-a-charge three-quarters is still your responsibility. Keep that straight as you read.

9.1 The spectrum of buying

There is no single product called “a scope clock for sale.” There is a spectrum, and where a given offer sits on it determines how much money, how much labour, and how much risk changes hands. From most-finished to least-finished:

1. Bespoke finished clock — a one-off, hand-built, fully working clock, often a restored vintage instrument, delivered ready to plug in. Oscilloclock is the canonical example (§ 9.2). Highest cost, zero build effort, zero electrical risk to you.
2. Stock finished clock from a small maker — a repeatable design (acrylic case, chosen tube) built to order. The “Full Clock With CRT” site sells in this tier alongside complete kits (§ 9.5). Mid-to-high cost, no build effort if you buy finished.
3. Complete kit — every part in a bag plus a board and instructions; you assemble and you wire the CRT, but the design is proven and supported. The Dutchtronix kit (Vol 7) and the kits on the Full-Clock site live here. Moderate cost, moderate effort, full HV risk.
4. Bare controller board — just the PCB (sometimes populated, sometimes not) that does the vector math and the DAC output. You supply the CRT, the high-voltage supply, and often the deflection amplifiers. AliExpress generic boards (§ 9.3) sit here. Low cost, high effort, full HV risk, and the documentation is frequently the weakest link.
5. Firmware + gerbers only — no physical goods at all; you fab the board and stuff it yourself. The OZ2CPU and jfet.org projects (§ 9.6) and the open-source crt-driver (Vol 10) are here. This is really a “build from scratch” path wearing a “kit” hat.

The rule of thumb that ties this volume back to Vol 1: the further down the list you go, the more of the dangerous engineering you personally own. Cost falls as you descend; risk does not.

9.2 Oscilloclock — the bespoke top of the market

Oscilloclock (oscilloclock.com) is the name everyone in this hobby knows, and for good reason: it is a single craftsman’s practice turning vintage cathode-ray test equipment — oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, radar indicators — into fully working, beautifully animated clocks, plus a line of purpose-built stock models. It is the high-water mark for what a scope clock can be, and it is the reference point against which every cheaper option is implicitly measured.

9.2.1 What they actually make

Three broad categories, by the site’s own framing:

• Custom conversions / restorations — a customer supplies (or the maker sources) a specific vintage instrument, and it is restored and converted into a clock with minimal cosmetic invasion, preserving the original front panel and often some original functionality. The documented Kikusui MC-120 build, for example, added custom LED lighting, WiFi time synchronization, and themed Metropolis animations while keeping the instrument’s character.
• Stock models — repeatable designs such as the “Model 1” and “Exo,” built into cast-acrylic cases with customisable displays. These are the closest Oscilloclock comes to a catalog product, though each is still hand-assembled to order.
• Core components — the X-Y-Z Core, a modular high-voltage-supply-plus-deflection-amplifier module sold to DIY builders who want the hard analog electronics done for them but want to build the rest themselves. This is the one place Oscilloclock meets the kit world; it is, in effect, “buy the dangerous quarter, build the easy three-quarters” — the exact inverse of an AliExpress board.

9.2.2 What makes them special

Three things justify the premium. First, build quality: each unit is hand-assembled, with circuit boards of 300-plus components soldered individually, in an explicitly stated craftsmanship (ものづくり / monozukuri) philosophy. Second, the animations: Oscilloclock is famous in the community for vector demos that go far past telling the time — the playable Zork text-adventure rendering that gives one of this hub’s source bookmarks its name, plus themed animation reels, startup sequences, and game-of-life-style flourishes that show off the vector display’s party trick of drawing literally anything describable as line segments (the “why vector” argument from Vol 1 § 1.1, made visible). Third, support: finished units carry a stated three-year warranty on the electronics (CRTs excluded, which is honest — a vintage tube is a vintage tube), and the maker is a known, contactable individual rather than an anonymous storefront.

FIGURE SLOT 9.2 — A representative Oscilloclock finished unit displaying an animation or the analog face, ideally one of the restored-instrument conversions. Suggested source: the oscilloclock.com galleries (request permission / credit the maker per the project photo policy), or a license-clean Openverse/Commons image of a comparable converted scope clock if permission is unavailable.

9.2.3 Price tier and how to buy

There is no published price list. All work — bespoke, stock, or Core module — is handled on a contact-for-quote basis through the site’s contact form; you describe what you want and receive a quote. The tier is unambiguously premium / bespoke: this is the four-dollar-sign option in Vol 1’s table, the path you take when you want a museum-grade object and budget is not the deciding factor. Verify current pricing, lead times, and exactly what a given commission includes directly with the maker — none of it is fixed, and a restored vintage instrument is priced very differently from a stock acrylic-cased model. Gift-wrapping is offered, which tells you something about the market it serves.

What you get versus a DIY build: a complete, working, warrantied, animated clock with zero hours at the bench and zero exposure to the high-voltage build — in exchange for the highest price in this volume and a lead time set by a one-person shop. If the making is the point for you, this is the wrong path; if the having is the point, it is the best one.

9.3 The AliExpress / generic “oscilloscope clock controller board”

At the opposite pole sits the cheap generic controller PCB, sold on AliExpress and similar marketplaces under names like “Oscilloscope Clock Controller Board.” The bookmarked listing in this hub showed roughly USD $122 list, discounted to about $76 at capture time — but marketplace pricing is volatile and listings vanish, so treat any specific number as indicative only and verify at purchase. This tier is genuinely useful and genuinely hazardous, and it deserves a careful reading because the listings are written to make a half-a-clock sound like a whole one.

9.3.1 What you typically get — and what you typically don’t

The defining question for any such listing is: does the board include the high-voltage supply, or only the digital front end? The answer varies by seller and is the single thing you must pin down before buying. In broad strokes the generic boards fall into two camps:

• Controller-only boards — the PCB carries the microcontroller (commonly an AVR/ATmega clone of the Dutchtronix lineage, or a PIC), the DACs, an RTC, and the low-voltage logic. It outputs X, Y, and Z (blanking) signals at logic/op-amp levels. It does not include the HV supply, and frequently does not include the deflection amplifiers that take those low-level signals up to the hundreds of volts the deflection plates need. You supply all of that, plus the CRT.
• “Complete” boards — some listings bundle a deflection-amplifier stage and even a small HV section, claiming a near-complete clock minus the tube. These are the ones to scrutinise hardest, because a board cheap enough to be an impulse buy that also claims to make kilovolts is making a claim worth verifying against the photos and schematic (if any).

Across the category, the CRT itself is almost never included — you are buying silicon, not glass. Many listings are clones or close derivatives of the Dutchtronix design (Vol 7), which is why the firmware behaviour, the face styles, and even the setup procedure often look familiar.

9.3.2 The questions to ask every listing

Before you spend a cent, get clear answers (from the listing, the seller’s Q&A, or by walking away if you cannot):

• HV supply: included or not? If not, you are building Vol 3’s circuit yourself — budget the cost, the transformer, and the risk accordingly.
• Deflection amplifiers: included or not? A board that outputs only 0–5 V cannot drive deflection plates directly; something must amplify those signals to the plate-voltage swing (Vol 4). Confirm whether that stage is on the board, sold separately, or entirely your problem.
• Which CRTs are supported? Generic boards are usually tuned for small electrostatic tubes in the 1–3 inch class (the 2AP1 / 3BP1 / DG7 / 6LO1i family this hub catalogs). Cross-check the claimed tube list against Vol 6 and against the actual deflection sensitivity and voltages your chosen tube needs — a board’s DAC range and amplifier swing have to match the tube’s volts-per-division, or your clock face will be tiny, clipped, or off-screen.
• Time-set and sync. Most are set by one or two pushbuttons (hours/minutes, as on the OZ2CPU and Dutchtronix lineages). Some clone the Dutchtronix’s serial-terminal setup; a few offer optional WiFi/GPS sync modules. Confirm what you actually get rather than assuming.
• Documentation. This is the category’s chronic weakness. Expect terse or machine-translated instructions, no schematic, no source code, and no support after the sale. If the design is a Dutchtronix clone, the original Dutchtronix documentation (Vol 7) may be your real manual — but verify the clone actually matches it before relying on that.

9.3.3 Quality, clone, and safety caveats

Three honest warnings. Quality is a lottery: component substitutions, cold joints on pre-populated boards, and out-of-spec parts are common; budget time to inspect, reflow, and test before you trust it near a CRT. Provenance is murky: many boards are uncredited clones of open or semi-open designs, so you inherit the original’s quirks without the original’s support channel. And the one that matters most — you still build the parts that can kill you. A cheap controller board does nothing to reduce the hazard of the HV supply and CRT you wire around it; if anything it raises it, because the documentation that would walk a beginner safely through bring-up is exactly what these listings omit. Read Vol 12 before energizing anything, exactly as you would for a from-scratch build — the bargain price buys you a circuit board, not a reprieve from the physics.

This path is the right call for an experienced builder who wants to skip the firmware and the vector-math work, already owns or can safely build an HV supply and deflection amps, and treats the cheap board as a known-imperfect starting point rather than a finished product. It is the wrong call for a first-timer who reads “controller board” as “clock.”

9.4 The Altoids Scope Clock — the novelty / minimalist build

The “Altoids Scope Clock” (electronixandmore.com) is a different animal worth understanding because its name oversells it in an instructive way. It is a much-loved minimalist project: a PIC 16F876 plus a Texas-Instruments DAC, generating X and Y clock graphics, with the whole controller circuit famously stuffed into a painted Altoids tin. It descends directly from the OZ2CPU design (§ 9.6) and uses the 60 Hz mains line frequency as its timekeeping reference, tapped from the AC side of a 12 VAC wall adapter through a current-limiting resistor (a 50 Hz variant exists). Time is set with two pushbuttons cycling Run / Hours-Set / Minutes-Set modes.

The instructive nuance: in its original “Version 1” form, the tin holds only the controller — it feeds X/Y (and optionally Z) into an external oscilloscope that provides the CRT, the HV supply, and the deflection amplifiers. So as a “scope clock in a tin,” it is really “the brain of a scope clock in a tin, plugged into a scope on your bench.” That is a perfectly good thing — it is the cheapest possible way to put a clock face on any X-Y-capable oscilloscope you already own, vacuum-tube scopes included — but it is not a self-contained pocket clock.

A neat finding from that project, relevant to anyone driving an old scope: the blanking (Z) signal turned out to be optional on this design, because the vectors are drawn fast enough that almost nothing is visible between points. Dropping it makes the controller compatible with simple X/Y-only scopes that have no Z-axis input — at the cost of faint connecting lines you mostly cannot see anyway.

The constraints of a truly self-contained tin build (a tiny CRT plus its HV supply inside the tin) are real and worth stating, because builders inevitably try it: a sub-1-inch electrostatic tube is dim and hard to source; the high-voltage supply and the metal tin are an uncomfortable pairing (a grounded metal enclosure inches from a kilovolt rail demands real clearance and insulation, per Vol 3 and Vol 11); and heat in a sealed tin is a problem. The novelty is the point; the packaging fights you the whole way.

FIGURE SLOT 9.4 — The Altoids-tin controller displaying a clock face on a vintage oscilloscope (the project’s signature image). Suggested source: electronixandmore.com (credit the author), or a license-clean substitute showing a clock face on a scope CRT.

9.5 The “Full Clock With CRT” build site

For the buyer who wants a real, self-contained clock-with-tube but at a fraction of an Oscilloclock price, the “Full Clock With CRT” build site (oscilloscopeclocknixiecrt.com) is the most useful single source in this volume. It is a one-person handmade shop — explicitly “not a commercial product,” everything built by hand — that spans the whole tiers-2-through-4 range: finished assembled clocks, complete kits, board-only partial kits, and individual components.

9.5.1 What it offers

The scope-clock line displays alternating analog and digital faces (switching roughly every ten seconds) to fight phosphor burn-in, in blue, green, or blue/yellow phosphor variants, with a “shifter” that nudges the image position periodically for the same reason. The site also sells Nixie, VFD, and tube-amplifier products, but the scope clocks are our interest. Most clocks support optional WiFi modules for automatic time sync and optional GPS modules, and many include programmable sleep/wake scheduling to extend tube and component life.

The CRTs offered span exactly the family this hub cares about: 2AP1, 3BP1, 6LO1i, 6LO2A, 1EP11, DG7-6, DG7-12C, and assorted 5-inch tubes — which makes this site doubly useful as a cross-check on tube availability when you are choosing a tube for a bare board (Vol 6).

9.5.2 Price tier and how to buy

Indicative pricing at capture: finished clocks roughly $180–$2,700, kits roughly $55–$295. That spread spans a small green-phosphor unit at the bottom to a large 5-inch, WiFi-synced, multi-tube-grade build at the top, and it neatly fills the gap between an AliExpress board and an Oscilloclock commission. Purchase is by email (the site lists a direct address), PayPal or card buttons, or via the maker’s Etsy / eBay / Tindie storefronts, with a stated typical lead time of one to two weeks. As always with a one-person shop, verify current pricing, stock, and the exact tube/feature set with the vendor before ordering.

The trade-off here is the sweet spot for “I want a tube clock, not a project”: buying finished gets you a self-contained clock with a real CRT and no HV build at a mid-market price; buying the kit gets you the assembly experience and the savings but puts the CRT wiring and HV bring-up back on you (Vol 12 applies in full).

9.6 Other paths — firmware-and-board-only projects and the database

Below the kit tier sit the projects that give you everything except physical goods. They blur into the from-scratch path of Vol 10, but they belong here because builders often arrive at them looking for “a kit” and find files instead.

9.6.1 An Oscilloscope CRT Clock (jfet.org)

A well-documented homebrew clock (web.jfet.org/vclk/) built around a Telefunken DB7-12C tube run at about 1150 V anode-to-cathode, a Hammond 270X transformer, Greinacher voltage multipliers producing ±340 V and ±680 V rails, ZTX458 / BUL216 cascode deflection amplifiers, an AD7302 DAC, and a PIC16F628 counting 50/60 Hz mains for timekeeping with Hershey-font vector glyphs. Crucially for this volume, the author publishes the gerbers, source tarball, compiled hex, full schematics, and a Digi-Key BOM — so it is a “buy nothing, fab everything” path with enough documentation to actually succeed. Cases are available through a third party.

9.6.2 OZ2CPU “PCBs and Firmware” (webx.dk)

The OZ2CPU project (webx.dk/oz2cpu/clock-scope/scope.htm) is the ancestor of the Altoids build and a reference design in its own right. It documents a three-board architecture — a power-supply board, a deflection-and-blanking board, and a PIC16F876 controller board (an older ZN508-DAC version and a better AD7302-DAC version) — running at 16 MHz (50 Hz) or 19 MHz (60 Hz). It supports a wide tube list with pinouts (DG7-32 preferred, DG7-6, 6LO1i, 3RP1, and the DH7/78 the author calls his best tube, which wants ~1200 V via a tripler), publishes free firmware hex files and a TGA-to-coordinate converter, and shows typical operating voltages (cathode ~−200 V, anode ~+300 V, 6.3 V filament). Again: files, not goods.

9.6.3 The Tube Clock Database

The Tube Clock Database (tubeclockdb.com) is not a vendor at all but the community’s catalog — it indexes tube-based clocks by display technology (Nixie, VFD, Numitron, scope/CRT, and more), with reviews, builder forums, and a vendor directory. Its scope/CRT section and entries like the documented Dutchtronix build log are the right place to (a) discover who is currently selling kits and finished clocks, (b) read independent build experiences before you buy, and (c) sanity-check a marketplace listing against a known design. Treat it as the index to this whole volume: when a vendor link in here eventually goes stale, the database is where you go to find its replacement.

9.7 Buy-versus-build trade-off

Here is the decision distilled. The table maps the five tiers of § 9.1 against the things that actually decide the choice — and it is the practical expansion of Vol 1 § 1.4’s first two decision-tree branches.

Factor	Oscilloclock (bespoke)	Finished from small maker	Complete kit	Bare controller board	Firmware/gerbers only
Build effort	none	none	moderate (assemble + wire CRT)	high (HV + amps + CRT all yours)	very high (fab board too)
Up-front cost	$$$$ (premium, quote)	$$–$$$ (~$180–2,700)	$$ (~$55–295)	$ (~$75–120 board)	~free (you buy parts)
Total cost incl. parts	all-in	all-in if finished	board + tube + case	board + HV + amps + tube + case	everything
Support	direct, warrantied (3 yr elec.)	direct, small maker	varies; often good	usually none	community only
Customisation	total (bespoke)	menu of options	some (case, tube)	high (it’s your design around it)	total
Learning	none	little	real (assembly, CRT bring-up)	substantial	maximum
Safety exposure	none (maker built the HV)	none if bought finished	full HV/CRT risk	full HV/CRT risk	full HV/CRT risk

9.7.1 When buying is the right call

Buy a finished clock (Oscilloclock, or finished from a small maker) when any of these are true: you want the object more than the process; you have no bench, no oscilloscope, or no appetite for mains-derived high voltage; you want a warranty and a contactable human; or you are buying a gift. The premium is real but so is the value — you are paying for a working, animated, warrantied object and total avoidance of the only genuinely dangerous part of the hobby.

Buy a complete kit when you want the assembly satisfaction and the learning, accept the HV and CRT risk, and value a proven, supported design — the Dutchtronix (Vol 7) and the Full-Clock kits are the strong choices here.

Buy a bare controller board only when you are an experienced builder who genuinely wants to own the analog and HV engineering, treats the cheap board as an imperfect head start, has read Vol 6 for tube choice and Vol 12 for safety, and will not be surprised when the documentation is absent and the part you have to build is the part that can kill you.

And build from firmware/gerbers (§ 9.6, or Vol 10) only when the making is the entire point — at which stage you have left this volume behind and joined the from-scratch builders.

Whichever tier you choose, the constant from Vol 1 holds: only the two genuinely finished options remove the high-voltage risk. Everything from a kit downward leaves the dangerous quarter — or three-quarters — in your hands, and Vol 12 is mandatory reading before first power-up.

9.8 References (Vol 9)

• Oscilloclock — handcrafted CRT scope clocks, bespoke conversions, restorations, stock models (Model 1, Exo), the X-Y-Z Core module, and the Zork / animation demos. Contact-for-quote pricing; verify current pricing and lead time with the maker. https://oscilloclock.com/
• “Oscilloscope Clock Controller Board” generic listing, AliExpress (indicative price ~USD $122 list / ~$76 promo at capture; verify at purchase; confirm whether HV supply and deflection amps are included and which CRTs are supported). https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807617111380.html
• Altoids Scope Clock (PIC 16F876 + DAC controller, OZ2CPU-derived, mains-locked timekeeping, driving an external scope), Electronix & More. https://www.electronixandmore.com/projects/scopeclock/index.html
• “Full Clock With CRT” — finished clocks, kits, and components; scope/Nixie/VFD lines; CRTs 2AP1/3BP1/6LO1i/6LO2A/1EP11/DG7-6/DG7-12C and 5-inch; optional WiFi/GPS; indicative pricing finished ~$180–2,700, kits ~$55–295; verify with vendor. http://oscilloscopeclocknixiecrt.com/
• “An Oscilloscope CRT Clock” — Telefunken DB7-12C, Hammond 270X, Greinacher multipliers, ZTX458/BUL216 deflection amps, AD7302 DAC, PIC16F628; gerbers, source, hex, schematics, and Digi-Key BOM published. https://web.jfet.org/vclk/
• OZ2CPU scope clock “PCBs and Firmware” — three-board design (PSU / deflection-blanking / PIC16F876 controller), wide tube support with pinouts, free firmware hex and TGA-to-coordinate converter. https://www.webx.dk/oz2cpu/clock-scope/scope.htm
• Tube Clock Database — community catalog of tube clocks (scope/CRT, Nixie, VFD, Numitron), reviews, forums, and vendor directory; Dutchtronix oscilloscope-clock build entry. https://www.tubeclockdb.com/scope-crt-clocks/364-dutchtronix-oscilloscope-clock-build
• Dutchtronix AVR Scope Clock kit (the canonical hobby kit; covered in Vol 7). http://www.dutchtronix.com/ScopeClock.htm
• “Oscilloscope Clocks — Good resources” compilation (Altoids/jbstanley build write-ups, OZ2CPU and Dutchtronix references). Held in 02-inputs/PDF Resources, Ideas, and Schematics/.
• CRT sourcing for bare-board builds: Sphere Research surplus CRT listings (cross-reference Vol 6). https://www.sphere.bc.ca/?s=crt