When I saw the #Nixie inspired display last week I once again fell in love with LEDs faking Nixie displays. The copper colored cage is awesome, the reflections on the inner walls and the wire mesh looks fantastic. Great job!

The first time I fell in love with this topic was when I had my first working prototype of a display for my #fixietube clock in my hands and thought that it might actually work for me. Those blue LEDs are really bright, although they are running with a value of 16 for analogWrite, so I'm still thinking of adding a diffuser.

It wasn't the first time I've put some LEDs in a glass container, since I've used a test tube that was casing a vanilla twig for that before. I stacked LEDs per charlie-plexing together, so I would only have 3 wires/signals coming out of the tube. While googling tubes I found out that there is a VFD - tube called "IV-26", with 7 dots aligned on top of each other and I immediately thought of this. Would I revise it some day, I definitely would go for a 4pin charlie-plexed setup, getting 12 LEDs in there and maybe change the color to get the VFD feeling.

So when I saw the project of @FilleK, I had the urge to replicate this beauty. An old cell-phone-signal-alarm-thingy was used to get a case for my attempt to recreate the feeling of what he has created. A moody, lighted display photo will follow soon! Here is a "build log" in pictures.

This was the display I had in a drawer, probably from an old fridge, so for reference and no better place to put it; here is the datasheet: http://www.digchip.com/datasheets/parts/datasheet/513/TDSY.php

And here is the beauty shot :)