Tag Archives: Nextube

Retro-inspired nixie display with custom features lets you see the time, weather, stock prices, or your TikTok followers

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Designed for people who simultaneously love living in the 80s and the 2020s…

Culture is cyclical. It’s 2023 but retro music is trending again, vintage designs and themes are making a re-emergence (just look at the new Burberry logo)… and even though our tech is futuristic, it has a significant retro flavor with companies looking to harness the power of nostalgia in their new products. Minimalism is dead, retro is cool, and the Nextube is totally riding that wave. Designed as a vintage-inspired tabletop display, the Nextube comes with 6 nixie tube-like screens docked within a wooden base. It wears its steampunk aesthetic on its sleeve but comes with modern tech under its hood. The six mini displays look like Nixie tubes, but are, in fact, LED screens that can be customized to showcase anything from the time to the weather, music visualizations, crypto prices, or even a subscriber count for your YouTube or TikTok page.

Designer: James Wong of Rotrics

Click Here to Buy Now: $148 $188 (21% OFF) Hurry! Limited time offer

The 1970s and 1980s were far from minimalist. The music was loud, the fashion was bright, cyber-synthwave was popular, and one could argue that it was in this very era that technology first flourished. Nixie tubes were somewhat the predominant display type of this era, turning them from tech components into symbols of pop culture. Sadly, nixie tubes fell out of favor in the 90s as technology advanced (along with the fact that a bulk of nixie tubes were made in the USSR, which fell into disarray around the time). Designed, however, as a cultural throwback, the Nextube celebrates its ancestor in a wonderfully whimsical way. A portmanteau of ‘Next’ and ‘Nixie Tube’, the Nextube uses a set of mini LED displays encased in vacuum glass tubes. Complete with a neat walnut wood base and brass trims, the Nextube looks like a steampunk gizmo from an 80s laboratory on your desk. It comes with the signature Nixie tube-inspired font too, although it offers a few other retro-style fonts and themes to choose from, giving you custom control over your tabletop display.

The Nextube’s bank of fonts and styles lets it be the display you want it to be

The six individual displays create a unique constraint that’s fun to work with. You can view the time, date, weather, and a wide variety of data-points on the Nextube in a way that’s charmingly vintage. Each tube does a remarkable job of looking rather close to actual Nixie tubes (with a matching glowing typeface too), while consuming a mere 5V of electricity as opposed to the 12V that regular Nixie tubes consume. The LED displays are rated to last for 100,000 hours too, compared to the 5,000 hours that most Nixie tubes last.

View weather details at a glance

Track your YouTube subscriber count

Or view your online shop’s PayPal balance in real-time

Or even let the Nextube be your reliable time manager

The Nextube’s open-source firmware means you can customize it to display anything from inspirational quotes to calendar alerts, email notifications, or even miniature images from your camera roll. Three small buttons (sitting flush against the wooden body) let you toggle between the Nextube’s various functions, while the device itself can be connected to your laptop/desktop to fine-tune how your Nextube device behaves and what metrics it displays.

The Nextube’s six display units are also accompanied by RGB LEDs located on their rear, which create an ambient backlight that can be customized to suit your needs. Each Nextube also comes with a built-in spectral analyzer that responds to music, turning your retro display into a Winamp-style visualizer that responds to music in real-time!

The Nextube allows you to access a whole slew of built-in functions, or even tinker with its companion software Nextube Studio to create your own custom styles and preview them on the device, or even share them with the Nextube community.

Occupying 7 inches in width and standing just under 2.4 inches in height, the Nextube makes for a perfect compact accessory to any worktable. It comes with a walnut wood base, brass trimmings, and 6 LED displays that sit under their own individual glass tubes. The Nextube doesn’t have a battery of its own but comes with a USB-C port that lets you plug it into your power strip or directly into a port on your laptop/desktop/multiport hub. It works offline, providing basic functions like the clock, timer, or music visualizer, and can even connect to 2.4GHz WiFi networks to access metrics like the weather, your camera roll, or even stock prices and follower counts from various social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok.

A perfect tabletop accessory for any tech enthusiast, the Nextube starts at $148 with global shipping and a 1-year warranty.

Click Here to Buy Now: $148 $188 (21% OFF) Hurry! Limited time offer

The post Retro-inspired nixie display with custom features lets you see the time, weather, stock prices, or your TikTok followers first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Nixie tube tabletop clock adds a retro-punk flavor to your otherwise boring smart home appliances

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If you’re the kind of person to simultaneously live in the 80s as well as the 2020s, the Nextube may be just the perfect little desktop accessory for you.

While I love what Apple, Google, and Amazon have done to uplift the home and bring it into the 21st century, one could posit that their devices were designed more to blend in than to stand out. A Nest door camera doesn’t scream for attention, the doorbell itself looks decently sophisticated, and the smart speaker inside your house is almost always a neutral color and form, so it ‘becomes a part of your home’… just as intended. These accessories add features and functionality, but rarely do they add character. That’s a school of thought that eludes most design/tech companies, because they want to build a product that fits beautifully into all sorts of homes – but predominantly Euro-American homes which are increasingly moving towards adopting minimalism. The Nextube, however, was designed for the flashy, retro-loving maverick.

Designer: James Wong of Rotrics

Click Here to Buy Now: $149 $189 ($40 off). Hurry, for a limited time only.

The 70-80s were the farthest thing from minimalism. The music was loud, the fashion was colorful, cyber-synthwave was all the rage, and it was arguably the birth of modern tech, with video-games and computers becoming household objects, and the Nixie Tube increasingly becoming a signature element in sci-fi pop culture. Nixie tubes gradually died out in the 90s-2000s as the technology around cathode-ray tubes, and then LCD and LED displays began developing. However, unlike tech (which progresses linearly), culture is cyclical, and retro-tech is making a comeback. The Nextube is a product of that cultural throwback but relies on today’s tech. It mimics the raw, retro appeal of nixie tubes, but given how rare these tubes are (since they stopped production in the 90s), the Nextube uses a clever set of mini LED displays encased in vacuum glass tubes. Complete with a neat walnut wood base and brass trims, the Nextube looks like something from an 80s laboratory on your desk. The steampunk gadget comes with 6 individual displays that tell the time as well as the weather, in that gloriously vintage nixie-inspired glowing font.

A clever play on the words Next and Nixie-tube, the Nextube is a little retro and modern mashed into one gloriously steampunk device. Its primary function is that of a tabletop clock and alarm, however, the 6 mini displays can be programmed to display practically anything, from the weather to your YouTube subscriber count, the price of your favorite cryptocurrency, or even a countdown clock for a pre-set date/time. The Nextube’s mini displays aren’t limited to the Nixie-tube font either. Outfitted with LED panels, the Nixtube’s mini displays come with an array of retro-inspired fonts, including dot-matrix, seven-segment display, flip-clock, and a variety of cyberpunk-inspired fonts and themes.

Your reliable time manager.

Monitor your sub counts in real-time.

Know the weather at a glance.

Dance with your favorite music.

Track your primary tasks.

The digital IPS screens can bring endless possibilities.

Armed with open-source firmware, you can practically program the Nextube’s mini-screens to display anything, from motivational messages to calendar alerts, email notifications, or even tiny pictures from your camera roll. Small buttons in front of the tubes allow you to toggle between the Nextube’s various functions, and a spectral analyzer built into the Nextube’s body even lets you turn it into a music visualizer, with dancing bars that respond to any music that’s playing.

While it does look exactly like the kind of product you’d see in the background of a YouTuber’s setup (we’re thinking on the set of MKBHD’s Retro Tech web-series), its versatility means you can place the Nextube anywhere, from your work-desk to your bedside table, kitchen counter, or even living room coffee table. Wherever you put it, the Nextube’s commanding presence and wonderfully nostalgic retro-vibe instantly make it an eye-catching centerpiece – which easily sets it apart from the other ‘boring-looking’ smart-home appliances you may have lying around your place. The IPS displays ensure incredible visibility no matter what angle you view the Nextube from, and all you really need is a power source to connect the device to. The Nextube is available on Kickstarter for $149 – it comes bundled with a USB-C cable, charging brick, and Nextube’s open-source software; and ships globally with a one-year warranty.

Click Here to Buy Now: $149 $189 ($40 off). Hurry, raised over $425,000.