The Bulbdial clock comes to life

posted Apr 8th 2009 8:15am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: classic hacks, home hacks, led hacks

bulbdial

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has built the bulbdial clock, an idea originated by Ironic Sans. It’s basically a high definition indoor sundial. The LEDs arranged in a circle shine a light on the peg in the middle casting a shadow, just like a sundial. There are 3 colors of rings, allowing for hour, minute, and second shadows. This isn’t the first time that Ironic Sans has seen ideas come to reality. There were the pre pixelated reality show clothes and the sneaky histogram hidden message system. While it is a cute idea, it isn’t really new. People have been patenting this idea for a while.

Comments [7]

tagged: bulbdial, clock, emsl, ironic sans, led, shadow, sundial

7 Responses to The Bulbdial clock comes to life

mesoiam says:

April 8, 2009 at 9:37 am

I think this could’ve been made better by having a pointed stick in the middle, the shadows are a bit blunt. Still pretty cool though.

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dax says:

April 8, 2009 at 1:58 pm

At the cost of potentially making the electronics more complex, using RGB LEDs would have removed the need for multiple rings. With either case, adding more LEDs would add more precision to the time.. still pretty nifty concept and creation, though!

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supernova_hq says:

April 8, 2009 at 2:14 pm

So it has 3 colored lights and their shadows cast the hours, minutes and seconds. That’s pretty cool and all, except that the picture (in the summary) is in BLACK AND WHITE!!!

Come on you guys, your bandwidth can’t be THAT expensive…

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supernova_hq says:

April 8, 2009 at 2:16 pm

Is it really so hard to put a color picture in the summary?

But seriously, that is one cool clock (once you click the link to get the color pictures).

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Jelengar says:

April 8, 2009 at 2:19 pm

i believe that they have used three rings not because of the rgb effect (shadows are always the black/gray anyway :) ) but to get different heights (so to cast shadows of different lengths).

This project made my day ;)

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cynic says:

April 8, 2009 at 2:29 pm

@dax
I also thought time could be saved by using RGB LEDs, but if you check out the design, it’s so each ‘hand’ has a different length and is recognisable by more than just it’s colour.

I’d quite like to make one of these actually, but I’d also need to know how well it does in medium to strong natural light. Using a solar panel outside to charge it would almost bring it full circle.

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cynic says:

April 8, 2009 at 2:54 pm

Oops, that’ll teach me to put the kettle on before posting. Soundly beaten by jelengar.

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