Clocks That Only A Geek Could Love

Alpha-Geek Clock

Oh this one’s good! This clock has a built-in WWVB receiver to make sure the time is always accurate. But with just one LED as the display we wish you good luck when reading it! A whole bunch of info (time, day, year, etc) is blinked out in binary encoded decimal. [Thanks Tymm]

Standard Time

Manual labor. This clock is an art installation in Rotterdam. In the video you can see that workers changed the segments of a four-digit display every minute over a twenty-four hour period. Since they filmed it we’d expect the ability to turn this into a video clock like the one we saw last week. [Thanks David]

International Clock

Low-tech but highly creative. The instructional video uses basic geometry and the workings from a cheap clock to craft an international clock. There are twelve labels corresponding to different time zones. Put the zone you want up and read the clock as normal. [via Red Ferrett Journal]

Princess and the Pea

There are few who will agree to have an air tank as part of an alarm clock. The Princess and the Pea concept uses compressed air to inflate an exercise ball in between the mattress and the box spring. Watch this video to see how it will roll you out of bed if the hissing air sound didn’t wake you first. At least it’s more gentle than the pneumatic alarm clock from last June. [via Neatorama]

15 thoughts on “Clocks That Only A Geek Could Love

  1. The Alpha clock is certainly on the simple side, but it’s interesting to see how easy it is to get a radio-controlled clock up and running. That CMMR-6P-60 module is surprisingly cheap for a turn-key solution.

  2. how about exploding an exercise ball (of course you would be going through a lot of exercise balls each time you would have to buy a new one)

    the loud bang from exploding an exercise ball would be sure to get you up.

    or you could go to your local bike shop and get some old junk bike tubes and explode one of those

    ^^^^^^

    VVVVVV

    would be sure to get you up

  3. @MS3FGX – yeah, it’s very easy to do when a company makes it for you. Buy one. It works right out of the box, all you have to do is solder on an LED and a battery clip and you’re in business. That’s why I wouldn’t label this a hack. Unless by “hack” they mean an unskilled impostor.

  4. > Unless by “hack” they mean an unskilled impostor.

    That clock was a quick-and-dirty check for the WWVB transmitter simulator I was building as the first step toward a Totally Featureless Clock for a friend. That lonely LED showed the transmitter was up-and-running, sending valid time codes across the workbench.

    The Alpha-Geek Clock writeup was a *joke*.

    Link whoring: search my blog for WWVB and you’ll find more serious bits & pieces of those projects. This should get you started:

    http://softsolder.wordpress.com/?s=wwvb

    Both projects will appear next year in my Circuit Cellar column, with plenty of tech detail.

  5. @Ed – I can see by your other articles and the wording in your post that it was intended as a joke: “Ready for the Mass Market”.

    Hope my comment was not taken as an offense, my apologies if it was. I should have done more reading on your site.

    Again, no offense, but HackADay certainly did make it look like a good, finished product.

  6. > look like a good, finished product

    Amazing what a nice case can do for a project, ain’t it? I found those boxes while looking for something else and just couldn’t resist.

    Now, if somebody else puts ’em on etsy for fifty bucks, you know where it started!

    Peace…

  7. I’d like to automate the clock in Rotterdam. Just rotate the segments along the long axis, paint one side light, the other side black. For extra points, make it flash 12:00, 12:00, 12:00… after a power outage.

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