Time Twister Is An Ingenious Lego Clock

Here’s an interesting take on a Lego clock, it uses rotating squares to change the orientation of the black and white tiles to display the needed number. As we see one of the digits cycling to the next number in the video after the break, a couple of different things pop into mind. This seems very much like a 1-dimensional Rubik’s Cube, and it also has a hint of a very large ePaper display. Those use magnetic fields to swivel microspheres that are black on one side and white on the other.

The timepiece, which was built by [Hans Andersson], is limited to displaying numbers only. If you think about it, each row is three pixels but you don’t need to have every combination of those pixels available in order to display the digits. Four sides provide enough room for the necessary combinations. This would not be true if you were trying to scale it up to include all alpha-numeric characters.

The tick of this thing certainly sounds interesting, huh?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_mA72r3ZiQ&w=470]

[Thanks Michael]

33 thoughts on “Time Twister Is An Ingenious Lego Clock

    1. Do you often need better than minute resolution on a clock that only shows hours and minutes?

      Personally, I use the fuzzy clock setting where I can, set to only tell me what quarter hour it is (approximately) so I can totally see why a clock that takes a long time to change the minute would still be useful.

      I would want it to be either faster or quieter though.

      1. The main problem that I see with the long time change is that you cannot read the time during the change. I want to be able to quickly glance at a clock to get the time, not watch it for 40 seconds.

      2. Alex: i guess you’ll get used to not look at the watch when you hear it changing the digits :-) You will also probably get better sense of time (because of the loud noise it regularly makes) and you will be very disturbed as next minute gets closer, so you will look at the clock just before it starts to turn :-)

  1. Awsome build!

    I have built another of this guy’s robots, the Tilted Twister 2.0, the Rubiks Cube solving Lego Robot, and it is brilliant. We have two Lego NXT systems, so we will look forward to building this too when build details become available!

    It does not matter that it takes time to update the time, it is a piece of art work, not an accurate time piece which you would use to catch a bus with!

    Congratulations on another clean, simple but effective build!

  2. You could probably shorten the time it takes to change the time by optimizing the orientation the the layers to reduce the amount of turns necessary to switch digits in incremental order.

    Additionally if the motor can handle it you should be able to reduce the gear reduction so that the turning happens faster. It’s probably that slow to prevent excess motion.

    1. According to the site (and carefully study the video)

      “Each layer can rotate 360 degrees before it hooks to the next layer. By twisting the top layer back and forth in a specific pattern, you can arrange the layers so that the desired digit is displayed.”

  3. Hyponotic to watch, the buzzy gears no. It should be timed out to take 58 or 59 seconds to change, this is fair in that time ain’t Digital. Thus it can be accurate down to the second.

  4. Kinda like the tumblers on a combination lock. Pretty cool. Now just need to give each layer 8 sides so you can create all possible displays… though I imagine that would take even longer to rotate changes :P

    1. That’s what I thought, like a safe combination! I don’t think more sides would take more time, though, one full rotation of the axel will take the same amount of time, only if you add more layers would it take longer (although you’d need to optimize the patterns for most-used letters). I wonder if one could do it with a fast servo, or a motor and a stopping mechanism?

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