Time And Tide Are One Thing

The rise of 3D printing has given us incredible things, from awesome tchotchkes to intricate chocolates to useful things like spare body parts. But none has been so vital to comedy as say, printing hats for sea urchins. That’s right, sea urchins like to cover up with various things and will happily don, say, a 3D printed hat if presented the opportunity.

So anyway, this is a tide clock that uses a printed sea urchin and various hats to tell the time until/between low and high tide. How? It uses the position of a given hat relative to a couple nOOds LED strands, one for high tide and another for low.

Inside the large bamboo enclosure is an TTGO that fetches cheaply-obtained tide information and displays it on the screen. The TTGO also controls a servo that moves the sea urchin around. As it moves, a magnet in the urchin’s head (?) attracts the next hat.

Before settling on the current design, [rabbitcreek] experimented with both a sand dollar and a sea urchin skeleton. All the files are available if you want to whip up your own.

This isn’t [rabbitcreek]’s first foray into tide clocks. Here’s a solar number that should last for years.

Turning Soviet Electronics Into A Nixie Tube Clock

Sometimes you find something that looks really cool but doesn’t work, but that’s an opportunity to give it a new life. That was the case when [Davis DeWitt] got his hands on a weird Soviet-era box with four original Nixie tubes inside. He tears the unit down, shows off the engineering that went into it and explains what it took to give the unit a new life as a clock.

Each digit is housed inside a pluggable unit. If a digit failed, a technician could simply swap it out.

A lot can happen over decades of neglect. That was clear when [Davis] discovered every single bolt had seized in place and had to be carefully drilled out. But Nixie tubes don’t really go bad, so he was hopeful that the process would pay off.

The unit is a modular display of some kind, clearly meant to plug into a larger assembly. Inside the unit, each digit is housed in its own modular plug with a single Nixie tube at the front, a small neon bulb for a decimal point, and a bunch of internal electronics. Bringing up the rear is a card edge connector.

Continues after the break…

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An Open Firmware For LILYGO’s E-ink Smart Watch

The world’s first quartz wristwatches were miles ahead of electric and mechanical wristwatches by most standards of the time, their accuracy was unprecedented and the batteries typically lasted somewhere on the order of a year. Modern smart watches, at least in terms of battery life, have taken a step backwards — depending on use, some can require daily charging.

If you’re looking to bridge the gap between a day and a year, you might look into a smart watch with an e-ink display. One option is the ESP32-based LILYGO T-Wrist. Of course, it’s not a smart watch without some software to run on it, which is where qpaperOS comes in.

Developed by [qewer33], this open source firmware for the T-Wrist is designed to get the most out of the battery by updating only once per minute. With a 250 mAh battery, it should last about five days on a charge. Of course, with the power of the ESP32 comes a whole host of other features including GPS, a step counter, and a weather display, although since the firmware is still under development, some of these features have yet to be implemented.

With all of the code available, qpaperOS could make an excellent platform from which to build your own smart watch around. Or perhaps you could chip in and add some of the features on the whislity. The ESP32 is a capable and versatile chip, even capable of playing popular 8-bit video games, although we’re not sure this functionality would fit in a smart watch and preserve battery life at the same time.

Turning A Quartz Clock Module Into A Time Reference

If you’re looking for a 1-second time reference, you’d probably just grab a GPS module off the shelf and use the 1PPS output. As demonstrated by [InazumaDenki], though, an old quartz clock module can also do the job with just a little work.

The module was harvested from an old Seiko wall clock, and features the familiar 32.768 KHz crystal you’d expect. This frequency readily divides down by 2 multiple times until you get a useful 1 Hz output. The module, originally designed to run a clock movement, can be repurposed with some basic analog electronics to output a useful time reference. [InazumaDenki] explains various ways this can be done, before demonstrating his favored method by building the device and demonstrating it with a decade counter.

It has some benefits over a GPS time reference, such as running at a much lower voltage and needing no external signal inputs. However, it’s also not going to be quite as accurate. Whether that matters to you or not depends on your specific application. Video after the break.

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These Fake Nixie Tubes Have A Bootup Screen

[IMSAI Guy] bought a fake Nixie clock, and luckily for all of us has filmed a very close look and demonstration. Using OLED displays as the fake Nixie elements might seem like cheating to some, the effect is really very well done.

Clock digits with bootup screens is something we didn’t know we liked until we saw it.

When it comes to Nixie elements, it’s hard to say which gets more attention and project time from hardware folks: original Nixie tube technology, or fake Nixie elements. Either way, their appeal is certainly undeniable.

Original Nixie tubes have shown up in modern remakes of alarm clocks, and modern semiconductors make satisfying a Nixie tube’s power requirements much easier with clever and compact Nixie drivers costing under $3 USD. This is also a good time to remind people that Nixie tubes don’t have to be digits. This audio spectrum visualizer, for example, uses IN-13 tubes which serve as elements of a bar graph.

Authentic Nixie elements require high voltages and are labor-intensive to manufacture to say the least, and as far as fake Nixie elements go, this one looks pretty good once it lights up. You can see it in action in the video, embedded below.

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Timekeeping For Distributed Computers

Ask any programmer who has ever had to deal with timekeeping on a computer, and they’re likely to go on at length about how it can be a surprisingly difficult thing to keep track of. Time zones, leap years, leap seconds, various timekeeping standards, clock drift, and even relativity are all problems that can creep in to projects. Issues with timekeeping are exacerbated in distributed systems as well, adding another layer of complexity when we need to reliably determine the order that a series of actions occurred across a number of different computers with a high precision. One solution to this problem is the implementation of a vector clock.

When using other systems such as logical clocks to attempt to keep track of the order of events on different computers, a problem that may arise is that these systems don’t always track these changes with perfect reliability due to many issues such as varying temperature, race conditions, or clock skew. The vector clock instead tracks causal relationships between events. Each separate process maintains its own vector clock, represented by a list of integers. When one of these processes performs an event, it increments its own clock and sends it out to the rest of the system. By keeping track of this clock as it is updated by various processes across the computer the distributed system can be much more confident about the order in which events took place.

Of course, there are always downsides with elegant solutions like this. In the case of vector clocks the downside is largely increased overhead for keeping track of all of the sets of integers. But in systems where the ordering of processes is of the upmost importance, this is worth the trade-off to ensure reliability. And unless we hook all of our computers up to atomic clocks like they do for some computers at CERN we will have to take the increased overhead instead.

Clock Escapement Uses Rolling Balls

The escapement mechanism has been widely used for centuries in mechanical clocks. It is the mechanism by which a clock controls the release of stored energy, allowing it to advance in small, precise intervals. Not all mechanical clocks contain escapements, but it is the most common method for performing this function, usually hidden away in the clock’s internals. To some clockmakers, this is a shame, as the escapement can be an elegant and mesmerizing piece of machinery, so [Brett] brought his rolling ball escapement to the exterior of this custom clock.

The clock functions as a kitchen timer, adjustable in 10-second increments and with several preset times available. The rolling ball takes about five seconds to traverse a slightly inclined, windy path near the base of the clock, and when it reaches one side, the clock inverts the path, and the ball rolls back to its starting place in another five seconds. The original designs for this type of escapement use a weight and string similar to a traditional escapement in a normal clock. However, [Brett] has replaced that with an Arduino-controlled stepper motor. A numerical display at the bottom of the clock and a sound module that plays an alert after the timer expires rounds out the build.

The creation of various types of escapements has fascinated clockmakers for centuries, and with modern technology such as 3D printers and microcontrollers, we get even more off-the-wall designs for this foundational piece of technology like [Brett]’s rolling ball escapement (which can also be seen at this Instructable) or even this traditional escapement that was built using all 3D-printed parts.

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