Every once in a while, the Hack a Day tip line gets a submission that is cool, but screams to be built in a few hours, possibly while consuming adult beverages. When [Shay] and [Ben] sent in their Manifold Clock Kickstarter, I knew what I had to do. To make a long story short, there’s a manifold clock hanging on my wall right now. Check out my manifold clock how-to guide after the break.

As designed by [Shay] and [Ben] at Studio Ve, the Manifold Clock tells time in three dimensions and is based on the log z Riemann surface. Here’s the video the guys put up on their Kickstarter campaign:

As you can see, it’s not a terribly complicated build. There are three basic components for this build. First, the clock drive: these can be had for about $5 from any arts and crafts store. Secondly, the clock hands: not many clock drives come with a six-inch long minute hand, but I can make something work. Lastly, the webbing that goes between the hands. The official version of the Manifold Clock uses Tyvek for its tear resistance, but I came up with something just as cool.

To create the long clock hands, I repurposed the clock hands that came with the clock drive. By cutting of the largest part of the hour and minute hand, I was left with a small sliver of brass that can be attached to the hub of the clock. I bought a few pieces of brass tubing while I was in the hobby shop, as well. The hands of the clock were extended by soldering on brass tubing with 0.1″ or 2.5mm OD brass tubing:

Pardon the terrible picture. If anyone would like to donate a macro lens for a D40, I would graciously accept.

After cutting the clock hands to length, everything’s gravy. Now onto building the webbing that goes in between the clock hands.

The next two paragraphs are rather boring. Fair warning.

If you’d like to create your own manifold, just fire up your favorite CAD package and get to work. For my manifold, I first drew a circle with the same radius as the minute hand, and two more for the hour hand and center. I used a circle with a diameter of half and inch for the center – just enough to clear the hub of the clock drive. Inscribe a 12-gon in the hour hand’s circle, and draw the hour hand. I drew mine at 5 o’ clock, although this is just a rough guesstimate from watching the video for the Manifold Clock

The next step may be a little difficult if you don’t know your drawing package very well, but luckily it can be done very easily with a compass and straight-edge construction. I’ll let you Euclid that one out for yourself. Bisect the hour and minute hands, then draw a circle with a radius that is the average of the minute and hour hands. Draw an arc from the tip of the minute hand through the intersection of the bisection and circle you just drew, ending at the tip of the hour hand. Erase a few lines,  put some tabs on for gluing, and you’re done.

To save everyone from having to replicate my work, I’ve created a PDF file of the template for my clock’s membrane. This template is sized for a minute hand that is 5.5 inches long and an hour hand that is 3 inches long. Do with it what you will.

The Manifold Clock uses a piece of Tyvek for the web between the hour and minute hands. Tyvek can be had for free if you care enough to drive around to a new development and dumpster-dive for a piece of housewrap, but I wanted to make my clock a little classier. My webbing is made out of mylar (from an “emergency camping blanket” or alternatively a mylar balloon) with a layer of Kapton tape stuck to one side. The Kapton tape was originally purchased for the heated bed and hot end of my RepRap, but once I realized the gold foil on the Apollo LEM were a lamination of mylar and Kapton, I had to try this out. The result is a fairly tear-resistant film in a wonderful silver and gold:

Oh yeah, you also have to bend the minute hand higher than the hour hand.

After cutting my gold and silver film according to the template, the only thing left to do is assemble the clock. Wrap the tabs on the web around the hands of the clock, making sure the hands can rotate freely around the foil. Assemble the hands onto the clock mechanism according to the directions and mount it in some sort of enclosure. I used a fifty-cent round clock face:

So far the clock has been up on my wall for 38 hours and it’s still keeping the right time. I’m going to call this a success. Here’s a time-lapse of the clock in action:

The expenses for this build were a clock mechanism for $5.99, a small brass tube for $2.99, and an unfinished clock face for $0.50, totaling $9.49. Of course I haven’t figured in the cost of the mylar, Kapton, solder, paint, and soldering iron, but you get the point.

Sadly my clock doesn’t have a second hand and doesn’t tick very loudly so a Vetinari Clock is out of the question. If anyone is brave enough to build a Manifold Clock with a second hand, send it in. We’ll put it up.

We see people driving around the night before trash collection and reclaiming items doomed to the land fill (or on their way to recycling… who knows). We’re beginning to think we need to join those ranks. Case in point is this vintage oscilloscope which [Bob Alexander] plucked from the curb in the nick of time. Here’s the kicker, when he got it home he found it still worked! He couldn’t let this opportunity go to waste, so he figured out how to turn it into a clock without losing the ability to use it as a scope.

You probably already know that it’s possible to display your own graphics on an oscilloscope. In fact, you can buy a board from Sparkfun which will turn the scope into an analog clock, and that’s exactly what [Bob] did. But he was met with two problems, the X-axis was flipped and he didn’t have an easy way to power the board.

He struggled with the voltage supply, frying his first attempt at boosting the internal 6.3V supply to use with a linear 5V regulator. His second attempt worked though, soldering a 12V regulator to the transformer. He was then on to the X-axis correction, using a rail-to-rail op-amp to invert the signal. The project finishes by adding toggle controls and buttons on the back of the case to switch between scope and clock modes, and to set the time.

Hack A Day’s own [Jack Buffington] finally finished the solar clock he built for the buildlounge.com laser cutter giveaway.

[Jack] has been putting up the build log on his blog, and now the project is finally complete. The clock operates entirely on solar power. Instead of fancy-smanchy electronics, this clock puts a new spin on the very old school sundial. A box outside [Jack]‘s house captures sunlight and focuses it onto an array of optical fibers. These fibers transmit the sunlight though the wall and to the face of the clock. Only a portion of the fibers are lit at any one time, and these correspond to the time of day. With a lot of confusing fiber routing, the clock can indicate the time of day by lighting up the clock face.

We covered the nascent beginnings of this project when it was still a glimmer in [Jack]‘s eye, and we’ve got to hand it to him. This is a really creative project, and the addition of the ‘daylight savings time lever’ is the icing on the cake. Check out the video after the break for a great explanation of how the clock actually works, and be sure to check out the project on BuildLounge.

If you’re like [Richard], you’ve got a few really rare components lying around. Maybe it’s a very weird micro or a really tiny CRT, but eventually you’ve got to build something with these parts. When [Richard] decided to put some ITS1A neon display tubes to use, he fell back to the old standby – a really awesome clock.

Unlike the lowly Nixie tube, the ITS1A tube is weird. It’s a neon seven-segment display that can be controlled directly from the pins of a microcontroller. It does this with the help of seven tiny thyratrons in each segment. Even though this tube has neon, the display isn’t the familiar neon orange-red. The tube emits a lovely green with the help of a phosphor coating.

With a single digit already incorporated into [Richard]‘s clock, he needed four indicators for the hours and minutes. After a failed experiment with a crazy 4-color, 16-pixel Melz ITM2-M display, he moved on to a simpler MTX90 thyratron indicator.

Using the same control scheme as his earlier numitron clock, Richard had a PCB made and wired everything up. The seven-segment tube indicates the value, and the indicator tubes indicates the position of the digit in the XX:XX standard. A very cool  build with parts you don’t see coming around often.

When it came time to try out some old-school computing [Quinn Dunki] grabbed a 6502 processor and got to work. For those that are unfamiliar, this is the first chip that was both powerful, affordable, and available to the hobby computing market back in the 1970′s. They were used in Apple computers, Commodore 64, and a slew of other hardware.

The first order of business in making something with the chip is to establish a clock signal. She sourced a crystal oscillator which runs at 1 MHz, but also wanted the option to single step through code. Her solution was to build two clock signals in one. A toggle switch allows her to choose the crystal, or a 555 timer circuit which uses a push button to fire each clock pulse.

Check out the video after the break to see some single stepping action. There’s no memory on board just yet. But the input pins have been hard-wired to voltage or ground to simulate data input. We wondered what she was up to with that HEX Out project which stiffs the logic on the data bus. Looks like it’s extremely useful in this project!

[linux-dude] always wanted to have a binary clock, but he didn’t want to pay someone else to make it for him. Additionally, he was looking for a compact alarm clock he could take on the road, rather than relying on the one in his hotel room.

Inspired by other binary clock projects he has seen over the years, he set off to build his own, which he wanted to fit inside an Altoids tin. His binary clock uses an Arduino Duemilanove (which fits perfectly in the tin) to keep time and control the indicator LEDs. The LEDs are arranged in two rows as you would expect, representing hours and minutes. A small piezo speaker serves as the alarm buzzer, which should be sufficient to wake up most people, though something bigger might be required for heavy sleepers.

We didn’t see any sort of battery pack or power plug mentioned, so we’re not quite sure how [linux-dude] keeps his clock juiced up. Additionally, the lack of an real time clock is something we’re puzzled by. While the Arduino does have a clock function that can be used, an RTC might serve him better – then again if he’s gone for just a day or two at a time, a small amount of drift may not be an issue.

[Simon] came up with an improved version of Lord Vetinari’s clock that begs to be installed in waiting rooms around the world.

Last week, we were introduced to a real-life Vetinari Clock that keeps regular time but ticks at irregular intervals. It’s a great way to turn someone’s mind into porridge, but the original build broke after a few weeks because of some limitations in the clock drive. [Simon] built a very minimal circuit does away with these problems.

Just as in the first build, a microcontroller pulses the second hand motor once every second. As for the random component of this build, the microcontroller has a puts 32 bytes into a 128 byte array. The array is checked 4 times a second, and if the byte is 1, the second hand is incremented. If the byte is 0, time stops for a little bit. [Simon] included the schematic, board layout and code if you’d like to build one yourself.

There are a few drawbacks to this design; the pattern of ticking and not ticking is hard-coded into the microcontroller. Even though the 32 second long pattern shouldn’t be noticeable by watching the clock, it’s not an entirely random solution. Judging from the comments on the original build, using radioactive decay to increment a second might be a bit uncalled for.

We would like to see a second hand that stops when you look at it though. Facial recognition, anyone?

Sometimes we need more psy ops in our life. Being an eminent fan of the Discworld series, Reddit user [rdmiller3] decided he needed to build Lord Vetinari’s clock. This fictional clock was placed in the waiting room for Lord Vetinari in several of the Discworld books. Although the clock keeps accurate time overall, it sometimes tics irregularly and out of sync. The reason? To whittle away the minds of whoever waits for Lord Vetinari.

The build uses a standard battery-powered analog clockwork. The ticking mechanism is just a magnet mounted inside a coil driven iron core. The coil leads were disconnected from the clock circuit and connected to digital inputs of an Arduino. With a few random() calls, the clock keeps accurate but random time.

Unfortunately, the clock stopped working after a few weeks because the 5 V from the Arduino was, “pounding it way too hard.” [rdmiller3] says a few resistors and LEDs for the voltage drop would make for a more reliable circuit, though. Check out the hard to watch video of the clock in action after the break.

via buildlounge

For most of the working world, the onset of autumn and winter in the Northern hemisphere means one thing – waking up well before the sun rises to get a start on the daily grind. [Brent] from Freeside Atlanta knows that routine well and decided to build himself a sunrise alarm clock in an attempt to wake himself more naturally on those dark mornings.

He bought an assortment of LEDs in varying colors including blue, red, yellow, and white, along with a few UV diodes for good measure. His goal with this array of LEDs was to simulate the natural colors of the sunrise, rather than simply slowly brightening the room. The clock uses a DS1307 RTC to keep the time, and an Arduino is tasked with lighting the LEDs about 25 minutes before it’s time for [Brent] to wake up.

He says that it seems to be working pretty well, gently waking his body before the clock radio kicks in. It certainly beats a loud buzzer!

We’re no strangers to POV time pieces around here, but something about them never gets old. Whether they use a ring of LEDs to draw clock hands, or an intricately cut HDD platter to replicate LCD segments, we love seeing them. [David] sent in this hard drive POV clock built by a fellow named [Kly], and it’s just beautiful.

[Kly’s] “Propeller” POV clock is named as such due to the design of the circuit board. The board is mounted on the HDD spindle, rotating much like an airplane’s propeller. The construction details are sparse, but from what we can find, it is based around a PIC32MX microcontroller, which is used to control the 66 SMD RGB LEDs mounted on the circuit board.

As you can see in the video below, the tightly packed LEDs result in some pretty amazing visuals.

Aside from watching the video below, be sure to swing by his Youtube channel for a handful of videos showing RGB POV clock in action.

[duckcrazy] recently shared the details on a clock he built, using recycled components to tell time.

He began his project by dismantling a handful of carefully selected pop bottles and an old clock. The bottom and midsection of the bottles were saved, and he verified that they could be easily inserted within one another. The base of the clock is made up of a CD, on which the clock’s motor components were mounted.

He constructed two open paper cylinders bearing hour and minute designations, then glued the respective clock hands inside. The cylinders and clock hands were re-mounted onto the clock’s motor, and the entire thing was enclosed within the pop bottles.

It’s a novel way to build a clock, and moving beyond the plastic bottles and paper for a moment, there’s a lot of potential for some even cooler designs based on his work. We imagine that laser-etched cylinders powered by a micro and a continuous rotation servo would be pretty sweet, though that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

[Justin] always wanted a GeoChron clock, but since they run in the range of several thousand dollars apiece, he was pretty certain he would never have the chance to own one. Undaunted, he figured out a way to build a small version of the clock for himself, and he wrote in to share how it was done.

He first purchased a Wise Clock 3 from FlorinC, but he definitely wasn’t going to use the clock as it was originally intended. Rather than display the time in numbers, he pulled the Wise Clock apart and sandwiched a vellum printout of a world map in between the front face plates. A tweaked firmware image allows him to simulate day and night using the Wise Clock’s LED array. He also programmed the clock to take into account seasonal light patterns, as you can see in the video embedded below.

We think this is a great idea, and though we would probably use plain white LEDs if we built one, the RGB LEDs in the Wise Clock certainly provide a neat effect.

[Doug Paradis] found a simple way to use dials instead of hands on a clock. Actually, that’s pretty much the entire hack… use dials instead of hands. He grabbed a battery-operated clock movement from the hobby store, then printed out one dial for hours, another for minutes, robert’s your mother’s brother, and you’ve got a new clock. The case seen above is laser cut, with a window and index line that helps you read the time precisely.

But instead of building a case, we’d like to try this with some retro equipment. The first thing that pops to mind is to replace the disks on a broken strobotuner, like the big-dialed model that Conn used to make. If you’re not down with the bulky music hardware-turned-clock perhaps there’s an old multi-meter, or a panel gauge that can be repurposed for this. We know [Doug] already has some needle meters sitting around that would be perfect for this.

[Charles Gantt] and a few others were having trouble burning the Sanguino bootloader to an ATmega644 chip. With some help from the [Nils Vogil] via the RepRap IRC [Charles] got it worked out and wrote a guide for burning the bootloader using an Arduino as an ISP programmer.

We’re not familiar with the specifics of the Sanguino bootloader, but [Charles] mentioned that he was unable to flash it onto the AVR chip without a resonator. The resonator serves as an external clock source for the chip. We’d bet the programming process changes the fuse settings on the chip to use an external source. Without that source, you won’t be able to communicate with the chip afterwards.

The solution just adds the resonator to the programming circuit. This should be useful when burning any bootloader using an Arduino. But it does make us wonder if there isn’t an alternative method that would let you draw the clock signal from the Arduino itself?

A few years ago, Tube Clock forum member[Sine1040] bought a set of four brand new aircraft indicator units that were built some time in the early 70’s. He had no idea what the units were actually used for, but he did know that he could repurpose them into some pretty slick looking clocks.

He disassembled all four boxes and between them, scrounged enough parts to build three clocks. After gutting the clocks and rearranging the digits, he built a timekeeping circuit using an ATMega8 which is clocked by a DS32 oscillator.

While the time is displayed using the large projection-style digit displays, the seconds are ticked off in the left-most analog meter. Minutes are also represented in the clock’s right-most analog window, swinging the needle from top to bottom as each one passes.

[Sine1040] paid special attention to keeping the boxes looking as stock as possible, with the only external modification being a power plug installed in place of an old grounding screw. The clock is definitely a different take on keeping time, and we think it looks great.

Continue reading to see a quick demo video of the clock in action.

[Thanks Brian]