Glitching Square Wave Clock Is Designed To Confuse

[Voja Antonic] has built a clock that tells the time in binary with square waves, and trolls the uninitiated in electronics.

The clock itself is very attractive. If you look closely you can see the circuitry backlit behind the dot LED matrix display. The whole thing is housed in a nicely folded steel case. RGB LEDs are used to good effect to highlight some additionally obfuscating circuit schematics. The workmanship is very top notch, and we would gladly host such an object on our desks.

The clock’s standard time telling mode is three sets of square waves showing the binary values for the hours, minutes, and seconds. Every now and then the clock will glitch out. The waves will distort. The colors will change. And every now and then, tantalizingly, the alpha-numeric time will show up for just a split second, before returning to those weird squiggles again.

We’ve seen a whole slew of binary clocks before. This one, for instance. But the waveform display makes us feel just that little bit more at home — it’s just like we’re sitting in front of our oscilloscope.

25 thoughts on “Glitching Square Wave Clock Is Designed To Confuse

  1. I don’t understand this whole crypto-chronometer thing. I can see it as an accomplishment from an engineering and art perspective. Awesome.

    But as ElectroBoom’s Mehdi Sadaghdar said of the TokyoFlash watch he received, “The quality is very good and it looks very professional… There is only one problem, and it’s really nothing. The problem is you cannot tell time with it.”

    Pretty much sums it up.

    1. It’s art and/or novelty. We already have a zillion devices that easily tell us the time. So there’s room for some devices that obfuscate the time. Put another way, neither this or the TokyoFlash watch is /supposed/ to tell time. Not really. It’s sculpture, most of which don’t have any practical functions either.

      1. It’s fairly simple, and thankfully doesn’t use more than 4 bits at a time for binary numbers. Given maybe a 5 minute tutorial on binary, it would be legible to anybody because it has no encoding.

        I think what would irritate me most is the flashing; that would keep me awake.

  2. I think it’s awesome. It looks like a prop out of a sci-fi movie. I’ve always wanted to do something like this but I lack the creative/artistic ability.
    P.S. Since everyone is nitpicking; I’m surprised no one pointed out that “Parallel” is misspelled as “Paralel”. It’s etched in the top right corner of the clock. Specifically, it says “Paralel Clock”. Unless I’m mistaken.

Leave a Reply to ShannonCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.