We love custom clocks here at Hackaday, and are always thrilled to see each inventive means of time-keeping. In a seldom-seen take on the familiar device, the [Bastel Brothers]’s LED Strip Clock’s sleek profile finds itself in good company.
The clock is a two-metre strip of 60 LEDs; every minute past the current hour corresponds to one lit LED, every fifth LED is turned to red in order to make reading minutes easier. So 3 red LEDs +3 green LEDs=18 minutes, with the hour marked by a third color. Sounds complex, but the [Brothers] are quick to say you get used to it quickly, especially when the 6 o’clock LED is centered at some noticeable object or feature.
A custom and home-etched PCB using an ATtiny4313 instead of an Arduino are the clock’s brains, a Maxim DS1307 for time-keeping, and a simple rotary encoder as the input for setting the time. The processor was seen as excessive at the time, but looking back the [Bastels] say it hasn’t left much room for upgrades or future tinkering, so it wasn’t really worth saving a few bucks in this case. The code is available here but, as the [Brothers] admit — use it at your own risk since it’s a bit of a mess. Still, it works and looks damn good at the same time.
We recently featured a different kind of linear clock, but really, you could spend days browsing our archives of many magical and wondrous clocks.
When is cocktail hour?
When all the LED’s turn red!
midnight on my led strip clock. works for me.
Last year I did this: http://bogdan.nimblex.net/diy/2016/10/29/iot-fuzzy-clock.html
It’s a similar ideas but somehow, at the time I did not consider readability of time is important :)
time line? ugh..
time isn’t made out of lines,
itis made of circles.
THAT IS WHY CLOCKS ARE ROUND!
That’s exactly why you have to make a line to remind yourself that the lost time is just gone. It’s not coming back to you again. If you lose a moment, you lose it for good.
I did a similar linear binary clock as one of my first PIC16F84 projects about a decade ago:
http://jpa.kapsi.fi/stuff/pix/ledikello/pa290010.jpg
Still working and in use, though I had to disassemble the code at one point to make a few customizations, having lost the original sources :)
Cannot help but quoting the Doctor:
“People are used to consider time as being a STRAIGHT LINE … but in fact it’s all kinds of wibbly-wobbly!”
Blink? ;)