In case you happen to have an ocean nearby, you’re probably familiar with its rising and falling tides. And if mudflat hiking is a thing in your area, you’re also aware of the importance of good timing and knowing when the water will be on its way back. Tide clocks will help you to be prepared, and they are a fun alternative to your usual clock projects. If you’re looking for a starting point, [rabbitcreek] put together an Arduino-based tide clock kit for educational purposes.
If you feel like you’re experiencing some déjà vu here, this indeed isn’t [rabbitcreek]’s first tide clock project. But unlike his prior stationary clock, he has now created a small and portable, coin-cell version to take with you out on the sea. And what shape would better fit than a 3D printed moon — unfortunately the current design doesn’t offer much waterproofing.
For the underlying tide calculation itself, [rabbitcreek] uses just like in his previous project [Luke Miller]’s location-based library for the ubiquitous DS1307 and DS3213 real-time clocks. Of course, if you also want to keep track of other events on your clock, why not set up calendar events for the next rising tide?
This is one of several alternate timebase clocks that are part of my Crazy Clock project – the others being Sidereal, Martian, Lunar and Annual. Of course, that’s a much simpler project. All I had to do was get the ticking rate correct and leave it to the user to make the hands point the right direction initially.
This is cool, but as somebody who has spent most of my life by the water, I can tell you that these kind of tide calculators aren’t always very accurate. You can predict where the moon is, of course, but storms and wind also interact with the tides. If you’re on a bay or river, the tide could end up being halfway opposed to what a clock like this is telling you. I.E. it says you’re half way between high and low, but the water is still high.
Of course, if there’s a storm or something you probably won’t be doing much outside activities anyway…
Would be nice if there were non-USA locations available – however given that the UK Hydrographic office controls tidal data and is a government department then us Brits have to pay…….. :-(
@ Rob I’m working on that. Will try and publish something soon on HaD.io
Rob- there is actually a tide API available from thenAitalty – it’s quite easy to get started. I’m pretty sure it’s free, although their website is broken at this second.
https://www.admiralty.co.uk/digital-services/data-solutions/uk-tidal-api
So this is way past the last post… My son is living down in Guyana on the Courantyne (Sic, per author.) river. It is 20 miles from the coast and when the tide is going out, the river flows north (It’s South America, folks.) And when the tide comes in the river flows upstream for HOURS!. Would be awesome if someone figured out a way to predict tides in these cases also. Not asking YOU, since I can’t even begin to figure our where to start. If someone can build from your efforts that would be awesome. Thanks for all your hard work!
Price list is over optimistic.
Generic push-button–$0.02, please where ?
2032 batteries (3 required). $0.50, not here !
Plastic Housing 3 D printed–nothing, no pla.
PCB board — $1.00 , there is no more free shipping from PCBWay