Flip digit clocks are a prized piece of consumer electrical ephemera, providing as they do a digital display without significant electronics. Making your own flip digit display involves some drudgery in the production of all those flip cards, but how would it seem if the complexity was reduced? Go from base 10 to base 2 for example, and a binary flip digit display can be made from flip dot display parts. [Marcin Saj] has done just that, resulting in a timepiece that’s a few bits out of the ordinary.
Under the hood though it’s slightly more conventional, with the trusty ATmega328 and Arduino bootloader, whose software drives the dot electromagnets via a set of MOSFET drivers. It’s a nice project which if you want there’s a Kickstarter to buy one, but the files are also available from a GitHub repository if you’d like to have a go for yourself. Meanwhile you can see it in action in the video below the break.
We like this clock, as it’s different from the norm in Arduino clocks. It’s not however the first flip dot clock we’ve seen, this one has a full dot matrix display.
Neat, I give it a 1010 out of 10.
“These 64 hour days are killing me!”
What’s the extra hour dot (or two for 12-hour) used for?
Ah, didn’t read the documentation I see.
It would’ve been more friendly to just relate what the documentation says: “The top row corresponding to the hours does not need as many bits but for the aesthetics of the clock it will have the same number of bits.”
So yeah. To me it seems a little silly to have a flap that never flips, and I think it would look pretty cool with six bits on the bottom and five on top, but that’s just my opinion.
Let’s not encourage laziness. Let’s instead encourage people to find the answers themselves. For example, “are there hats?” is easily answered by a simple web search.
But are there, really? Not everything is a lie on the internets.