Berlin Clock Takes Inspiration From Sci-Fi Sources, Looks Incredible

July 7, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 6 Comments

What would a HAL9000 look like if it eye were yellow and sat atop a front panel inspired by an Altair 8800? You’d have today’s feature, [Stephan]’s BerlinUhr, a gorgeous little take on a Berlin Clock.

At Hackaday, we have a soft spot for clock builds. They’ve graced our pages from early times. When we saw this ultra cool Berlin Clock, we couldn’t resist the urge to share it with all of our readers. For those of you not familiar with a Berlin Clock, it’s a clock that consists of 24 lights, and was the first of its kind back in 1975.

[Stephan]’s build is notable because not only is it a beautiful design, but the work that went into the design and build. At several inches tall, the BerlinUhr is supported solely by a USB-C connection, although it can also be hung on a wall. The RTC is backed up by a CR1216, and an ATtiny167 provides the brains for the operation.

A neat part of the build comes with the KPS-3227 light sensor, used to adjust the LED brightness according to ambient lighting. Rather than being a straightforward part to insert into the PCB, KiCad’s footprint had some pins reversed, causing [Stephan] to learn how to correct it and contribute the fix to KiCad. Well done!

We weren’t kidding about clocks, by the way- check out the link to the Atomic Wrist Watch on this post from 2005, and this Russian VFD based clock from 2006- with video!

Do you have your own favorite clock build you’d love to see grace our pages? Be sure to submit a tip!

A wristwatch similar to the Berlin Uhr, with the actual Berlin Urh in the background

Tiny Berlin Clock Replica Also Counts Seconds

July 5, 2022 by Robin Kearey 7 Comments

If you’re a clock aficionado and have ever visited Berlin, you’re probably familiar with the Berlin Clock on Budapester Straße: a minimalist design of yellow and orange lights that displays the time in a base-5 number system. This clock has been telling the time to the few that can read it since 1975, and is but one of several unusual clocks that can be found in the city.

Berlin resident [jjoeff] decided to make a miniature replica, appropriately called the Berlin Uhr Nano, in order to watch the unusual display at any time of day. Built around a Wemos D1 Mini, it connects to WiFi in order to synchronize its internal clock to an NTP time server. It then drives a custom PCB that holds 39 WS2812 LEDs to display the time in its proper format. Unlike the original though, it also includes a full counter to tell the number of seconds; the bigger clock just flashes a single lamp to show the seconds passing.

Powered by a 500 mAh lithium battery, it can be converted into a wristwatch by simply threading a strap through slots in the PCB. With no buttons for adjustment or any functionality other than displaying the time, it serves the same purpose as the original, just in a portable format. We’ve seen a slightly larger Berlin Clock replica made of wood before, as well as a round one that uses the same base-5 encoding scheme. Continue reading “Tiny Berlin Clock Replica Also Counts Seconds” →

Light Duty Timekeeping: Arduino Berlin Clock

December 1, 2015 by Kristina Panos 13 Comments

Just when we thought we’d seen all the ways there are to tell time, along comes [mr_fid]’s Berlin clock build. It’s based on an actual clock commissioned by the Senate of Berlin in the mid-1970s and erected on the famous Kurfürstendamm avenue in 1975. Twenty years later it was decommissioned and moved to stand outside the historic Europa-center.

This clock tells the time using set theory and 24-hour time. From the top down: the blinking yellow circle of light at the top indicates the passing seconds; on for even seconds and off for odd. The two rows of red blocks are the hours—each block in the top row stands for five hours, and each block below that indicates a single hour. At 11:00, there will be two top blocks and one bottom block illuminated, for instance.

The bottom two rows show the minutes using the same system. Red segments indicate 15, 30, and 45 minutes past the hour, making it unnecessary to count more than a few of the 5-minute top segments. As with the hours, the bottom row indicates one minute per light.

Got that? Here’s a quiz. What time is it? Looking at the picture above, the top row has three segments lit. Five hours times three is 15:00, or 3:00PM. The next row adds two hours, so we’re at 5:00PM. All of the five-minute segments are lit, which adds 55 minutes. So the picture was taken at 5:55PM on some even-numbered second.

The original Berlin clock suffered from the short lives of incandescent bulbs. Depending on which bulb went out, the clock could be ‘off’ by as little as one minute or as much as five hours. [mr_fid] stayed true to the original in this beautiful build and used two lights for each hour segment. This replica uses LEDs driven by an Arduino Nano and a real-time clock. Since the RTC gives hours from 0-23 and minutes and seconds from 0-59, a couple of shift registers and some modulo calculations are necessary to convert to set theory time.

[mr_fid] built the enclosure out of plywood and white oak from designs made in QCAD. The rounded corners are made from oak, and the seconds ring is built from 3/8″ plywood strips bent around a spray can. A brief tour of the clock is waiting for you after the break. Time’s a-wastin’!

Continue reading “Light Duty Timekeeping: Arduino Berlin Clock” →

3D Printed Berlin Uhr Is An Attractive Germanic Clock

January 18, 2023 by Lewin Day 22 Comments

As much as Big Ben steals the spotlight when it comes to big public clocks, the Berlin Uhr is a much beloved digital communal timepiece. [RuudK5] developed their own 3D printed replica of this 1980s German icon.

The revision we see today is the [RuddK5]’s third attempt at replicating the Berlin Uhr. The clock features a design with four linear elements with a round light on top. The top light is responsible for blinking the seconds. The lowest line has four lights, each indicating one minute, while the next line has eleven lights, marking out five-minute intervals. Above that, the top two lines represent one hour and five hour blocks respectively. It’s a display unlike most other clocks out there, but when you learn it, it’s easy enough to use.

[RuddK5]’s replica relies on addressable LED strips to serve as the individual lighting elements. The strips are placed inside a 3D printed housing that is a scale replica of the real thing. Running the show is an ESP32 microcontroller, which is charged with getting accurate time updates from an NTP server.

Great design really does shine through, and this clock looks just as appealing at the small scale as it does lofted on a pole over the city of Berlin. If you prefer to read out the time in a simpler fashion though, we’ve featured plenty of clocks like that, as well!

Hackaday Berlin: The Badge, Workshops, And Lightning Talks

March 14, 2023 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

Hackaday Berlin is just under two weeks away, and we’ve got news times three! If you don’t already have tickets, there are still a few left, so grab them while they’re hot. We’ll be rolling out the final full schedule soon, but definitely plan on attending a pre-party Friday night the 24th, followed by a solid 14-hour day of hacking, talks, and music on Saturday the 25th, and then a mellow Bring-a-Hack brunch with impromptu demos, workshops, and whatever else on Sunday from 10:30 until 14:00.

The Badge Round Two

Many Europeans weren’t able to make the flight to Supercon, so here’s your chance to get hands on Voja Antonic’s superb down-to-the-metal computer trainer-slash-retrocomputer on this side of the Atlantic. It’s been re-skinned for Berlin, with a couple hardware tweaks because nobody can leave a board revision alone, but it’s 100% compatible with the badge that took Supercon 2022 by storm.

If you want to read more about it, you should. We loved it, and so did the crowd. One of the coolest badge hardware hacks was a “punchcard” reader, but there was also a lot of work on the software side as well, and we got pull requests for most of the cool demos. If you’re coming, and if you’d like to start your badge hacking a bit early, you could start your research now.

We’ll have a Badge Hacking Ceremony Saturday night, so you can show off whatever you made. It’s lots of fun. Continue reading “Hackaday Berlin: The Badge, Workshops, And Lightning Talks” →

Hackaday Podcast 205: Hackaday Berlin, So Many Sundials, And Ovens Pinging Google

February 10, 2023 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start this week’s episode off with the announcement of Hackaday Berlin on March 25th. It’s been quite some time since we’ve been on the other side of the pond, because we had to cancel 2020’s Hackaday Belgrade due to COVID-19, so excitement is high for all three days of this “one-day” event.

After a new What’s that Sound, discussion moves on to an impressive collection of DIY sundials, the impact filament color has on the strength of 3D printed parts, the incredible retrocomputer replicas of Michael Gardi, and the Arduino FPGA that you’ve probably never heard of. We’ll wrap things up with the unexpected difficulties of mixing multiple cheap audio sources in Linux, and try to figure out why our kitchen appliances need to be connected to the Internet.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download all the bits!

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 205: Hackaday Berlin, So Many Sundials, And Ovens Pinging Google” →

Triple Zone Clock Tells Time In Style

January 6, 2023 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Although the cutoff for saying ‘Happy New Year’ is somewhere around today, there’s still plenty of time to reminisce about 2022 and all that we accomplished. Hackaday alum [Jeremy Cook] spent much of last year designing and building a triple-zone PCB clock, dubbed the 742 clock. It is called so because of all the 7-segments, and then 42 from the height in millimeters of each PCB. Also because it’s 24 backwards, and if we may be so bold, because 42.

If this looks familiar, it’s because we covered the single-panel version a few months ago. Much like that one, the triple time zone clock is controlled by a single Wemos D1 mini, and the other two panels are chained to the primary board. This version has a frame made of 20/20 extrusion with nice 3D printed caps on the ends to finish off the look.

As with the single-panel clock, this one uses bared-FR4 PCBs to diffuse the LEDs, and the effect looks really nice. We particularly like the capacitive corners that control the clock and the colors, which change throughout the day when left to their own devices. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.

Are you really into LEDs? Consider building a Berlin clock.

Continue reading “Triple Zone Clock Tells Time In Style” →