Polarizer clock with rainbow glow clockface

Bending Light, Bending Time: A DIY Polarizer Clock

January 7, 2025 by 7 Comments

Imagine a clock where the colors aren’t from LEDs but a physics phenomenon – polarization. That’s just what [Mosivers], a physicist and electronics enthusiast, has done with the Polarizer Clock. It’s not a perfect build, but the concept is intriguing: using polarized light and stress-induced birefringence to generate colors without resorting to RGB LEDs.

The clock uses white LEDs to edge-illuminate a polycarbonate plate. This light passes through two polarizers—one fixed, one rotating—creating constantly shifting colours. Sounds fancy, but the process involves more trial and error than you’d think. [Mosivers] initially wanted to use polarizer-cut numbers but found the contrast was too weak. He experimented with materials like Tesa tape and cellophane, choosing polycarbonate for its stress birefringence.

The final design relies on a mix of materials, including book wrapping foil and 3D printed parts, to make things work. It has its quirks, but it’s certainly clever. For instance, the light dims towards the center, and the second polarizer is delicate and finicky to attach.

This gadget is a splendid blend of art and science, and you can see it in the video below the break. If you’re inspired, you might want to look up polariscope projects, or other birefringence hacks on Hackaday.

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LED Wall Clock Gets Raspberry Pi Pico Upgrade

January 1, 2025 by 11 Comments

When [Rodrigo Feliciano] realized that the reason his seven-segment LED wall clock wasn’t working was because the original TG1508D5V5 controller was fried, he had a decision to make. He could either chuck the whole thing, or put in the effort to reverse engineer how the displays were driven and replace the dead controller with something a bit more modern. Since you’re reading this post on Hackaday, we bet you can guess which route he decided to take.

If you happen to own the same model of clock as [Rodrigo], then you really lucked out. He’s done a fantastic job documenting how he swapped the original controller out for a Raspberry Pi Pico W, which not only let him bring the clock back to life, but let him add new capabilities such as automatic time setting via Network Time Protocol (NTP).

But even if you don’t have this particular clock there’s probably something you can learn from this project, as it’s a great example of practical reverse engineering. By loading a high-resolution image of the back of the PCB into KiCad, [Rodrigo] was able to place all the components into their correct positions and following traces to see what’s connected to what.

Pretty soon he not only had a 3D model of the clock’s PCB, but a schematic he could use to help wire in the Pi Pico. Admittedly this is a pretty straightforward PCB to try and reverse engineer, but hey, you have to start somewhere.

We had high hopes for KiCad’s image import feature when it was introduced, and it’s great to see real-world examples like this trickle in as more folks learn about it.

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FallingWater Clock Puts New Spin On A Common LCD

December 27, 2024 by 4 Comments

Sometimes, all it takes is looking at an existing piece of tech in a new way to come up with something unique. That’s the whole idea behind FallingWater, a gorgeous Art Deco inspired clock created by [Mark Wilson] — while the vertical LCD might look like some wild custom component, it’s simply a common DM8BA10 display module that’s been rotated 90 degrees.

As demonstrated in the video below, by turning the LCD on its side, [Mark] is able to produce some visually striking animations. At the same time the display is still perfectly capable of showing letters and numbers, albeit in a single column and with noticeably wider characters.

In another application it might look odd, but when combined with the “sunburst” style enclosure, it really comes together. Speaking of the enclosure, [Mark] used OpenSCAD to visualize the five layer stack-up, which was then recreated in Inkscape so it could ultimately be laser-cut from acrylic.

Rounding out the build is a “Leonardo Tiny” ATmega32U4 board, a DS3221 real-time clock (RTC), a couple of pushbuttons, and a light dependent resistor (LDR) used to dim the display when the ambient light level is low. All of the electronics are housed on a small custom PCB, making for a nicely compact package.

This build is as simple as it is stylish, and we wouldn’t be surprised if it inspired more than a few clones. At the time of writing, [Mark] hadn’t published the source code for the ATmega, but he has provided the code to generate the cut files for the enclosure, as well as the Gerber files for the PCB. If you come up with your own version of this retro-futuristic timepiece, let us know.

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Lathe Gears Make A Clock

December 27, 2024 by 11 Comments

When you think of making something using a lathe,  you usually think of turning a screw, a table leg, or a toothpick. [Uri Tuchman] had a different idea. He wanted to make a clock out of the gears used in the lathe. Can he do it? Of course, as you can see in the video below.

Along the way, he used several tools. A mill, a laser cutter, and a variety of hand tools all make appearances. There’s also plenty of CAD. Oh yeah, he uses a lathe, too.

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Fibonacci Clock Looks Like Beautiful Modern Art

December 19, 2024 by 9 Comments

Don’t ask us why, but hackers and makers just love building clocks. Especially in the latter case, many  like to specialize in builds that don’t even look like traditional timepieces, and are difficult to read unless you know the trick behind them. [NerdCave] has brought us a pleasing example of such a thing, in the form of this gorgeous Fibonacci clock.

The build was inspired by an earlier Fibonacci clock that later became a Kickstarter project. Where that build used an Atmega328P, though, [NerdCage] landed on using a Raspberry Pi Pico W instead. The build throws the microcontroller board on a custom PCB, and sticks in inside an attractive 3D-printed enclosure. Black filmanet was used for the body, while white filament was used for the face of each square to act as a diffuser. Addressable RGB LEDs are used to illuminate the five square segments of the clock.

Obviously, you’re wondering how to read the clock. All you need to know is this. The first five numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 1, 1, 2, 3, and 5. Each square on the clock represents one of these numbers—the side lengths of each square match these numbers. Red and green are used to represent hours and minutes, respectively, while a blue square is representing both. Basically, to get the hour, add up the values of red and blue squares, and to get the minutes, do the same with green and blue squares, but then multiply by 5. In the header image, the clock is displaying 8:55 PM… we think.

We’ve featured Fibonacci-themed clocks before, albeit ones with entirely different visual themes. Video after the break.

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Gloriously Impractical: Overclocking The Raspberry Pi 5 To 3.6 GHz

November 18, 2024 by 9 Comments
The Raspberry Pi 5 board strapped to a liquid nitrogen cooler and with ElmorLabs AMPLE-X1 power board attached. (Credit: Pieter-Jan Plaisier, SkatterBencher.com)
The Raspberry Pi 5 board strapped to a liquid nitrogen cooler with an ElmorLabs AMPLE-X1 power board attached. (Credit: Pieter-Jan Plaisier, SkatterBencher.com)

As impractical as most overclocking of computers is these days, there is still a lot of fun to be had along the way. Case in point being [Pieter-Jan Plaisier]’s recent liquid nitrogen-aided overclocking of an unsuspecting Raspberry Pi 5 and its BCM2712 SoC. Previous OCing attempts with air cooling by [Pieter] had left things off at a paltry 3 GHz from the default 2.4 GHz, with the power management IC (PMIC) circuitry on the SBC turning out to be the main limiting factor.

The main change here was thus to go for liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling, with a small chipset LN2 pot to fit on the SBC. Another improvement was the application of a NUMA (non-uniform memory addressing) patch to force the BCM2712’s memory controller to utilize better RAM chip parallelism.

With these changes, the OC could now hit 3.6 GHz, but at 3.7 GHz, the system would always crash. It was time to further investigate the PMIC issues.

The PMIC imposes voltage configuration limitations and turns the system off at high power consumption levels. A solution there was to replace said circuitry with an ElmorLabs AMPLE-X1 power supply and definitively void the SBC’s warranty. This involves removing inductors and removing solder mask to attach the external power wires. Yet even with these changes, the SoC frequency had trouble scaling, which is why an external clock board was used to replace the 54 MHz oscillator on the PCB. Unfortunately, this also failed to improve the final overclock.

We covered the ease of OCing to 3 GHz previously, and no doubt some of us are wondering whether the new SoC stepping may OC better. Regardless, if you want to get a faster small system without jumping through all those hoops, there are definitely better (and cheaper) options. But you do miss out on the fun of refilling the LN2 pot every couple of minutes.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

Split-Flap Clock Flutters Its Way To Displaying Time Without Numbers

November 5, 2024 by 18 Comments

Here’s a design for a split-flap clock that doesn’t do it the usual way. Instead of the flaps showing numbers , Klapklok has a bit more in common with flip-dot displays.

Klapklok updates every 2.5 minutes.

It’s an art piece that uses custom-made split-flaps which flutter away to update the display as time passes. An array of vertically-mounted flaps creates a sort of low-res display, emulating an analog clock. These are no ordinary actuators, either. The visual contrast and cleanliness of the mechanism is fantastic, and the sound they make is less of a chatter and more of a whisper.

The sound the flaps create and the sight of the high-contrast flaps in motion are intended to be a relaxing and calming way to connect with the concept of time passing. There’s some interactivity built in as well, as the Klapklok also allows one to simply draw on it wirelessly with via a mobile phone.

Klapklok has a total of 69 elements which are all handmade. We imagine there was really no other way to get exactly what the designer had in mind; something many of us can relate to.

Split-flap mechanisms are wonderful for a number of reasons, and if you’re considering making your own be sure to check out this easy and modular DIY reference design before you go about re-inventing the wheel. On the other hand, if you do wish to get clever about actuators maybe check out this flexible PCB that is also its own actuator.

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