Synesthetic Clock Doesn’t Require Synesthesia

We often think of synesthetes as those people who associate say, colors with numbers. But the phenomenon can occur with any of the senses. Simply put, when one sense is activated, synesthesia causes one to experience an unrelated, activated sense. Sounds trippy, no?

Thankfully, [Markus Opitz]’s synesthetic clock doesn’t require one to have synesthesia. It’s actually quite easy to read, we think. Can you tell what time it is in the image above? The only real requirement seems to be knowing the AM color from the PM color. The minute display cycles through blue, green, yellow, and red as the hour progresses.

Behind that pair of GC9a01 round displays lies an ESP32 and a real-time clock module. [Markus] couldn’t find a fillArc function, so instead he is drawing triangles whose ends lie outside the visible area. To calculate the size of the triangle, [Markus] is using the angle function tangent, so each minute has an angle of 6°.

[Markus] created a simple but attractive oak housing for the clock, but suggests anything from cardboard and plastic to a book. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever used for an enclosure? Let us know in the comments.

Do you appreciate a good analog clock when you see one? Here’s a clock that uses analog meters for its display.

Simple NTP Clock Uses Custom RGB 7-Segment Displays

A great majority of hackers build a clock at some point. It’s a great way to get familiar with electronics and (often) microcontrollers, and you get to express some creativity along the way. Plus, you get something useful when you’re done! [Tadas Ustinavičius] recently trod this well-worn path and built a neat little NTP clock of their own.

The build uses an ESP 12F as the core of the operation. It’s charged with querying an NTP time server via its WiFi connection in order to maintain accurate timekeeping around the clock. For display, it drives a series of custom 7-segment displays that [Tadas] built using 3D-printed housings. They use WS2812B addressable LEDs and thus can display a rainbow of colors.

For initial configuration, the phone creates its own WiFi hotspot with a web interface for changing settings. Once configured, it connects to the Internet over WiFi to query an NTP server at regular intervals.

It’s a simple build that does a simple job well. Projects like these can be very valuable, as they teach you all kinds of useful skills. If you’ve been working on your own clock design, don’t hesitate to let us know. You can use a microcontroller, relays, or even a ball.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 248: Cthulhu Clock Radio Transharmonium, Thunderscan, And How To Fill Up In Space

This week, Elliot sat down with Dan for the penultimate podcast of 2023, and what a week it was. We started with news about Voyager; at T+46 years from launch, any news tends to be bad, and the latest glitch has everyone worried. We also took a look at how close the OSIRIS-REx mission came to ending in disaster, all for want of consistent labels.

Elliot was charmed by a Cthulhu-like musical instrument, while Dan took a shine to a spark gap transmitter that’s probably on the FCC’s naughty list. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishably from magic, and we looked at the laser made possible by the magician-in-chief himself, C.V. Raman. Why would you stuff a PSU full of iron filings? Probably for the same reason you’d print fake markings on a 6502 chip. We also took a look at the chemistry and history of superglue, a paper tape reader that could lop off your arm, and rocket gas stations in space.

 

Grab a copy for yourself if you want to listen offline.

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3D-Printed LED Wall Clock Does Lots With Little

This wall clock built by [Alf Müller] is lovely, using two NeoPixel rings to mark the time by casting light onto a 3D-printed ring. The blue shows the minutes, made more discrete by a grid inside the ring. The green shows the hours.  [Alf] has provided the code so you can rework the color scheme.  It might be interesting to add seconds with the red LEDs, or perhaps a countdown triggered by a touch sensor…

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It’s A Marble Clock, But Not As We Know It

[Ivan Miranda] is taking a very interesting approach to a marble clock. His design is a huge assembly that uses black and white marbles to create a (sort of) dot matrix display. It’s part kinetic art and part digital clock, all driven by marbles.

Here’s how it works: black and white marbles feed into a big elevator. This elevator lifts marbles to the top of the curved runs that make up the biggest part of the device. The horizontal area at the bottom is where the time is shown, with white and black marbles making up the numerical display. But how to make sure the white marbles and black marbles go in the right order?

The solution to that is simple. Marbles feed into the elevator in an unpredictable order. An array of sensors detects the color of each marble. Solenoids simply eject any marble that isn’t in the right place. For example, if the next marble for track n needs to be white, then simply kick out any black marbles in that position until there’s a white one. Simple, effective, and guarantees plenty of mesmerizing moving parts.

Of course, this means that marble ejection and marble color sensing need to be utterly reliable, and [Ivan] ran into problems with both. Marble ejection took some careful component testing and selection to get the right solenoids.  Color sensing (as well as detecting empty spaces) settled on IR-based sensors commonly used in line-following robots.

You can watch the clock in action in the video embedded below just under the page break. We recommend giving it a look, because [Ivan] does a great job of showing all of the little challenges that reared their heads, and how he addressed them. There are still a few things to address, but he expects to have those licked by the next video. In the meantime, [Ivan] asks that if anyone knows a source for high quality glass marbles in bulk, please let him know. Low quality ones vary in size and tend to get stuck.

Marble clocks are great expressions of creativity, especially now that 3D printing is common. We love clock hacks, so if you ever create or run across a good one, let us know about it!

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Hackaday Podcast 239: Overclocking, Oscilloscopes, And Oh No! SMD Out Of Stock!

Elliot Williams and Al Williams got together again to discuss the best of Hackaday for a week, and you’re invited. This week, the guys were into the Raspberry Pi 5, CNC soldering, signal processing, and plasma cutting. There are dangerous power supplies and a custom 11-bit CPU.

Of course, there are a few Halloween projects that would fit in perfectly with the upcoming Halloween contest (the deadline is the end of this month; you still have time). OpenSCAD is about to get a lot faster, and a $20 oscilloscope might not be a toy after all. They wrap up by talking about Tom Nardi’s latest hardware conversion of DIP parts to SMD and how TVs were made behind the Iron Curtain.

Did you miss a story? Check out the links below. As always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Go ahead and download it!

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Clock Project Doesn’t Require A Decision

You decide to build a clock. The first thing you have you determine if it is going to be digital or analog. Or is it? If you build [Ivanek240267]’s clock, you can have both.

The digital portion uses an OLED display. The analog portion contains two rings of smart LEDs. The WiFi configuration is always an issue in projects like this, and this clock also offers options. In addition, the Raspberry Pi Pico-based clock also sets itself via NTP.

You can, of course, compile the WiFi credentials into the code, and assuming you don’t plan on changing networks, that’s fine. But if you’re in a more dynamic situation, the clock can also read its configuration from a memory card.

The analog clock uses colors. The green LEDs represent quarter hours. The blue LEDs are for minutes, while the red ones are full hours. Of course, reading the OLED doesn’t require any special interpretation.

When debugging, the timing doesn’t drive the smart LEDs. That means if you need to work on that part of the code, you won’t be able to count on debugging support.

We’ve mentioned before that digital clocks are all analog, anyway. If you want to use fewer LEDs, you can get by with only five.