clock hacks

Solar Tide Clock Keeps Track of the Moon

September 22, 2017 by 1 Comment

Old fashioned tide clocks were an attempt to predict high tide by timing the rising and setting of the moon. When you looked at one you could see how many hours until the next high tide. [rabbitcreek] wanted to make his own version of the tide clock that does a better job of predicting the actual high tide than those old clocks, which were essentially glorified timers tuned to the moon’s phases.

[rabbitcreek] based his the tide prediction software off of [Luke Miller’s] Tide Clock, which applies location-specific adjustments to the standard lunar clock, taking into consideration such factors as the geographic features (basin depth, etc.) that modify the default timing. [Miller]’s Arduino code includes a library of common locations organized by NOAA station number.

[rabbitcreek]’s project consists of a Adafruit Feather board hooked up to a DS3231 RTC breakout and a HS-225BB servo, which turns the clock’s hand. It’s an 180-degree servo, attached to a hacked-down Actobotics gearbox gearing the servo down 2:1 to permit 360 degrees of movement.

He also wanted his creation to be left to operate unattended for years, theoretically — so solar power was a natch. The face of the clock consists of individual wavers of solar panel glued into a huge clock-like array. The solar cells feed into an Adafruit PowerBoost 500, a TPL5111 low power timer breakout, and a LiPo battery for when it’s dark out.

If you’re looking for more solar clocks check out this one that uses capacitors as hour markers.

Word Clock Five Minutes At A Time

September 17, 2017 by 2 Comments

As this clock’s creator admits, it took far more than five minutes to put together, but it does display the time in five minute increments.

After acquiring five 4-character, 16 segment display modules that were too good to pass up, they were promptly deposited in the parts pile until [JF] was cajoled into building something by a friend. Given that each display’s pins were in parallel, there was a lot of soldering to connect these displays to the clock’s ATMega328P brain. On the back of the clock’s perfboard skeleton, a DS1307 real-time clock and coin cell keep things ticking along smoothly. The case is laser cut out of acrylic with an added red filter to up the contrast of the display, presenting a crisp, crimson glow.

Troubleshooting — as well as procrastination — proved to be the major stumbling block here. Each of the displays required extensive troubleshooting because — like Christmas lights of yore — one bad connection would cause all the other displays to fail. Furthermore, there isn’t any easy way to change the time, so the clock needs to be reprogrammed once in a while

We love word clocks because there are so many ways to configure them and for the oddities. That isn’t to say radial clocks are any less creative.

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Spell Out the Time with Frickin’ Laser Beams

August 29, 2017 by 17 Comments

Clocks are a never-ending source of fascination to hackers. We get all kinds around here, from Steampunk Nixie clocks to retro cool flip clocks to clocks that don’t even look like clocks. But this is something new — a glow-in-the-dark laser tracing clock.

What [tuckershannon]’s clock lacks in practicality it makes up for in the gee-whiz department. The idea is simple: trace the characters out on a phosphorescent screen using a laser. To accomplish this, [tuckershannon] adapted the design of this whiteboard marker robot clock, replacing the drawing surface with glow-in-the-dark stickers. A 405 nm laser diode module is traced over the surface by the two-servo pantograph plotter, charging up the phosphors. He offers no clue as to how long the ghostly image lingers, but from the look of it, we’d bet that it lasts for a good fraction of a minute, especially in a dark room. Then again, you’d want the image totally faded before the next write cycle comes up, to prevent overwriting the previous time.

All in all, it’s a nice design and a clever new clock display modality. And who knows — maybe this whole glowing phosphor display thing could really catch on.

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The Tourbillon: Anti-Gravity for Watch Movements

August 28, 2017 by 39 Comments

Do you know what time it is? Chances are good that you used a computer or a cell phone to answer that question. The time on your phone is about as accurate as chronometry gets these days. That’s because cell networks are timed from satellites, which are in turn timed from atomic clocks. And these days, it may be that atomic clocks are the only clocks that matter.

Before this modern era of quartz and atomic accuracy, though, timepieces were mechanical. Clocks were driven by heavy weights that made them impractical for travel. It wasn’t until the mainspring-driven movement came along that timekeeping could even begin to become portable.

But while the invention of the mainspring made portable timepieces possible, it hurt their accuracy. That’s because the driving force of a tightly wound spring isn’t constant like that of an inert, solid weight.  So pocket watches weren’t exactly an overnight success. Early pieces were largely ornamental, and only told the hour. Worst of all, they would slow down throughout the day as the mainspring unwound, becoming useless unless wound several times a day. The mainspring wasn’t the only problem plaguing pocket watches, but it was the among the most obvious.

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Wooden Word Wristwatch Wows Woomies

August 25, 2017 by 25 Comments

[HakuG] wanted to make a watch for his roommates, and had a design project due. He killed two birds with one stone, and then some. The result is a classic word clock, but with a refined all-wood look that’s also small enough to wear on your wrist.

Nothing good ever comes out right the first time, and the log of [HakuG]’s different versions is full of different attempts, all of them just fine in their own right, but none of them “perfect”. Kudos to [HakuG] for sticking with it and refining the project far past the initial prototype stage to something that really looks like a finished product.

Of course we’ve covered word clocks before. Heck, we’ve even seen a beautiful wooden one. But we’re pretty sure that this is the first wooden word-clock watch we’ve ever written up, and it’s surely one of the nicest.

Thanks [Paul Hein] for the link!

“The Alarm Clock Ate My Duvet Cover, That’s Why I’m Late!”

August 3, 2017 by 22 Comments

Some people just won’t wake up. Alarm clocks don’t cut it, flashing lights won’t work, loud music just becomes the soundtrack of an impenetrable dream. Maybe an alarm clock that rudely yanks the covers off the bed will do the trick.

Or not, but [1up Living] decided to give it a go. His mechanism is brutally simple — a large barrel under the foot of the bed around which the warm, cozy bedclothes can wind. An alarm clock is rigged with a switch on the bell to tell an Arduino to wind the drum and expose your sleeping form to the harsh, cold world. To be honest, the fact that this is powered by a 2000-lb winch that would have little trouble dismembering anyone who got caught up in the works is a bit scary. But we understand that the project is not meant to be a practical solution to oversleeping; if it were, [1up Living] might be better off using the winch to pull the bottom sheet to disgorge the sleeper from the bed entirely.

Something gentler to suit your oversleeping needs might be this Neopixel sunrise clock to coax you out of bed naturally.

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Tell Time With a Reverse-Sundial Watch

July 27, 2017 by 22 Comments

[Xose Pérez] set out to make a sundial wristwatch by combining a magnetometer a small nylon bolt for the gnomon, but it doesn’t work like you’d think. Instead of using the magnetometer to point the sundial north, you angle the watch until the bolt’s shadow matches the white line on the PCB, and the ATmega328P computes the azimuth of the sun and determines the time thereby. To display the time he used one of those QDSP-6064 bubble displays, because sundials are retro.

His description of the project build includes a lot of fun anecdotes, like him attempting to solder the LCC connections of the HMC5883 magnetometer before giving up and making use of Seeedstudio’s PCBA service. He got 10 boards back with the ATmega and magnetometer populated while leaving the rest for [Xose] to fill in.

One fun detail of the project? You can’t tell what time it is without the sun, but you can’t read the bubble display in bright sunlight.

If you’re looking for more watch projects we’ve published, check out this wrist-controlled watch, the Chronio DIY watch, and this cool nixie-tube watch.