Vetinari Clock Will Drive You Insane

October 6, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 47 Comments

Sometimes we need more psy ops in our life. Being an eminent fan of the Discworld series, Reddit user [rdmiller3] decided he needed to build Lord Vetinari’s clock. This fictional clock was placed in the waiting room for Lord Vetinari in several of the Discworld books. Although the clock keeps accurate time overall, it sometimes tics irregularly and out of sync. The reason? To whittle away the minds of whoever waits for Lord Vetinari.

The build uses a standard battery-powered analog clockwork. The ticking mechanism is just a magnet mounted inside a coil driven iron core. The coil leads were disconnected from the clock circuit and connected to digital inputs of an Arduino. With a few random() calls, the clock keeps accurate but random time.

Unfortunately, the clock stopped working after a few weeks because the 5 V from the Arduino was, “pounding it way too hard.” [rdmiller3] says a few resistors and LEDs for the voltage drop would make for a more reliable circuit, though. Check out the hard to watch video of the clock in action after the break.

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A Sunrise Clock For Those Cold, Dark Winter Mornings

October 1, 2011 by Mike Nathan 26 Comments

For most of the working world, the onset of autumn and winter in the Northern hemisphere means one thing – waking up well before the sun rises to get a start on the daily grind. [Brent] from Freeside Atlanta knows that routine well and decided to build himself a sunrise alarm clock in an attempt to wake himself more naturally on those dark mornings.

He bought an assortment of LEDs in varying colors including blue, red, yellow, and white, along with a few UV diodes for good measure. His goal with this array of LEDs was to simulate the natural colors of the sunrise, rather than simply slowly brightening the room. The clock uses a DS1307 RTC to keep the time, and an Arduino is tasked with lighting the LEDs about 25 minutes before it’s time for [Brent] to wake up.

He says that it seems to be working pretty well, gently waking his body before the clock radio kicks in. It certainly beats a loud buzzer!

What Has 114 LEDs And Is Always Running?

September 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

The answer, of course, is a word clock. This is actually [Eric’s] second version of a word clock. Like the first one, it uses 114 LEDs to back light the words on the display.

In his first iteration he used an Arduino to drive a Charlieplex array of lights. It was an 11 by 10 grid, plus four LEDs to display the in-between minutes as dots at each corner of the clock face. This time around he’s still using an Arduino, but the lights have seen a huge upgrade. In one of his build pictures you can see the reel of RGB led modules which have two RGB LEDs and an HL1606 driver on each segment. These are SPI controlled, making them easy to hook up, using just a few data and power bus rails. Check out the test video after the break that shows what this grid is capable of.

In case you can’t figure out what time is displayed above, you might check out an English version of a Word Clock face to help in your own build.

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Putting Twitter In A VFD Clock

September 29, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

Not content with only knowing the time, [trandi] decided his Vacuum Fluorescent Display clock would be much better if it displayed the weather and a Twitter feed.

[trandi] received a Lady Ada Ice Tube clock last month. The kit went together almost too easily. Now he had to, “make it connect to other ‘stuff’ and display some custom messages.” After playing with the firmware to display a Hello World, [trandi] mucked around with the GPS mod and figured out how to add scrolling text over a serial connection.

A serial connection to an Internet-connected computer is all well and good, but [trandi] really wanted a stand-alone solution. A tiny WiFi to RS-232 board was sourced and the work of getting a clock on the internet began in earnest. After a weekend was wasted trying to debug the HTTP mode of the WiFi board, [trandi] gave up and used TCP mode with manually constructed HTTP headers.

The clock gets the current weather and a Twitter feed. To one-up to the Ice Cube GPS mod, the clock now sets its own time from the Internet. Check out the video of [trandi] showing off his Internet clock and fine collection of single malts after the break.

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MSP430-based Wristwatch Project

September 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

[Nav] is working on a scratch-built wristwatch. Although it is based on an MSP430 microcontroller, it’s not the ready-to-hack ezCronos that you might be thinking of. Instead, [Nav] started with a different TI development tool that we’ve looked at before, the ez430-F2013.

The breakout board for the F2013 is small enough to meet his needs, but still provides easy soldering with 0.1″ vias that break out each pin. To make sure the timepiece is accurate he added a 32.768 kHz clock crystal. A small, square, LCD screen acts as the face of the watch, but we didn’t find specific part information for the display.

Currently the watch can run for a few days on the CR2032. We’d bet some work with sleep modes for the microcontroller can help with that. The watch has a couple of buttons that let you control it, and [Nav] discovered that he could fit everything into the watch case for an iPod nano. That’s creative!

We’ve seen other hacks with tiny batteries. The next logical step here would be to swap out the disposable coin cell for something that can be topped off with an external charger.

Amazing RGB POV Clock

September 27, 2011 by Mike Nathan 21 Comments

We’re no strangers to POV time pieces around here, but something about them never gets old. Whether they use a ring of LEDs to draw clock hands, or an intricately cut HDD platter to replicate LCD segments, we love seeing them. [David] sent in this hard drive POV clock built by a fellow named [Kly], and it’s just beautiful.

[Kly’s] “Propeller” POV clock is named as such due to the design of the circuit board. The board is mounted on the HDD spindle, rotating much like an airplane’s propeller. The construction details are sparse, but from what we can find, it is based around a PIC32MX microcontroller, which is used to control the 66 SMD RGB LEDs mounted on the circuit board.

As you can see in the video below, the tightly packed LEDs result in some pretty amazing visuals.

Aside from watching the video below, be sure to swing by his Youtube channel for a handful of videos showing RGB POV clock in action.

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Arduino Boards Control Cheap Clockworks Via Coil Injection

September 27, 2011 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

Here’s a couple of clocks that use Arduino boards to control inexpensive clockworks. The concept is quite simple, and perhaps best outlined by [Matt Mets’] article on the subject. As it turns out, these clockworks are driven by a coil, forming a device that is quite similar to a stepper motor. If you solder a wire onto each end of the electromagnetic coil and hook those to a microcontroller, you can alter the speed at which the clock ticks. Just drive one pin high and the other low, then reverse the polarity for the next tick.

The clock you see on the right (translated) is a store-bought cheapy. The Arduino barely visible at the bottom of the image is sending pulses once every second. But as you can see in the video after the break, holding down a button will fast-forward through time. [Sodanam] posted his code as well as pictures of the hardware hack itself.

To the left is a horse of a different color. It’s a clock modeled after the Weasley household clock from the Harry Potter books. The clockwork trick is the same, but the Arduino uses GPS data and NOAA weather information to set the status.

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