Watch Hacking, One Day At A Time

April 27, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

If there is one thing hackers return to time and time again, it is clock/watch hacking. There are always creative ways to tell time, and with several “hackable” wristwatches on the market, there is bound to be no shortage of neat timepiece hacks.

[hudson] from NYC Resistor has decided to take on a fun challenge for the next month revolving around his programmable inPulse watch. Over the upcoming 30 27 days, he will design, program, and publish a watch face for the timepiece. He already has 3 days behind him, and the results are pretty interesting. The concepts are creative and functional, though due to time constraints they sometimes end up a little less polished than he would like.

All of the code is available on his Bitbucket page if you have an inPulse watch and would like to play along or improve on his work.

We think it’s a pretty cool project, and we are eager to see what he produces each day. Stick around to see a quick video showing off one of his 3D watch faces.

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FlipFlop Clock Uses Mains Frequency To Keep Time

April 10, 2011 by Mike Nathan 33 Comments

One afternoon, [Sam] was a bit bored and decided he would build a clock. Not wanting to spend any money on the project, he set off to construct his clock using only the components he had on hand – this meant no micro controllers would be used whatsoever.

Built on a set of four breadboards, his clock sports a pretty short parts list. It uses just over a dozen flipflops, a few NAND chips, a 555 timer, and a small handful of other components. What you won’t find on the bill of materials however, is any sort of crystal or real-time clock. Instead of using a separate chip for keeping time, he opted to use the 60hz mains frequency as the basis for his time keeping.

The mains sine wave is passed through a series of frequency dividers to reach a 1/60hz signal, which is used to trigger the clock counters he constructed. The time is displayed on a 4-digit seven segment display, using a pair of multiplexers clocked by a 555 timer.

The clock seems to work nicely, though you have to be pretty well-versed in how the clock was built to set the time. The only means of doing so is to probe into the clock of the digit you are setting while pressing the lone pushbutton mounted on the breadboard.

While we are pretty sure no one will ever mess with his clock’s time, we have to wonder if it blinks on and off like our old VCR when the power goes out.

How Low Can You Go?

April 9, 2011 by Jason Komp 29 Comments

That’s exactly what [Kenneth Finnegan] figured out with his original investigation into low powered MSP430-based circuits. He was able to keep a count-up timer running off of 20F worth of capacitors for over 10 weeks. Although quite impressive by its own merit, many people left comments that questioned whether similar results would be seen in a circuit with functionality more advanced than simply incrementing a single digit on an LCD. Well folks, [Kenneth] has stepped it up again with this ultra low power LCD clock.

The biggest challenge in creating this clock was finding an efficient way to drive the 28 LCD segments off of the limited number of pins on his MSP430G2231 chip while still having open pins for button inputs as well. An ICM7211 LCD driver is definitely up for the task (with a few clever modifications to drive the auxiliary characters such as the center colon), but requires 8 pins to drive it. A standard 74HC595 latching shift register brings this number down to a more manageable number of 3 total pins.

Once completed the total current consumption was found to be around 12μA – low enough for a claimed run-time of approximately two and a half years from the 3V 200mAh CR2032 coin cell used. If true, a set of standard AA alkaline cells in series as found in many clocks would run this little circuit for decades.

Stick around for a short video after the break and make sure to check out the original blog entry for schematics and the complete source code!

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15-digit Nixie Clock Contains Mostly Non-useful Information

April 6, 2011 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[Jarek Lupinski] is at it again, this time building a clock using 15 Nixie tubes. Just look at the time…. wait, how do you read this now? It’s not seconds since the epoch, but an homage to a very expensive New York City art piece. [Jarek] took his inspiration from the Metronome art installation in Union Square.

We hadn’t heard of it before and were shocked to learn that this art was commissioned at $4.2 million. It belches steam and confuses passersby with its cryptic fifteen digits. It seems that the eight digits on the left mark the current time – two digits for hours, two for minutes, two for seconds, and the final digit for hundreths of a second. The seven remaining digits count down the time left in the day. So when you watch it, you see the significant digits of the display increasing, and the insignificant half decreasing.

The Nixie version rests snuggly on a 15″x4″ PCB. We’re sure it doesn’t number in the millions, but that couldn’t have been cheap to have manufactured. Each tube has its own driver chip, removing the need for multiplexing. An ATmega168 controls the clock (along with some shift registers to expand the I/O count), reading time from a DS1307 RTC chip. It looks fancy, but where’s the belching smoke on this version?

Power-sipping MSP430 Mini Alarm Clock

April 4, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

[Markus] had a TI MSP430 sitting around from the LaunchPad kit he bought a while back. He didn’t know what to do with it, but eventually decided that it would make a great miniature alarm clock.

He added a shift register to the mix in order to drive his 7-segment LCD display, using two of the MSP430’s output pins in the process. Four more pins were tied to the display’s cathodes, while the remaining two pins are connected to push buttons which register user input.

He crammed the clock’s logic as well as an alarm tune into the chip’s scant 2KB of memory space, literally occupying everything up to the last available byte. The clock is quite a power-miser, using just 2 µA in standby mode. According to [Markus’] calculations, that should enable the clock to use one set of batteries for 10+ years.

While this isn’t the first MSP430 clock we have seen, it certainly is the smallest and most simple. Stick around to see a quick video of his clock in action.

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Learn The Geometry To Draw An Analog Clock On A Graphic LCD Screen

March 23, 2011 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

Does the image of the clock above make you shutter with fear because of the math you’d need to use to recreate your own version of the project? We certainly understand that High School geometry is becoming a very distant memory, but it’s really not as hard as you think. [Janw] built this analog clock using a graphic LCD and he’s done a great job of explaining the concepts behind it.

The hardware he’s using is pretty standard for an electronic hobby clock; an ATmega16, graphic LCD, DS1307 real-time clock, and supporting hardware like a potentiometer, resistors, and buttons. The code is written in Bascom, but like we said, [Janw] explains the concepts behind drawing the hands on the clock so you can recreate this with any microcontroller or software language you prefer. We recommend grabbing a calculator and some blank paper. It took us a few tries to brush the cobwebs out and really grasp what he’s doing with each equation.

Birthday Gift Is A Constant Reminder Of Impending AARP Membership

March 22, 2011 by Mike Nathan 16 Comments

Sometimes milestone birthdays can be a bit depressing. 30 is rough, and 40 tougher – but 50…that’s a big one!

[Ryan’s] uncle is going to be turning 50 shortly, and in the interest of good-natured fun, he has constructed a handy birthday countdown timer for his uncle, lest he forget (or tries to avoid) the big day.

The device displays the amount of time left before his uncle’s birthday, playing an audio clip of “Don’t fear the Reaper” when the clock strikes 00:00. This is accomplished by using the MSP430’s internal clock to keep time, while also interfacing with a Nokia 3310 LCD panel to display the countdown timer. The music is provided by the circuit board from a greeting card he gutted for the project, which was wired to the LaunchPad in order to be triggered at the right moment. Everything was crammed inside an Altoids tin, as you can see in the picture above.

Though not overly complicated, it’s a fun little project, and we’re hoping his uncle gets a big kick out of it. Once his birthday has come and gone, [Ryan] plans on converting the piece into a permanent desktop clock for his uncle.