Atomic Pinball Clock

January 14, 2011 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

[Mark Gibson] sent us a load of details on his build, a WWVB atomic clock using a pinball machine marquee (PDF). This is the upright portion of an old machine that used electromechanical displays instead of digital electronics. It’s big, noisy, and seeing it running might make you a bit giddy. Luckily he included video that shows it working on both the outside and the inside.

It took a bit of probing to discover the connections for relays that control the display. From there he used optoisolation to drive them with an Arduino. With this hurdle behind him, [Mark] set out to add atomic clock accuracy. He picked up a WWVB module and added it to the mix.

Check out his build log in PDF form linked above. He went out of his way to explain how the original parts work, and the processes he used during prototyping. For more of those juicy details we’ve added a photo gallery and his video after the break.

Didn’t get enough pinball goodness from this project? Check out the this digital gas plasma display pulled and reused from a much more modern pinball machine. Oh, and there’s always Bill Paxton Pinball.

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Driving An 8-digit Split Flap Display

January 3, 2011 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

[Markus] got his hands on a split-flap display and built a controller for it. These sometimes can be found on really old alarm clocks, but [Markus] was a lucky-duck and managed to acquire this large 8-digit display which previously made its home in a railroad station. They work like a Rolodex, mounting flaps around a cylinder for a full alpha-numeric font set.

A PIC 12F683 was selected to control the display, using optoisolation to separate the 42V display motors from the driver circuit. From the video after the break we think he did a wonderful job of getting this working. It only takes six I/O pins to control and the sound and look of the digits scrolling leaves us quite jealous.

So what’s he got in store for it? The first thing he did was use it to count down to the New Year.

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Bi-color LED Matrix Clock Uses Point-to-point Construction

December 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[Daniel] wanted his child to stay in bed until a semi-decent time each morning. The problem is the kid doesn’t know how to read a clock, so [Daniel] built him a clock. Yeah, doesn’t make much sense to us either, but we’ve used our own shaky premises for projects so who are we do judge?

He used a bi-color 8×8 LED matrix as the clock display. What caught our eye is the point-to-point soldering he used for the three strip boards that make up the device. Note the use of a drill-bit to break the traces when needed. Each board has its own purpose; the matrix drive, the logic board, and the power board. A PIC 18F4550 lets [Daniel] control the clock via USB, and takes care of lighting up the hour as a red number when it’s time to sleep, and a green one when it’s okay to arise. There’s a flashing pixel for seconds, and a binary readout of minutes along the bottom.

We’ve asked [Daniel] to post a schematic and an image of the clock face when displaying the time. No word yet but we’ll keep our eye on it. In the mean-time, check out this clock that uses an RGB 8×8 LED matrix.

Alarm And Wake Up Light

December 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

On the shortest day of the year wouldn’t it be nice to wake up to a bright room? This alarm clock with an integrated wake-up light is one way to do just that. It has some nice features, like a wood veneer that allows the seven-segment display to shine through, but hides it when the display is turned off. There’s also a feature to adjust the color based on ambient room temperature (another way to dwell on how cold it is in your bedroom).

A CC1101 RF chip came to the party, but we can’t figure out what it’s purpose is in this circuit. If you can shed some light on its involvement please do so in the comments.

[Thanks Eric]

This Hack Really Pushes Our Buttons

December 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

Yep, if you’ve got a button that needs pushing, this is one way to do it. [Travis] combined an old alarm clock with a car door-lock actuator and minimal logic circuitry to make this happen. When the alarm time is reached, the adjustable actuator comes down to press whichever button has been placed under it. In the video after the break he’s using it to schedule the start time for his Roomba, make his coffee, heat his pizza, or pointlessly press the clock’s own snooze button (classic). We think this is just begging to be used with a Rube-goldberg setup, perhaps to topple to d ominos that other robot took the time to set up. Oh wait… that shows up in the video too. Fantastic!

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Keep Your Kids In Line With A Time Clock

December 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 68 Comments

When the cat’s away the mice will play, but a least you’ll know when they came home if you use this time clock. It’s called the Kid-e-log and [John Boxall] developed it to help a friend who wanted to keep track of their teenage children’s after school activities while they were still at work. He figured having them punch a time clock would at least let you know if they came straight home as they were supposed to. An RFID tag was issued to each (no, they didn’t implant the tags) and used to record the time. To keep fraud to a minimum the hardware has a battery back-up for its real-time clock, and the tag read events are stored to EEPROM for retention between power cycles. This doesn’t prevent common tricks like taking the reader with you, or sending your tag with a sibling, but it’s a start. See it in action after the break.

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Domino Clock Uses An Electromechanical Display

December 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

This clock concept uses big dominos with changing faces to display the time. As far as we can tell they haven’t made it through to a finished product yet, but we loved the explaination of the engineering that went into the prototype. After the break you can watch [Eric] explain how he accomplished the design requirements of a slowly changing digit that uses no power to keep its state, which also uses low-power when changing state. To accomplish this he designed a flipping circle that stays put in both the white and black positions once set. When it’s time to change the digits, a coil is energized to push against a magnet in what he calls a single poled motor. Whatever the name, we want to build one ourselves!

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