clock hacks

979 Articles

Color Clock Makes Telling Time Impossible

June 7, 2010 by 22 Comments

[Bogdan] set out to build the all-too-familiar binary clock. But, he didn’t want to be ordinary, and set the goal of making the clock as hard to read as possible. What he ended up with is a clock that is almost impossible to read correctly.
He’s using colors to tell the time. We immediately thought this might make use of resistor codes as the display but it doesn’t. Red shows the hours, green for minutes, and blue for seconds. Now stack all of them on top of each other in binary and you’ve got the time. That means you’ve got to know all of your color combinations, plus read the binary value correctly, to decipher the time. Add to that the display changing every second and we’re in trouble.
Aside from the user difficulty level, this is a really clean build. It uses an ATmega8535 in conjunction with our favorite DS3232 RTC chip. The etched board is nice and clean, making for an aesthetically pleasing clock.

Six Digit LED Clock

June 2, 2010 by 13 Comments

Got a bag of LEDs handy? Why not build a display with them? We’ve seen a lot of clocks that make use of LED modules but soldering your own is a fun pastime. [Vadim Suhovatih] did just that using 130 LEDs to build this clock. Each segment of the 7-segment digits consists of three LEDs in parallel which are switched by some 2N4401 transistors. An ATmega328 in the form of an Arduino controls the device with the aid of a DS1307 real-time clock for timekeeping and a 4017 decade counter to assist with scanning the display. Check out the demo after the break.

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Talking Clock Sounds Just Like You

May 23, 2010 by 18 Comments

[vimeo=http://www.vimeo.com/10852914]

We’d bet a large portion of our readers don’t remember when you could call the phone company and get the time of day. Gadget Gangster is bringing back the tried and true method with this talking clock. Just press the button and the ‘operator’ will read the time of day to you. Record your own voice and place the WAV files on an SD card, from there a Propeller chip takes care of the rest.

As a side note, we’re big fans of the method used to breadboard the power supply using the TO-220 package leads as their own jumpers. We’ve always been partial to using a breadboard regulator on a PCB but this method is simple and takes almost no space at all.

Biopunk Watch: Time, Temperature, Gaming

May 14, 2010 by 17 Comments

[Matthew Garten] built this watch based on an Arduino. The face is a small color display which allows you to choose to show time in digital, binary, or analog formats. In keeping with the recent trend here on Hackaday he has a glove-based add-on that has temperature sensors in the fingers; for Firefighters or those with nerve damage to their fingers (we’re thinking Darkman). For entertainment in any situation he’s included a trackball and the ability to play breakout or draw in 16-bit color. Details are scarce but apparently he’ll be sharing more soon. For now, watch the video after the break and think of ways to shrink this down into a nice package like the Pong Watch enjoys.

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DPAC Put Your Alarm Clock To Shame

May 1, 2010 by 16 Comments

DPAC, the Dynamically Programmable Alarm Clock, goes far beyond what you would expect an alarm clock to do, yet we find all of its features useful. You can see there are four buttons at the bottom that control the menu scrolling. The second from the left currently reads “Sync”, a feature that the clock uses every 10 minutes but can be forced manually. This will check your Google Calendar, schedule an alarm for the next event while factoring in driving distance, traffic, and weather conditions. It’s got an audio system for radio and iPod operation, but also includes some home automation options. Using the X10 communication protocol it can turn on lights, start the coffee maker, and open the blinds as part of a gentle wake-up cycle. All of this is configurable through the clock itself, or via the web interface. The prototyping was done on an Arduino but the final version uses an AVR ATmega324 along with a Roving Networks RN-134 WiFi module (datasheet) for connectivity. Check out the demonstration video that [Eric Gaertner] and his fellow developers filmed after the break.

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Using A/C Frequency As A Clock Signal

April 30, 2010 by 31 Comments

A while back we saw a logic clock that used the alternating current frequency from the power grid to keep time. We asked for information on your projects that use this method and we got a lot of comments and tips. Today we’re sharing [Doug Jackson’s] method which he used in his word clock.

The schematic above is from that project and we’ve outlined the important part in green. [Doug] pulls a signal from the 9V AC power before it hits the bridge rectifier, using a 100K resistor and a zener diode to protect the microcontroller pin. The code for that project comes as a hex file but he sent us the C code pertaining to this timing circuit. It’s written for PIC but you’ll have no trouble adapting it to other microcontroller families. Take a look after the break.

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