Making A Kit-Kat Clock Even Creepier

December 19, 2023 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

If there’s anything as American as baseball and apple pie, it’s gotta be the Kit-Kat clock in the kitchen. For the unfamiliar, the Kit-Kat clock is special in that its pendulum tail and eyes move back and forth with each passing second. They’re equal parts cute and creepy.

But not this particular Kit-Kat, not once [Becky Stern] got a hold of it. The cute/creepy scales have been tipped, because the eyes of this Kat follow you around the room. “You” in this case is fellow maker [Xyla Foxlin], whom [Becky] drew in the Maker Secret Santa pool. See, [Xyla] loves cats, but is deathly allergic to them. So really, what better gift is there?

In order to make this happen, [Becky] started by disconnecting the long lever that link the eyes and the tail, which move together, and connected a servo horn to the eyes. [Becky] drilled out the nose in order to fit the camera, which is connected to a Seeed Grove AI Vision board with a Xiao RP2040 piggybacked on top.

While soldering on the servo wires, [Becky] accidentally detached a tiny capacitor from the AI Vision board, but it turns out that it wasn’t critical. Although she only had to write one line of code to get it to work, it ended up working too well, with the eyes darting around really quickly. By making the servo move in timed increments to the new positions, it’s now much more creepy. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.

You know we can’t resist a clock build around here, especially when those clocks are binary.

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Binary Clock Kit Blips Again

December 10, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 16 Comments

Back in 1978, the world was a bit different. There was no Raspberry Pi, no Internet, and not even an ESP32 to build projects with. And rather than order electronics kits from Tindie or Adafruit, [Dr. Francitosh] selected this binary clock with his mother from a catalog, and made the order via mail. Simpler times. The good Doctor, AKA [Greg Smith], was a young electronics tinkerer, and his mother wanted a good project-in-a-box to show off his skills. Thus, a Greymark Binary Clock was ordered and assembled. Then, sadly, the beloved clock crashed from its proud mantle position, doomed to never to blink or blip again. Or was it?
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Inside A Rubidium Frequency Standard

December 5, 2023 by Al Williams 14 Comments

We think of crystals as the gold standard of frequency generation. However, if you want real precision, you need something either better than a crystal or something that will correct for tiny errors — often called disciplining the oscillator. [W3AXL] picked up a rubidium reference oscillator on eBay at a low cost, and he shows us how it works in the video you can see below. He started with a GPS-disciplined oscillator he had built earlier and planned to convert it to discipline from the rubidium clock.

The connector looks like a D-shell connector superficially, but it has a coax connector in addition to the usual pins. The device did work on initial powerup, and using a lissajous pattern to compare the existing oscillator with the new device worked well.

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Cockpit Instrument Respectfully Retasked As A Clock

December 5, 2023 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

How do you convert an old cockpit instrument into a clock? Easy: just build a circuit that convinces it it’s in the air, and the rest will take care of itself.

Now obviously, little about [porkfreezer]’s conversion of King KI 266 DME into a clock was actually easy; working with avionics rarely is. DME stands for “Distance Measuring Equipment,” an instrument that’s part of the radio navigation suite of many aircraft. DME measures the line-of-sight distance of a plane to a ground station by measuring the time it takes for a signal to return after the plane interrogates it. The plane-mounted equipment includes a UHF transceiver and a display for the cockpit instrument panel, which accepts an analog voltage signal from the transceiver and translates it into a readout on the nice Panaplex digital display.

Rather than gutting the thing and just driving the display directly, [porkfreezer] decided to build a circuit to generate the proper signals for the DME. The board uses a PIC16 and an MCP47C dual 10-bit digital-to-analog converter to generate the voltages needed, while a USB-powered DC-DC converter provides the ±15 volt supply the DME display expects.

Everything lives on a PCB that fits right on the back of the instrument. Sadly, the connector needed to mate up to the one on the instrument was outlandishly expensive — again, avionics — so [porkfreezer] had to solder the board directly to the DME’s pins. Otherwise, this would have been a completely reversible hack.

Still, it’s an interesting reuse of an unusual piece of gear, and one that respects the original design as much as possible. That counts as a win in our book.

Swatch Internet-Time Clock Doesn’t Miss A Beat

November 27, 2023 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

The thing about human invention is that occasionally, two or more people think of an idea around the same time, and it’s difficult to determine who was first. Such is the case with Swatch’s Internet time, which is told in something called “.beats”. Rather than using hours and minutes, the solar day in the .beat system is divided into 1,000 parts equal to one minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system, or 1 minute and 26.4 seconds of standard time.

Swatch came up with .beats to sell their special line of .beats watches. But they weren’t the only ones to divide the solar day this way. A few months before Swatch’s announcement of .beats time, a Argentinian drummer named [Charly Alberti] came up with the same idea and created a website for it to display the current Internet time of day.

The point of all this is that [Roni Bandini] has created an homage to both .beats and [Charly] in the form of a small clock. The main brain is a Seeed Studio Xiao nRF52840, with a Xiao TFT round display to show the time as well as a tribute to [Charly]. The 3D-printed stand incorporates a cylindrical power source. We think the black and white images, which [Roni] created with Dall-e, look fantastic.

Interestingly enough, the Xiao has no Internet connectivity; the time is set manually via hard-coded variable, and then the display’s RTC keeps track of the seconds and convert them to Internet time. Check out the brief build video after the break.

Interested in regular old metric time? Here’s a modern metric clock.

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Analog Wall Calendar Keeps Track Of The Days For You

November 23, 2023 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

[ssh16] had seen some fancy wristwatches with retrograde hands. Wanting to do something similar of their own, they set about creating an analog wall calendar that displays the date and the day of the week.

The build uses a pair of stepper motors to control the hands, a simple choice for accurate and reliable motion control. A Microchip PIC18F24J50 serves as the brains of the operation, chosen for its built-in RTC module and the fact that it has plenty of IO for controlling stepper motors. The built-in RTC is programmed with calendar information for the next 100 years, so there is no need to adjust the clock for leap years on the regular. The top hand of the wall calendar is driven in an arc to show days of the month, from 1 to 31. The bottom hand similarly steps through the 7 days of the week. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of retrograde hands, they’re simply hands that sweep in an arc instead of moving in a whole continuous circle.

Hackers do love a good clock build, even if this one doesn’t specifically tell the time itself. If you’ve whipped up your own nifty timepiece, know that we’d love to see its fine face on the tipsline!

A Modernized Metric Clock

November 22, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 60 Comments

Much to the chagrin of many living in North America who still need to do things like keep two sets of wrenches on hand, most of the rest of the world has standardized to a simpler measurement system using metric units exclusively. The metric system is widely adopted worldwide, but we still use a base-60 system for timekeeping that predates the rest of the metric system. The French did attempt to “decimalize” timekeeping as well with the French Republican Calendar at around this same time, but this “metric” timekeeping system never caught on particularly well. It’s still an interesting historical tidbit, and [ClassTech] built this modern metric clock to explore it a little more.

The system itself uses ten-day weeks, ten-hour days, and 100-minute hours which makes it more in line with the base-10 system common to the rest of the metric system. But this means that a second in the French Republican system actually works out to a little less than one and a half SI seconds, meaning that a modern timekeeping computer needs to do a little more math to display the correct time at the correct interval. [ClassTech] is using a Particle Photon IoT processor getting the time from a NTP server, converting it to “metric time”, and displaying the time on a Nextion touch display.

While the device is reported to update the time once per second, we’re not sure if this is every SI second or every French Republican second. Either way, there are plenty of reasons this timekeeping system never gained widespread adoption, and a surprising one is that timekeeping tends to be easier in a base-60 system due to its capability of having more divisors. Many other reasons are less technical and more cultural, and timekeeping tends to be surprisingly difficult to coordinate even among shared numbers systems and languages.