clock hacks

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Swatch Internet-Time Clock Doesn’t Miss A Beat

November 27, 2023 by 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.

Continue reading “Swatch Internet-Time Clock Doesn’t Miss A Beat” →

Analog Wall Calendar Keeps Track Of The Days For You

November 23, 2023 by 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 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.

Don’t Look Up, Or You’ll See The Time From This VFD Projection Clock

November 15, 2023 by 19 Comments

Ceiling clocks were a bit of a thing back in the days when clock radios were a fixture of nightstands. The idea was to project the time onto the ceiling so you’d only have to roll over onto your back and open your eyes to check the time, instead of potentially disturbing your slumber by craning your neck around to see the front of the clock.

As we recall, what sounded like a good idea was iffy in practice, with low-end optics and either weak incandescent bulbs or blazing LEDs. This nifty VFD projection clock by [Thomas Shupfs] seeks to fix those problems, and from the look of it does a pretty good job. It takes advantage of something else that fell out of favor with consumers — analog photography — by tapping into the ready supply of unwanted lenses. He paired that up with an IVL2-7/5 vacuum fluorescent display inside a 3D printed case with a cone-shaped extension to hold the lens at the right distance above the display. [Thomas] says that the STM32 software only supports JSON-RPC over USB at this time, and includes a couple of Python programs with examples of how to set the time and check the accuracy of the clock.

[Thomas] compares the clock head-to-head against his old LED projection clock, as seen in the featured image above; we flipped it for a better idea of what it would look like from bed. We’ve got to say the soft blue glow of the VFD would be a lot more pleasant to wake up to than the bright red LED projection. But this soft white projection clock is nice too.

Thanks to [skymab] for the tip.

Watch Time Roll By On This Strange, Spiral Clock

November 13, 2023 by 15 Comments

[Build Some Stuff] created an unusual spiral clock that’s almost entirely made from laser-cut wood, even the curved and bendy parts.

The living hinge is one thing, but getting the spacing, gearing, and numbers right also takes work.

The clock works by using a stepper motor and gear to rotate the clock’s face, which consists of a large dial with a spiral structure. Upon this spiral ramp rolls a ball, whose position relative to the printed numbers indicates the time. Each number is an hour, so if the ball is halfway between six and seven, it’s 6:30. At the center of the spiral is a hole, which drops the ball back down to the twelve at the beginning of the spiral so the cycle can repeat.

The video (embedded below) demonstrates the design elements and construction of the clock in greater detail, and of particular interest is how the curved wall of the spiral structure consists of a big living hinge, a way to allow mostly rigid materials to flex far beyond what they are used to. Laser cutting is well-suited to creating living hinges, but it’s a technique applicable to 3D printing, as well.

Thanks to [Kelton] for the tip!

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It’s A Marble Clock, But Not As We Know It

November 6, 2023 by 28 Comments

[Ivan Miranda] is taking a very interesting approach to a marble clock. His design is a huge assembly that uses black and white marbles to create a (sort of) dot matrix display. It’s part kinetic art and part digital clock, all driven by marbles.

Here’s how it works: black and white marbles feed into a big elevator. This elevator lifts marbles to the top of the curved runs that make up the biggest part of the device. The horizontal area at the bottom is where the time is shown, with white and black marbles making up the numerical display. But how to make sure the white marbles and black marbles go in the right order?

The solution to that is simple. Marbles feed into the elevator in an unpredictable order. An array of sensors detects the color of each marble. Solenoids simply eject any marble that isn’t in the right place. For example, if the next marble for track n needs to be white, then simply kick out any black marbles in that position until there’s a white one. Simple, effective, and guarantees plenty of mesmerizing moving parts.

Of course, this means that marble ejection and marble color sensing need to be utterly reliable, and [Ivan] ran into problems with both. Marble ejection took some careful component testing and selection to get the right solenoids.  Color sensing (as well as detecting empty spaces) settled on IR-based sensors commonly used in line-following robots.

You can watch the clock in action in the video embedded below just under the page break. We recommend giving it a look, because [Ivan] does a great job of showing all of the little challenges that reared their heads, and how he addressed them. There are still a few things to address, but he expects to have those licked by the next video. In the meantime, [Ivan] asks that if anyone knows a source for high quality glass marbles in bulk, please let him know. Low quality ones vary in size and tend to get stuck.

Marble clocks are great expressions of creativity, especially now that 3D printing is common. We love clock hacks, so if you ever create or run across a good one, let us know about it!

Continue reading “It’s A Marble Clock, But Not As We Know It” →

This Machine Has Lost Its Marbles

October 26, 2023 by 15 Comments

The astonishing variety of ways to tell the time which have appeared on these pages over the years provides a showcase of the talents and ingenuity of our community. Many clocks use designs we are familiar with, but every now and then along comes a clock that rings something new. So it is with [Ivan Miranda]’s latest work — a digital clock that shows the time with a dot matrix made of marbles. So far he’s published only part one of what will become a series. There’s technically no clock yet, but as it stands it’s enough of a marble machine to be a worthy project in its own right.

In the video below we see him solving the problems of creating free-running marble transport and handling via a conveyor belt, and solving such unexpected problems as cleanly releasing them from the belt, holding a row of marbles with a solenoid, and catching errant marbles that bounce free of the machine. The result is a rather pretty marble machine that makes an endless cascade of falling marbles on a curved track. We’re guessing that future videos will deal with the assembly of lines for the dot matrix display, such that the figures of the clock will be formed from black and white marbles, so this is a series to watch out for.

We’ve seen [Ivan]’s work in the past, not least for his giant 3D printer.

Continue reading “This Machine Has Lost Its Marbles” →