DIY Retrograde Clock Is 3D Printed

July 28, 2022 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Retrograde clocks are unique, in that they eschew the normal fully-circular movement for the hands. Instead, the hands merely sweep out a segment of a circular arc, before jumping back to their start position to begin again. They’re pretty rare to find, but [Jamie Matthews] decided he had to have one. Thusly, he elected to build his own!

For his build, [Jamie] started with a regular off-the-shelf clock movement you might find in any hobbyist clock build. From there, he affixed his own witches’ brew of racks and gears to the output in order to create the desired semi-circular mechanism. The arcane mechanism enables the clock to tell time over roughly a 180-degree arc.

It’s relatively simple to make one of your own, too. The parts are all readily 3D printable, with [Jamie] reporting it took less than 8 meters of filament to produce the geartrain for his build. You can even print the clock face if you don’t want to CNC cut it out of acrylic.

Overall, it’s a fun look at an often-forgotten part of our horological history. Desktop 3D printing really does enable the creation of some exciting, different clock designs. Video after the break.

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Simple Binary Watch Uses A PCB Body

July 21, 2022 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

There are many ways to tell the time, from using analog dials to 7-segment displays. Hackers tend to enjoy binary watches, if only for their association with the digital machines that seem to make the world turn these days. [Vishal Soni] decided to build one of their own.

It’s a straightforward design, that uses six bits to show the time. A red light is illuminated at the top of the watch to indicate the watch is showing minutes, and these are displayed in binary on the six blue LEDs below. Then, the watch indicates it is showing hours, and again uses the six blue LEDs to show the relevant number. Continue reading “Simple Binary Watch Uses A PCB Body” →

The Casio Smartwatch You Never Had

July 20, 2022 by Jenny List 26 Comments

In a way, you have to feel a bit sorry for the engineers at Casio. They can produce the most advanced digital watches ever to grace the wrist, but their work will forever be associated with one of their more lowly creations. The Casio F91 is the archetypal digital watch — it’s affordable, it’s been in production since the Ark, it does the job so well that it’s become a design classic, and it remains a very tough act to follow.

If it has a flaw though, it’s that the functions of a watch from 1989 are very basic. Wouldn’t it be nice if a Casio F91 could be a modern smartwatch! Well thanks to [Pegor] it can, with a complete re-engineering of the classic watch’s internals. Now the simple classic timepiece is fully up-to-date!

All the Casio internals are removed, and a new movement holder supports a fresh PCB with an OLED display mounted via a flexible sub-PCB. The brains comes courtesy of a Texas Instruments CC2640 BLE microcontroller. This gives it a 15-day battery life, which is nothing like what the original watch would have but compares favorably to smartwatches. He admits that the software needs some work, but with hardware this well-executed we hope that others can contribute some improvements.

This is probably the most impressive F91 hack we’ve seen, but it’s by no means the first revamped Casio we’ve shown you.

Quirky Complicated Clock Piques Constructor’s Curiosity

July 19, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 2 Comments

The Clock that served as inspiration for the garberPark Clock

Have you ever observed the project of another hacker and thought to yourself “I have got to have one of those!”? If so, you’re in good company with hacker [garberPark], the maker of the unusual chain clock seen in the video below the break.

While on a stroll past the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN, [garberPark] was transfixed by the clock seen to the right here. In the clock, two motors each drive a chain that has numbers attached to it, and the number at the top displays the current time. It wasn’t long before [garberPark] observed his own lack of such a clock. So they did what any hacker will do: they made their own version!

Using an ESP8266, and Arduino, and some other basic electronics, they put together a horizontal interpretation of the clock they saw. Rather than being continuous rotation, limit switches keep things in line while the ESP8266’s NTP keep things in time. Salvaged scanner stepper motors provide locomotion, and what appear to be bicycle cranks and chains work in harmony with cutoff license plates to display the current time- but only if there’s somebody around to observe it; A very nice touch and great attention to detail!

If you enjoyed this, you’ll love the Sprocket and Chain clock we featured a few months back.

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The word clock on a desk, with "tien", "over", "half" and "twaalf" lit

An Impeccably Documented Word Clock In Dutch

July 18, 2022 by Arya Voronova 8 Comments

[Maarten Pennings] shares a word clock project – but not the regular kind. For a start, this clock is a shining demonstration of hobbyist-available 3D printing technologies, with embedded light guides for the letters printed in transparent filament, thanks to a dual-extruder printer. For a word clock, it’s surprisingly small – in fact, it uses an 8×8 addressable LED matrix, with words shown in different colors. If you’re looking to build a novel word clock, you’re all set here – [Maarten] tells all about this project’s story and provides a treasure trove of insights into designing all of its aspects!

The 8×8 limitation was initially set because he wanted to use a low-cost MAX7219 8×8 LED matrix module as a base for the clock. Thankfully, in Dutch, time can be expressed using shorter words — still, it had to be limited to 5-minute intervals. Extra effort had to be spent designing the layout — [Maarten] mentions his friend writing a solver that found a way to fit some words onto the layout diagonally. At some point, he switched from LEDs to Neopixels, and dug deep into addressable LED technology. For instance, he demonstrates Neopixel power measurements and current consumption calculations. This shows that the calculations indeed match the clock’s real consumption when measured by an external meter.

In the best of hacker traditions, all the source files are on Github — if you fancy yourself a Dutch word clock, you can build [Maarten]’s design easily! He provides extensive instructions on building this clock in the README, including a flashing and configuration tutorial, complete wiring diagrams, and a soldering guide. A manufacturing-grade amount of build information that won’t leave you guessing. He’s also added a fair number of animations, put plenty of effort into clock precision verification, and even investigated some Neopixel protocol minutiae. All in all, our hacker went all in on the capabilities while embracing the constraints. This reminds us of the similarly well-documented haptic word clock we covered just a year ago – check that one out, too!

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Because It’s Cool To Make A Watch That Thin

July 13, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 48 Comments

Recently [Richard Mille] and Ferrari (yes, that Ferrari) announced the thinnest mechanical watch ever made, the RM UP-01.

It measures a scant 1.75mm thick (~1/16 of an inch). The aesthetic is debatable, and the price tag is not even listed on the page, but we suspect it is a rather significant sum. But setting aside those two things, we’d like to step back and appreciate this as a piece of art. This is not a practical watch by any stretch of the imagination. This watch is the equivalent of a human-powered airplane. Impractical, costly, and not as effective as other modern mechanically-powered solutions. But that doesn’t make it any less impressive.

Since it is so thin, a regular stacked assortment of gears wasn’t an option. So instead, the gears were distributed over the watch’s surface, which led to a thin watch face. This means that winding is manual to save space, and a single winding will last around 45 hours. The heartbeat of any mechanical watch is the escapement. So they had to redesign the escapement to be flatter, doing away with the guard pin and the safety roller, instead using the anchor fork to bank the lever in case of unexpected forces or shocks.

The design is incredible but perhaps just as noteworthy is the fact that it could be machined. Machined out of titanium with a micron of accuracy, which is an incredible feat if you’ve seen a savage discussion of measurements. The smaller and more accurate you get, the steeper the difficulty curve.

A short teaser is available after the break.

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Hackable OSHW CardClock Demands Attention

July 12, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 12 Comments

When examining a project, it’s easy to be jaded by a raw parts list. When the main component is an ESP8266, we might say “oh, another 8266 project. yawn!” But we’re certain that when you take a look at [Will Fox]’s Foxie CardClock, it’ll surely grab your attention.

As if all those beautiful LEDs weren’t enough, the rest of the device’s specifications are quite impressive. The core components might be common, but what often separates such projects is the software. With Over The Air updates supported via ArduinoOTA, updates are a snap. A light sensor helps to keep all those LEDs at a sane level, and a once-per-minute synchronization via NTP keeps the time accurate. Even if power is lost, a super-capacitor can hold the time accurate for up to two days with the built in RTC module. There’s even provisions for setting the time using the buttons on the front panel should you want to keep the gadget offline.

The entire project is open source, with the hardware released under the CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 and the firmware source code distributed as GPLv3. Users are encouraged to hack and modify the design, and all the information you need to build one of your own is available in the project’s GitHub repository. [Will] also offers a pre-assembled version of the clock for just $45 USD, but unfortunately it seems to be out of stock at the time of this writing.

If credit card sized hacks are your chosen area of interest, you will appreciate this crystal radio made from an actual Credit Card. Thanks to [Abe] for submitting the Tip!