clock hacks

916 Articles

Moving Fridge Magnets Make For Unique Clock

August 14, 2020 by 40 Comments

We see a ton of clock projects around these parts, and being hackers, we love to feature them all. But every once in a while we stumble upon a great new way to display the time that really gets our attention and requires a closer look, such as this moving fridge magnet clock.

The fridge magnets [Craig Colvin] built this unique clock around are the colorful plastic kinds that have adorned the lower regions of refrigerators in toddler-filled households for ages. Instead of residing on a fridge, [Craig] laminated a sheet of white acrylic to a thin sheet of steel, to give the magnets something to hold onto. Moving the numbers is the job of a CoreXY-style mechanism. The belt-driven Cartesian movement maneuvers a head to to the right location to pick up a number; a servo in the head moves two powerful magnets into position under the number. The head then moves the number to the right spot, releases its magnets, and the number stays put on the board. You can see it in action in the video after the break.

While we love this as it is, it brings to mind some great mods. One can imagine the addition of letters to make a legit word clock, or to just add a calendar display. We’d also love to see these magnets in their natural habitat by building this into the door of a working fridge.

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Breathtaking Alarm Clock Looks Like It Came From A 1960 Fallout Shelter

August 10, 2020 by 24 Comments

All the hardcore geeks have alarm clocks where the bell striker is a hard disk read head… or at least they’ll be building them after seeing this. [Senile Data Systems] created an industrial voltage alarm clock out of decade counters that looks like it was unearthed from a fallout shelter (machine translation).

At first glace you might mistake this for a binary clock since it uses a column of LEDs to indicate each digit of 24-hour time. It’s not, as each row corresponds to a pin on the CD4017 decade counters that make up the timekeeping circuit inside.

Thumbscrew wheel switches at the top of the bulky handheld unit are how the alarm time is set, triggering a bell along the top edge. The clock is driven by the 50 Hz line voltage and [SDS] tried using that AC to drive a solenoid as the striker on the prototype unit but it performed poorly. The use of a hard disk read head turns out to be the perfect striker, as heard in the video after the break. As for triggering from the decade counters, here’s what [SDS] told us about the design:

The switches’ outputs gets ANDed with a 10 Hz signal (on a 60 Hz grid it will become 12 Hz). This drives a slightly beefy transistor which in turn drives an electromagnet to hammer a bell which broke off my bicycle. Yes. This is a digital analog alarm clock. The clock portion is digital but the bell is analog and sounds like Grampa’s old wind up alarm clock.

The build came about when a cache of over 600 industrial LEDs (24 V – 48 V) fell into his lap. This makes the insides of the clock something to behold as point-to-point soldering connects the panel mount lights and all nine logic chips. Add in that transformer for getting the line voltage and we imagine this thing has quite a bit of heft to it.

If you’ve ever had an alarm with a wind-up bell you know there’s no better way to jolt yourself out of a peaceful slumber and into the chaos of the real world. If the gentle tinkle of the hard drive head isn’t enough for you, this fire bell alarm clock will certainly do the trick.

 

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Animal Crossing IRL With Nova Lights To Mark The Passage Of Time

August 8, 2020 by 1 Comment

We feature a lot of clocks here at Hackaday, but it’s not often that one comes along and makes us stop in our tracks and reconsider the fundamental question: just what is a clock? [Charlyn] has managed it though, with her Nova Light clock, which doesn’t so much measure the passing of time, but mark it.

The clock itself is a set of origami pieces in the shape of the Nova lights and a star fragment from the popular Animal Crossing New Horizons game, and each has a multicolour LED underneath. The star fragment pulses, while the two Nova lights imperceptibly slowly change colour, one over the course of the day and the other over the course of the week. Except for Fridays, when in celebration of the end of the work week they pulsate with different colours. Under the hood is an Adafruit Feather with a real-time clock module, and since all the code is there for your enjoyment you can have a go at making your own. Below the break is a video showing the clock in action.

[Charlyn] is no stranger to these pages, in fact we’ve featured her exquisite use of origami before. It’s probably her rideable rocking horse that’s the most memorable among her projects though.

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Do You Know Where Your Children Are? Check The Weasley Clock

July 29, 2020 by 16 Comments

What’s the coolest thing you could build for a Harry Potter fan, aside from a working magic wand or Quidditch broomstick? We would have to say a Weasley clock that shows the whereabouts of everyone in the family is pretty high on the list, especially if that fan is a wife and mother.

Here’s how it works: they’ve set up geofences to define the boundaries of home, each person’s school or workplace, and so on. The family’s locations are tracked through their phones’ GPS using Home Assistant, which is hosted on a Raspberry Pi. Whenever someone’s location changes, the Pi alerts the clock over MQTT, and it moves the 3D-printed hands with servos.

The clock has some interesting granularity to it as well. As someone gets closer to home, their pointer’s distance reflects that in its proximity to the Home slice. And Home itself is divided into the main house and the shop and reflected by the pointer’s position.

We particularly like the attention to detail here, like the art poster used for the clock’s face that includes all the Weasley’s whereabouts in the background. It’s built into a thrift store grandmother clock, which is smaller than a grandfather clock but no less majestic. In the future there are plans to implement the clock’s chimes to announce that someone is back home.

No matter what you’re into, the whereabouts clock idea can probably fit that universe. For instance, here’s one that uses LEGO mini-fig heads to locate roommates.

Hex Matrix Clock Is Spellbinding

July 26, 2020 by 8 Comments

Just when we think we’ve seen all possible combinations of 3D printing, microcontrollers, and pretty blinkenlights coming together to form DIY clocks, [Mukesh_Sankhla] goes and builds this geometric beauty. It’s kaleidoscopic, it’s mosaic, and it sorta resembles stained glass, but is way cheaper and easier.

The crucial part of the print does two jobs — it combines a plate full of holes for a string of addressable RGB LEDs with the light-dividing walls that turn the LEDs into triangular pixels. [Mukesh] designed digits for a clock that each use ten triangles. You’d need an ESP8266 to run the clock code, or if you’d rather sit and admire the rainbow light show unabated by the passing of time, just use an Arduino Uno or something similar.

Most of the aesthetic magic here is in the printed pieces and the FastLED library. It has a bunch of really cool animations baked in that look great with this design. Check out the demo video after the break. The audio is really quiet until the very end of the video, so be warned. In our opinion, the audio isn’t necessary to follow along with the build.

The humble clock takes many lovely forms around here, including pop art.

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Concentric Rings Keep This Calendar Perpetually Up To Date

July 26, 2020 by 7 Comments

The variety of ways that people find to show the passage of time never ceases to amaze us. Just when you think you’ve seen them all, someone comes up with something new and unusual, like the concentric rings of this automated perpetual calendar.

What we really like about the design that [tomatoskins] came up with is both its simplicity and its mystery. By hiding the mechanism, which is just a 3D-printed internal ring gear attached to the back of each ring, it invites people in to check it out closely and discover more. Doing so reveals that each ring is hanging from a pinion gear on a small stepper motor, which rotates it to the right point once a day or once a month. Most of the clock is made from wood, with the rings themselves made using the same technique that woodturners use to create blanks for turning bowls — or a Death Star. We love the look the method yields, although it could be even cooler with contrasting colors and grains for each segment. And there’s nothing stopping someone from reproducing this with laser-cut parts, or adding rings to display the time too.

Another nice tip in this write up is the trick [tomatoskins] used to label the rings, by transferring laser-printed characters from paper to wood using nothing but water-based polyurethane wood finish. That’s one to file away for another day.

384 Neon Bulbs Become Attractive Display

July 23, 2020 by 11 Comments

Neon lights have inspired much prose over the years, with their attractive light output receiving glowing adulation. [Pierre Muth] is a big fan, and decided to spend lockdown creating something suitably pretty for his desk.

An 8×8 segment of the total panel. The display draws 40W at 5V with all pixels on at the same time.

The project consists of an 8×48 matrix display constructed out of INS-1 (ИНC-1) tubes. These tiny neon tubes are 6.5 mm in diameter, showing a bright orange dot of light when powered up. Requiring just 100 V and 0.5 mA to light, they’re a touch easier to drive than the famous Nixie.

[Pierre] decided to go all out, wishing to replicate the capabilities of smart LEDs like the WS2812. These contain a microcontroller built in to each LED, so [Pierre] would have to do the same. Each of the 384 neon tubes got its own bespoke PCB, containing a PIC16F15313 microcontroller, step up voltage circuitry, and a 6-pin connector. (Whoah!) When each bulb was soldered to its PCB, they were then plugged into a backplane. An ESP32 was then employed to drive the display as a whole.

Creating a display in this fashion takes a huge amount of work, with most of it being soldering the 384 individual bulb PCBs containing 11 components each. We have a lot of respect for [Pierre]’s work ethic to get this done during lockdown, and the final result is a gloriously retro neon matrix display. We’ve featured other neon matrixes recently, too. Video after the break. Continue reading “384 Neon Bulbs Become Attractive Display” →