Edge-Lit 7-Segments Clock The New Normal

April 14, 2020 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

People keep saying that time has lost all meaning now, but we’re still over here divvying up the days with hacks. Most of the hacks you see here are open source. But if you want something even more transparent to meter out the meaninglessness, we invite you to make one of these clearly awesome see-through clocks, which happens to be both.

A word of warning though — according to [GeekMomProjects], this is an incredibly fiddly build with tight tolerances everywhere that acrylic meets acrylic or an LED strip. We can see how it might be like forcing fragile puzzle pieces together. Since the whole thing is crystal clear acrylic, light is going to go everywhere.

[GeekMomProjects] cleverly blocked the escaping light by painstakingly applying non-conductive adhesive foil to the edges of all the smaller pieces. In spite of all that work, we think it would be worth it to have such a fantastic timepiece glowing away the hours somewhere in the house.

Electronically speaking, this beauty is pretty simple. The lights run off of an ItsyBitsy M4 Express, and the time is separately fetched with an ESP8266. [GeekMomProjects] had so much fun that she made one with seconds and one without. Check out their RGB dance routine after the break.

If you prefer your blinky 7-segment clocks a bit more utilitarian, here’s a clock made of shelves.

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Quarantine Clock Focuses On The Essential

April 12, 2020 by Sven Gregori 21 Comments

In these dire times of self quarantining, social distancing, and life as know it coming to a halt, time itself can become rather blurry, and even word clocks may seem unnecessarily precise — especially if you happen to have a more peculiar circadian rhythm. And let’s face it, chances are your usual schedule has become somwehat irrelevant by now, so why bother yourself with dates or an exact time anyway? If you can relate to this, then [mwfisher3] has the perfect clock for you, displaying only the day of the week and a rough estimate of how far that day has progressed.

Using a Raspberry Pi and a spare touch screen, [mwfisher3] had an easy game to begin with, so the clock itself is just Chrome running in Kiosk mode, displaying a local web site with the hours of the day mapped to an array of their textual representation. A few lines of JavaScript are then updating the web site content with the current day and “time”, and a Python script is handling the screen’s back light based on the readings from a Philips Hue motion sensor, using the phue library.

While this is definitely one of the simpler clock projects we’ve seen, this simplicity offers actually a great introduction to some easy JavaScript-based web displays on a Raspberry Pi without much fuzz and distraction. But if that’s not your thing, and you like things more mechanical, we’ve recently covered this day clock that follows the same idea, and then there’s also this light box for an artistic approach of getting a rough estimate of the time.

Planetary Gears Tell Time In This Ornamental Clock

April 10, 2020 by Moritz v. Sivers 8 Comments

A clock is perhaps one of the the most popular projects among makers. Most designs we see are purely electronic and do not bother with the often more complicated mechanical part. Instructables user [Looman_projects] though was not afraid of calculating gear ratios and tooth counts for his planetary gear clock.

As shown in the picture, a planetary gear, also known as epicyclic gear, consists of three parts: a central sun gear, planetary gears moving around the sun gear and an outer ring with inward-facing teeth holding it all together. The mechanism dates back to ancient Greece but is still being used in car transmissions and has become quite popular in 3D printing. In his instructable [Looman_projects] has some useful inlinks including an explanation video of how planetary gear sets work and a website helping you to calculate the tooth counts for specific gear ratios. It is also noteworthy that he tried to cut the gears from aluminum with a waterjet which unfortunately failed because the parts were too small. What makes the clock visually stand out is the beautiful ornamental see-through design of the dial plate and hands made from laser-cut wood. Despite the mechanical gearbox, it is not surprising that the driving mechanism is based on ubiquitous pieces of digital electronics including an Arduino Nano, DS3231 RTC module, and a stepper motor. To avoid a cabling mess [Looman_projects] designed a custom PCB that interconnects all the electronics and says he even got some spare PCBs left for people interested in rebuilding the clock.

Actually, this is not the first laser-cut planetary gear clock that we have seen. In case you are wondering about the advantages of planetary gearboxes, you might want to check out how a 3D printed version is lifting an anvil.

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Seven-Segment Single-Steps Through The Time

April 10, 2020 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Have you ever looked at the time, and then had to look again because it just didn’t register? This phenomenon seems more prevalent with phone timepieces, but it’s been known to happen with standard wall clocks, too. This latest offering in a stream of unusual clocks fashioned by [mircemk] solves that problem by forcing the viewer to pay attention as the time flashes by in a series of single digits, separated by a hyphen.

Inside the boxy blue base is an Arduino Nano, a DS3231 real-time clock module, and a perfboard full of transistors for switching the LED strips inside the segments. There’s an LED on the front that blinks the seconds, and honestly, we’re kind of on the fence about this part. It would be nice if it faded in and out, or was otherwise a little less distracting, but it did grow on us as we watched the demo.

We love the way this clock celebrates the seven-segment display, and only wish it were much bigger. The STLs and code are available if you want to make one, though they only cover the 7-segment part — the base is made of foam board. Check out the demo and build video after the break.

Would you rather hear the time go by in gentle chimes? Here’s chime clock that uses old hard drive actuators.

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Tell Time Like It’s 1960 With This All-Transistor Digital Clock

April 9, 2020 by Dan Maloney 44 Comments

When you’ve got time on your hands, doing something the hard way can be therapeutic. Not that the present situation and the abundance of free time that many are experiencing has anything to do with [Leo Fernekes] all-transistor digital clock build, which he started a year ago with his students. But if you’ve got time to burn, this might be a good way to do it.

[Leo] says one of his design goals with this clock was to do it with the technology commercially available in 1960, which means relying completely on discrete components. And he and his students managed to do just that, with the exception of the seven-segment displays, which were built from the LED filaments from some modern light bulbs. Everything else, though, is as old school as it gets, and really underscores all the complexity that gets abstracted away from timekeeping with modern chips. The video below covers each module in detail, from the Schmitt trigger that cleans up the 50-Hz line frequency to the ring counters and diode matrices used to drive the display. We found the analog stair step dividers used to bring the line frequency down to a more usable pulse train particularly interesting. That clever bit of engineering saved 10 transistors over what would be required for traditional flip-flop dividers.

There’s a lot to learn from this design, and the execution is great too – we’re suckers for Manhattan-style builds, of course. Hats off to [Leo] and his lucky students on a great build.

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What Day Is It?

April 8, 2020 by Danie Conradie 15 Comments

With much of the world staying at home at the moment, keeping track of our sanity and the day of the week is a bit of a challenge, especially without the normal daily routine to hold onto. To help with one of these problems, [phreakmonkey] has built a Day Clock. As the name suggests, it’s only purpose is to show what day of the week it is.

Avery simple device, the two main components are a servo and a Wemos D1 Mini, the popular ESP8266-based dev board. Using the NTPtimeESP library, it gets day of the week from the internet, and moves the servo to indicate the current day on a 3D printed face. Most readers should be able to whip one up in an hour or two, which can help keep sane in these interesting times.

For another Corona clock, check out [Elliot Williams]’ version that helps with keeping domestic peace. If you want to do something to combat the spread of the current epidemic, you can build a few face shields, make your idle computer available for Folding@Home or sew a few masks. Every bit helps.

Nixie Clock Turns Boombox

April 7, 2020 by Moritz v. Sivers 12 Comments

With all the Nixie Clock projects out there, it is truly difficult to come up with something new and unique. Nevertheless, [TheJBW] managed to do so with his Ultimate Nixie Internet Alarm Clock (UNIAC) which definitely does not skimp on cool features.

Although the device does tell time, it is actually a portable boombox that streams music from Spotify using a Raspberry Pi Zero running Mopidy. The housing made from smoked acrylic, together with the IN-12A Nixie Tubes, an IN-13 VU meter, and illuminated pushbuttons give this boombox kind of a 70s/90s mashup retro look. The acrylic housing is special since it consists of only two plates which were bent into shape, resulting in smooth edges in contrast to the often used finger or T-slot design.

For his project [TheJBW] designed a general-purpose Nixie display that can not only show time and date but also the elapsed or remaining track time. He also came up with a Python generated artificial voice that reads you the current playlist. The only problem [TheJBW] has run into was when trying to design a suitable battery system for the device, as the high current draw during start-up can easily cause brownouts. Due to time constraints, he ended up with a MacGyver-style solution by taping a 12 V battery pack from Amazon to the back of the unit.

Among the large variety of Nixie projects we don’t think we have ever seen them in an audio player before except for some attempts of using them as an amplifier. However, it is known that IN-13 tubes make a great VU meter.

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