For Your Binge-Watching Pleasure: The Clickspring Clock Is Finally Complete

December 6, 2016 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

It took as long to make as it takes to gestate a human, but the Clickspring open-frame mechanical clock is finally complete. And the results are spectacular.

If you have even a passing interest in machining, you owe it to yourself to watch the entire 23 episode playlist. The level of craftsmanship that [Chris] displays in every episode, both in terms of the clock build and the production values of his videos is truly something to behold. The clock started as CAD prints glued to brass plates as templates for the scroll saw work that roughed out the frames and gears. Bar stock was turned, parts were threaded and knurled, and gear teeth were cut. Every screw in the clock was custom made and heat-treated to a rich blue that contrasts beautifully with the mirror polish on the brass parts. Each episode has some little tidbit of precision machining that would make the episode worth watching even if you have no interest in clocks. For our money, the best moment comes in episode 10 when the bezel and chapter ring come together with a satisfying click.

We feature a lot of timekeeping projects here, but none can compare to the Clickspring clock. If you’re still not convinced, take a look at some of our earlier coverage, like when we first noticed [Chris]’ channel, or when he fabricated and blued the clock’s hands. We can’t wait for the next Clickspring project, and we know what we’re watching tonight.

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These Sands Of Time Literally Keep Time

December 6, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 13 Comments

Hour glasses have long been a way to indicate time with sand, but the one-hour resolution isn’t the best. [Erich] decided he would be do better and made a clock that actually wrote the time in the sand. We’ve seen this before with writing time on a dry erase board with an arm that first erases the previous time and then uses a dry erase marker to write the next time. [Erich]’s also uses an arm to write the time, using the tip of a sea shell, but he erases the time by vibrating the sandbox, something that took much experimentation to get right.

To do the actual vibrating he used a Seeed Studio vibration motor which has a permanent magnet coreless DC motor. Interestingly he first tried with a rectangular sandbox but that resulted in hills and valleys, so he switched to a round one instead. Different frequencies shifted the sand around in different ways, some moving it to the sides and even out of the sandbox, but trial and error uncovered the right frequency, duration, and granular medium. He experimented with different sands, including litter for small animals, and found that a powder sand with small, round grains works best.

Four white LEDs not only add to the nice ambience but make the writing more visible by creating shadows. The shells also cleverly serve double duty, both for appearance and for hiding things. Shells cause the arms to be practically invisible until they move (well worth viewing the video below), but the power switch and two hooks for lifting the clock out of the box are also covered by shells. And best of all, the tip that writes in the sand is a shell. There’s plenty more to admire about the cleverness and workmanship of this one.

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Decimal Time Clocks In Under 1 KB

December 2, 2016 by Adam Fabio 47 Comments

Humans historically have worked well with decimal numbering systems. This is probably due to the fact most of us have ten fingers, which make counting in base ten easy. Yet humanity seems to doggedly stick to the odd duodecimal/sexagesimal time system. [Danjovic] is bringing a bit of sanity into the mix with a decimal clock he calls DC-10. He’s entered his clock into our 1 kB Challenge.

DC-10 builds upon C10, the decimal time display system created by [KnivD] on Hackaday.io.

Here’s how it works:

1 year = 365.25 days (we can’t change this anyway)
1 day = 100 intervals (the equivalent of ‘hours’)
1 interval = 100 centivals (equivalent of ‘minutes’)
1 centival = 100 ticks (equivalent of ‘seconds’)
1 tick = 0.0864 current seconds.

[Danjovic’s] implantation displays intervals and centivals, exactly what you would need to know the current time of day. He used a Microchip PIC16F628 running from a 4 MHz clock. time is displayed on seven segment LEDs. The PIC is programmed in C, using the classic version of Microchip’s own IDE: MPLAB 8.92. The code uses 297 program words. Since the ‘628 uses 14-bit instructions, that equates to just under 520 bytes. Perfect for the 1 kB challenge!

If you have a cool project in mind, there is still plenty of time to enter the 1 kB Challenge! Deadline is January 5, so check it out and fire up your assemblers!

7 Segment Display Using Neopixel Rings

December 2, 2016 by Anool Mahidharia 13 Comments

There’s something about clocks — sooner or later, every hacker wants to build one. And we end up seeing all kinds of display techniques being used to show time. For the simplest of builds, 7-segment display modules usually get dug up from the parts bin. If you have a bunch of “smart” LED’s (WS2812’s, APA102’s), then building your own custom 7-segment modules isn’t too difficult either. [rhoalt] had neither, but he did have several 8 LED Neopixel rings lying around. So he thought of experimenting with those, and built a ‘Binoctular’ LED clock which uses the Neopixel rings as 7 segment displays.

Each digit is made using one pair of Neopixel rings, stacked to form a figure of eight. All the digits are composed of arcs, so readability isn’t the best but it’s not hard either. [rhoalt] does mention that the display is easier to read via blurred camera images rather than visually, which isn’t surprising. We’re long used to seeing numbers composed of straight line segments, so arc segmented digits do look weird. But we wouldn’t have known this if [rhoalt] hadn’t shown us, right ? Maybe a thicker diffuser with separator baffles may improve the readability.

The rest of the build is pretty plain vanilla — an Arduino Nano clone, a DS3231 RTC, a Lithium battery, and some buttons, all housed together in a laser cut enclosure which follows the figure of eight design brief. And as usual, once you’ve built one, it’s time to improve and make a better version.

A Different Sort Of Word Clock

November 27, 2016 by Jenny List 6 Comments

Our wonderfully creative community has a penchant for clocks. We have seen so many timepieces over the years that one might suppose that there would be nothing new, no instrument of horology that would not elicit a yawn as we are presented with something we’ve seen many times before.

Every once in a while though along comes a project that is different. A clock that takes the basic idea of a timepiece and manages to present something new, proving that this particular well of projects has not yet quite run dry.

Such a project is the circular word clock made by [Roald Hendriks]. Take a conventional circular wall clock and remove the hands and mechanism, then place LEDs behind the numbers. Add the words for “Quarter”, “Half”, etc. in an inner ring, and place LEDs behind them. Hook all these LEDs up to a microcontroller with a real-time clock, and away you go with a refreshingly novel timepiece.

[Roald]’s clock has the wording in Dutch, and the brain behind it is an Arduino Uno with the relevant driver ICs. He’s provided a video which we’ve put below the break, showing the clock in operation with its various demo modes.

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Exquisitely Crafted Nixie Tube Weatherclock

November 26, 2016 by Donald Papp 11 Comments

The Weatherclock is more than just a clock sporting Nixie tubes and neon lamps. There is even more to it than the wonderful workmanship and the big, beautiful pictures in the build log. [Bradley]’s Weatherclock is not only internet-connected, it automatically looks up local weather and sets the backlights of the numbers to reflect current weather conditions. For example, green for roughly room temperature, blue for cold, red for warm, flashing blue for rain, flashing white for lightning, scrolling white for fog and ice, and so on.

The enclosure is custom-made and the sockets for the tubes are seated in a laser-cut plastic frame. While seating the sockets, [Bradley] noticed that an Adafruit Neopixel RGB LED breakout board fit perfectly between the tube leads. By seating one Neopixel behind each Nixie indicator, each number could have a programmable backlight that just happened to look fabulous.

With an Electric Imp board used for WiFi the capabilities of the Weatherclock were rounded out on the inside. On the outside, a custom enclosure ties it all together. [Bradley] says his family had gotten so used to having the Weatherclock show them the outside conditions that they really missed it when it was down for maintenance or work – which shouldn’t happen much anymore as the project is pretty much complete.

It’s interesting to see new features in Nixie clocks. Nixie tubes have such enduring appeal that using them alone has its own charm, and at least one dedicated craftsman actually makes new ones from scratch.

Controlling This Smartwatch Is All In The Wrist

November 26, 2016 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

Smartwatches are pretty great. In theory, you’ll never miss a notification or a phone call. Plus, they can do all kinds of bio-metric tracking since they’re strapped to one of your body’s pulse points. But there are downsides. One of the major ones is that you end up needing two hands to do things that are easily one-handed on a phone. Now, you could use the tip of your nose like I do in the winter when I have mittens on, but that’s not good for your eyes. It seems that the future of smartwatch input is not in available appendages, but in gesture detection.

Enter WristWhirl, the brain-child of Dartmouth and University of Manitoba students [Jun Gong], [Xing-Dong Yang], and [Pourang Irani]. They have built a prototype smartwatch that uses continuous wrist movements detected by IR proximity sensors to control popular off-the-shelf applications. Twelve pairs of dirt-cheap IR sensors connected to an Arduino Due detect any of eight simple gestures made by the wearer to do tasks like opening the calendar, controlling a music player, panning and zooming a map, and playing games like Tetris and Fruit Ninja. In order to save battery, a piezo senses pinch between the user’s thumb and forefinger and uses this input to decide when to start and stop gesture detection.

According to their paper (PDF warning), the gesture detection is 93.8% accurate. To get this data, the team had their test subjects perform each of the eight gestures under different conditions such as walking vs. standing and doing either with the wrist in watch-viewing position or hanging down at their side. Why not gesture your way past the break to watch a demo?

If you’re stuck on the idea of playing Tetris with gestures, there are other ways.

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