VFD 430 Clock, NYC Style

January 25, 2016 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

[Daniel] seems to have a lot of time on his hands for building clocks, and that’s fine by us. For his latest build, he used a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) to display hours, minutes, and seconds using an MSP430 to drive it.

Like the analog meter clock he built recently, there is no RTC. Instead, [Daniel] used the 430’s watchdog timer to generate 1Hz interrupts from the 430’s 32KHz clock. [Daniel] wanted to try Manhattan-style board construction for this project, so he built each module on a punch-cut stripboard island and super glued them to a copper-clad board. We have to agree with [Daniel] that the bare-bones construction is a nice complement to the aesthetic of the VFD.

[Daniel] set out to avoid using a VFD display driver, but each of the segments require +50V. He ran through a couple of drawing board ideas, such as using 17 transistors to drive them all before eventually settling on the MAX6921 VFD driver. The +50V comes from an open-loop boost converter he built that steps up from 12V.

The time is set with two interrupt-triggering buttons that use the shift register example from TI as a jumping off point. All of the code is available on [Daniel]’s site. Stick around after the break for a quick demo of the clock.

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Finally, An Acceptable Use Of The Apple Watch

January 23, 2016 by James Hobson 20 Comments

For many of us, we remember the days of the Apple Classic Macintosh. For [Erich Styger], his days of development in Pascal and Modula-2 are long over, but he still gets warm and tingly thinking back to the classic white box we knew and loved. So he decided to 3D print a Classic Mac to use as his Apple Watch charging station.

He started with an existing model on Thingiverse and modified it to better suit his needs — sharing CAD makes the design process go ever so much faster. It consists of two parts, an outer shell that looks like a Classic Mac, and an inner structure that holds the stock charger for your Apple Watch.

The result is an adorably small Classic Mac to sit on your desk in miniature form. It’s perhaps the most acceptable use of a $1000 Apple Watch we have ever seen.

Seriously though, the Apple Watch is nicely built — just take a look at the tear-down we covered.

Digital Clock + IPhone Dock

January 21, 2016 by James Hobson 7 Comments

[Pinky_chi] was looking for a project to make for his girlfriend, and settled on a rather fantastic piece of woodworking — a digital clock, with an iPhone dock for her phone.

He built the enclosure completely out of walnut, which gives it a very refined and polished look; we’re quite impressed with his woodworking skills. The cool thing about this digital clock is that he used individual LEDs to create both the digital 7-segment displays, and a ring of LEDs around it to denote the hour.

On the back are three buttons. One to change the hour, the minute, and a temperature button. By holding down the temperature button, the display will display the current room temperature — he added this because the RTC device (a DS3231) has a built-in thermometer — so why not?

Choosing a favorite LED clock on Hackaday is like picking a favorite child — we love them all — but this Star Gate themed clock from a few years ago is great — check it out!

[via r/DIY]

3D Printed Tourbillon Clock

January 11, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

3D printed clocks have been done before, but never something like this. It’s a 3D printed clock with a tourbillon, a creative way to drive an escapement developed around the year 1800. Instead of a pendulum, this type of clock uses a rotating cage powered by a spring. It’s commonly found in some very expensive modern watches, but never before has something like this been 3D printed.

[Christoph Lamier] designed this tourbillon clock in Autodesk Fusion 360, with 50 printable parts, and a handful of pins, screws, and washers. The most delicate parts – the hairspring, anchor, escapement wheel, and a few gears were printed at 0.06 layer height. Everything else was printed at a much more normal resolution with 0.1mm layer height.

Because nearly the entire clock is 3D printed, this means the spring is 3D printed as well. This enormous 2 meter-long spiral of printed plastic could not have been printed without altering a few settings on the printer. The setting in question is Cura’s ‘combing’ or the ‘avoid crossing perimeters’ setting. If you don’t disable this setting, the print time increases by 30%, and moving the print head causes the plastic to ooze out over the spring.

There’s a 26-minute long video of the 3D printed tourbillon clock in action that is horrendously boring. It does demonstrate this clock works, though. You can check out the more interesting videos below.

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PIC32 Smart Watch For Less Than A Benjamin

January 10, 2016 by Al Williams 20 Comments

[Matthew Filipek] likes smart watches, but wanted to build one for under $100, so he did. The watch has a 1.7 inch LCD touchscreen, a rechargeable LiPo battery, an SD card, and Bluetooth. The watch is a little large since [Matthew] had only a month to complete the project that drove him to use some pre-made modules and meant one shot at getting his custom PCB right.

The watch sports three applications: a settings app, a simple game, and a sketch program (you can see a demo in the video below). Power management is a primary goal, of course, although the clock rate is held high enough to make the game playable. To simplify the software, [Matthew] uses protothreads–a lightweight thread abstraction for embedded systems.

We’ve seen several DIY smartwatches in the past including one entry for the Hackaday Prize. It is hard to roll your own watch that has the same small size and style as a commercial offering. However, there is something to be said for having a homebrew watch for boosting your hacker cred.

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An Incredible Clock Made Of Popsicle Sticks

January 9, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 13 Comments

[alvenh] has come a long way since he was a kid, but he kept the bag of popsicle sticks from his childhood. When he set out to build a clock for himself, he remembered his stored treasure and made something unexpectedly good out of the humble material. We’ve seen some neat stuff made with popsicle sticks before, but they usually retain their familiar shape.

[alvenh] began by choosing a style for his clock. We don’t know how he looked at a bag of sticks and thought, “Old English Georgian bracket clock with a bell top,” but if Hackaday teaches anything, it’s that some people just have a wider vision for the world. Next he laminated the sticks together or used them as a veneer for a thinner sheet of plywood to make his base materials.

An incredible amount of work went into the clock as he did things like sanding large contours using a jar for a form, or cutting mortise and tenons into craft sticks. [alvenh] even painted the face of the clock using his German Shepard as a model. Finally he installed an antique movement into the creation. The final result is stunning, and the build log is fun to read through.

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Current Meter Shows Current Time

January 5, 2016 by Anool Mahidharia 16 Comments

This isn’t the first of its type, but [Daniel]’s MSP430 based Analog Gauge Clock certainly ticks off the “hack” quotient. He admits an earlier Voltmeter Clock we featured a while back inspired him to build his version.

[Daniel] was taking an Embedded systems class, and needed to build an MSP430G2553 microcontroller based final project. Which is why he decided to implement the real time clock using the micro-controller itself, instead of using an external RTC module. This also simplified the hardware used – the microcontroller, a crystal, three analog ammeters, and a few passives were all that he needed. Other than the Ammeters, everything else came from his parts bin. Fresh face plates were put on the ammeters, and the circuit was assembled on a piece of strip board. A piece of bent steel plate served as the housing.

The interesting part is the software. He wrote all of it in bare C, without resorting to using the Energia IDE. He walks through all of the important parts of his code on his blog post. Setting load capacitance for the timing crystal was important, so he experimented with an oscilloscope to see which value worked best. And TI’s Application Note on MSP430 32-kHz Crystal Oscillators (PDF) proved to be a useful resource. Three PWM output’s run the three ammeters which indicate hours, minutes and seconds. Push-button switches let him set the clock. See a short demo of the clock in the video below.

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