It’s A Water Clock, Jim, But Not As We Know It — It Has Digits

May 11, 2026 by Tyler August 14 Comments

Guess what time it is– that’s right, clock time! It’s always clock time, and when it’s clock time at Hackaday the weirder the better. So, how about a water clock that’s not actually a water clock? The water here has nothing to do with timekeeping, but is what’s driving the display. Fair to say that [Strange Inventions] is living up to the name of his YouTube channel.

You can get the idea from the header image: each digit is formed by a fifteen-segment display made up of glass bottles. A stepper-driven peristaltic pump and some membrane-pump boosters fills the bottles as needed with dyed water, while emptying is accomplished simply by having a servo dump the water into a trough. It’s an interesting, albeit messy, way to generate a display.

It wasn’t the original idea– well, the bottles were the original concept, but flipping them was not. Dumping the bottles has the advantage of not needing oodles of pumps or taking five minutes to sequentially fill and drain the bottles at each digit. The linkage to get the servo to flip all nine bottles in one go took some troubleshooting– we can relate, since the physical half of such projects usually is the hard part– but after many modifications the 3D printed mechanism worked, and we think the results are worth it.

If you’re looking for the other kind of water clock, we featured one of those before, too. This one is also of ancient style, but makes use of modern electronics. It occurs to us that if one was really, really ambitious, they could expand this [Strange] project into a very damp flip-dot style display. Continue reading “It’s A Water Clock, Jim, But Not As We Know It — It Has Digits” →

Cocktail Machine Minces Words

September 30, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

For those living in a magical land of candy, with orange-faced helpers to do their bidding, the ability to taste your words is nothing new. But for the rest of us, the ability to taste what you type in cocktail form is a novelty. [Morskoiboy] took some back-of-the-envelope ideas and made them into a real device that uses syringes as keys, and facilitates the injection of twenty-six different flavorings into a baseline liquid. He figures that you can make each letter as creative as you want to, like representing different alcohols with a letter (T for tequila) or matching them to colors (R for red). Check out the video after the break to see an ‘Any Word’ cocktail being mixed.

This setup is entirely mechanical, and makes us wonder if [Morskoiboy] works in the medical equipment design industry. Each letter for the keyboard is affixed to the plunger on a syringe. When depressed, they cause the liquid in an external vessel (not seen above) to travel through tubing until it fills the proper cavities on a 15-segment display to match the letter pressed. From there the additive is flushed out by the gravity-fed base liquid into the drinking glass. We can’t imagine the time that went into designing all of the plumbing!

Continue reading “Cocktail Machine Minces Words” →

Gas Plasma Pinball Display

August 28, 2010 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Whoopjohn] decided to build a driver board for a display he pulled from a pinball machine. You’ve probably seen these used to scroll both score and messages using a total of sixteen 15-segment digits. We’d love to get our hands on one, and you might too but where? [Whoopjohn] notes that these were usually installed two-per machine and the driver boards were run close to their maximum ratings. That means that somewhere there’s a collection of broken machines with working displays. If you do plan to make this happen, you should be able to figure out the circuit based on this commented board layout (pdf).