A cyclotron clock display, mounted on a wooden base. There are two stepper motors exposed on either side. There is a panel installed in the wooden base with a red button on the left, two knobs and four smaller buttons in a two by two grid on the right.

A Flipping, Perpetually-Rotating Clock

October 13, 2022 by Abe Connelly 6 Comments

Clocks are a mainstay of hackers and makers, as they provide a way to explore creative designs while still maintaining a functional aspect to the project. [Brett Oliver] follows this tradition in making a cyclotron clock that uses a perpetual rotating digit concept from a 1900s desk flip calendar.

Each digit of the clock has a rotating chamber that’s big enough to fit a group of tiles inside that have digits printed on either face. The tiles are sized and stacked in such a way that the rotation of the chamber allows the next tile to slide in front of the old one. Specific digits are revealed by rotating the chamber a number of times.

Each of the four digits positions has a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor to rotate the chamber, with each motor being driven by a ULN2003 driver module. The main microcontroller is a ESP32 WROOM, and an I2C compatible DS3231 real time clock (RTC) module keeps time. All of the motors are driven off of an LM2596 module that provides 7 V, while the ESP32 and RTC are powered from a USB connector.

The different modes and the ability to set time is done through a panel that has various buttons and knobs. The whole clock is mounted on a custom wooden base that has cutouts for the panels and cabling. [Brett Oliver] has done a great job of documentation, going into detail about the mechanics and electronics of the build. Design files, including STLs of the various components, are also available for download. Be sure to check out the video after the break.

We’ve featured a flip calendar with a similar operating principle before which clearly shows the inner workings of the mechanism.

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Building A Tessellated NeoPixel Clock

October 1, 2022 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Anyone can buy a clock, but building your own lets you express your creative flair along the way. [Edison Science Corner] did just that with this neat sci-fi looking design.

The build relies on an Arduino Pro Mini to run the show, paired with a DS3231 real-time clock module. The latter part is of great importance, as without it, the Arduino would not keep accurate time. The 3D printed enclosure looks nondescript from the outside. However, inside, it’s got a neat triangular structure which allows the time to be displayed in that attractive tessellated triangular fashion. There’s a black plastic separator between all the segments which stop unattractive bleed-through and really help with the final effect. The individual triangles are each lit by a NeoPixel LED, which are both addressable and capable of lighting up in RGB colors. It makes for an attractive and colorful display.

If you want to try something more traditional yet challenging, consider whipping up your own 7-segment displays. Video after the break.

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battery powered wall mounted clock with LCD display and 10 capacitive touch buttons

A Peppy Low Power Wall Mounted Display

September 19, 2022 by Abe Connelly 18 Comments

[Phambili Tech] creates a battery powered mountable display, called “the Newt”, that can be used to display information about the time, calendar, weather or a host of other customizable items.

The Newt tries to strike a balance between providing long operating periods while still maintaining high refresh rates and having extensive features. Many of the battery powered devices of this sort use E-Ink displays which offer long operating windows but poor refresh rates. The Newt uses an LCD screen that, while not being as low power as an E-Ink display, offers extended battery operation while still being daylight readable and providing high refresh rates.

The display itself is a 2.7 inch 240×400 SHARP “Memory In Pixel” LCD that provides the peppy display at low power. The Newt is WiFi capable through its ESP32-S2-WROVER module with a RV-3028-C7 Real Time Clock, a buzzer for sound feedback and capacitive touch sensors for input and interaction. A 1.85Wh LiPo battery (3.7V, 500mAh) is claimed to last for 1-2 months, with the possibility of using a larger battery for longer life.

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Digital Light Pipes Clock various view of seven-segment display using illuminated light-pipes

LED Clock Has Its Pipes On Display

September 19, 2022 by Dave Walker 4 Comments

For most hackers and makers, building a clock is a rite of passage. Few, though, will be as unusual and engaging as this design by [TerraG2].

By combining addressable LEDs, light pipes and 7-segment displays, [TerraG2] has built a timepiece that looks great and will surely be a great conversation starter as well. It’s packed full of features such as automatic brightness control, an accelerometer controlled user interface, and WiFi to make sure it’s always accurate.

partial rear view of the clock showing illuminated light pipes — Partial rear view of the clock showing illuminated light pipes

The decision to leave the light pipes visible behind the main display really makes the project stand out from other clock builds, and the methods [TerraG2] has used to achieve this look will no doubt be transferable to a host of other projects.

The LEDs are courtesy of a standard 8×8 RGB matrix, with a custom 3D-printed shroud to hold the light pipes in place and a clever connector at the other end to illuminate the segments. With two LEDs per segment, seven segments per digit, and four digits, there’s even room for some extra features down the line if you can think of a use for those eight spare LEDs.

The brain of the project is an ESP8266 D1 with an MPU6050 inertial measurement unit (IMU) to detect when it’s flipped over to change the color scheme.

Full documentation is on Github, and a video of the clock in use is after the break.

Light pipes have been used to great effect in some other clock projects we’ve seen, such as this modern Nixie clock and this “clock of clocks”, as well as in this light organ that we showed recently.

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Circuit-less PCB Featured As Faceplate For A Digital Clock

August 17, 2022 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

If there’s no circuitry on a printed circuit board, does it cease being a “PCB” and perhaps instead become just a “PB”?

Call them what you will, the fact that PCBs have become so cheap and easy to design and fabricate lends them to more creative uses than just acting as the wiring for a project. In this case, [Jeremy Cook] put one to work as the faceplate for his “742 Clock,” a name that plays on the fact that his seven-segment display is 42 mm tall, plus it’s “24/7” backward.

In addition to the actual circuit board that holds the Wemos ESP32 module and the LEDs, a circuit-less board was designed with gaps in the solder mask to act as light pipes. Sandwiched between the boards is a 3D printed mask, to control the light and direct it only through the light pipes. [Jeremy] went through a couple of iterations of diffuser and mask designs, finally coming up with a combination that works well and looks good. He mentions a possible redesign of the faceplate board to include a copper backplane for better opacity, which we think is a good idea. We’d also like to see how different substrates work; would boards of different thickness or using FR-4 with different glass transition temperatures work better? Check out the video below and see what you think.

We’re seeing more and more PCBs turn up as structural elements, from enclosures to control panels and even tools, and we approve of this trend. But what we really approve of is what [Jeremy] did here by making this clock just a dumb display that gets network time over NTP. Would that all three digital clocks in our kitchen did the same thing — maybe then they wouldn’t each be an infuriating minute out of sync with the others.

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2022 Hackaday Prize: Talking Clock Built With Old-School Gear

August 16, 2022 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

Any smartphone or laptop could be a talking clock if you wished it so. However, we think this build from [Marek Więcek] is more fun, which uses discrete vintage chips to get the job done the old fashioned way.

The work started when [Marek] was tinkering with a 65C02 CPU, giving it an EPROM, some RAM, and some logic ICs to create something akin to a modern microcontroller in functionality. It came to be known as the 6502 Retro Controller Board. Slowly, the project was expanded with various additional modules, in much the same way one might add shields to an Arduino.

In this case, [Marek] expanded the 6502-powered board with a series of 7-segment displays, along with an RTC to keep accurate time. A classic SP0256-AL2 speech synthesis chip was then added, allowing the system to not only show the time, but read it aloud, too. As a bonus, not only can it tell you the hour, minute, day, and date, but it will also read various science-fiction quotes on demand.

Like most 80s speech synths, the output is robotic and a little difficult to parse. However, that’s part of the charm that makes it different compared to the speaking virtual assistants of today.

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Hackaday Prize 2022: Soviet Geiger Counter Gets WiFi

July 30, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

[Marek] has an impressive collection of old Soviet-style Geiger counters. These are handy tools to have in some specific situations, but for most of us they would be curiosities. Even so, they need some help from the modern world to work well, and [Marek] has come up with some pretty creative ways of bringing them into the 21st century. This version, for example, adds WiFi capabilities.

This build is based on the STS-5 Geiger tube but the real heavy lifting is handled by an ESP8266 which also provides a wireless network connection. There are some limitations to using an ESP8266 to control a time-sensitive device like a Geiger tube, especially the lack of local storage, but [Marek] solves this problem by including a real-time clock and locally caching data until a network connection is re-established. Future plans for the device include adding temperature and atmospheric temperature sensors.

Eventually this Geiger counter will be installed in a watertight enclosure outside so [Marek] can keep an eye on the background radiation of his neighborhood. Previously he was doing this with another build, but that one only had access to the network over an Ethernet cable, so this one is quite an upgrade.