Innovative Clock Uses Printed Caustic Lens

January 20, 2025 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

Hackers and makers have built just about every kind of clock under the sun. Digital, analog, seven-segment, mechanical seven-segment, binary, ternary, hexadecimal… you name it. It’s been done. You really have to try to find something that shocks us… something we haven’t seen before. [Moritz v. Sivers] has done just that.

Meet the Caustic Clock. It’s based on the innovative Hollow Clock from [shiura]. It displays time with an hour hand and a minute hand, and that’s all so conventional. But what really caught our eye was the manner in which its dial works. It uses caustics to display the clock dial on a wall as light shines through it.

If you’ve ever seen sunlight reflect through a glass, or the dancing patterns in an outdoor swimming pool, you’ve seen caustics at play. Caustics are the bright patterns we see projected through a transparent object, and if you shape that object properly, you can control them. In this case, [Moritz] used some GitHub code from [Matt Ferraro] to create a caustic projection clockface, and 3D printed it using an SLA printer.

The rest of the clock is straightforward enough—there’s some WS2812 LEDs involved, an Arduino Nano, and even an RP2040. But the real magic is in the light show and how it’s all achieved. We love learning about optics, and this is a beautiful effect well worth studying yourself.

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Neat Ring Clock Relies On Addressable LEDs

January 16, 2025 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

[WhiskeyTangoHotel] wanted to build an LED clock after seeing some great designs online. They elected to go after a ring clock design, based around the ever-popular WS2812B addressable LEDs.

The core of the build is the HELTEC WiFi 32 development board. It’s not one we’re intimately familiar with, but it’s based around the popular Expressif ESP32. Since it’s got WiFi, it’s able to simply dial up a network time server to always keep accurate time. It then drives a set of WS2812B LEDs set up in six rings. They display the current time with a layout akin to that of a typical analog clock.

What makes this build just a little more fun is the inclusion of Disco Mode. At the press of a button, the full set of LEDs flashes out some fun dancing patterns. The clock is also programmed to trigger the same display for sixty seconds at the top of each hour.

It’s a straightforward build—what might have been highly complicated to build two decades ago has been simplified with the magic of addressable LEDs. What’s also cool is that this clock was apparently inspired by another project shared on these very pages. If you’ve been spurred to build something cool yourself, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

Gimbal Clock Relies On Servos For Its Cool Movements

January 16, 2025 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

In the annals of human history, clocks got boring there for a while. Most were just variations on hands spinning in a circle, with the occasional tweeting bird mechanism to liven things up. These days, we’re treated to all kinds of original and oddball designs, like this neat gimbal clock from [Twisted&Tinned].

The concept of the build is straightforward enough. It has four main vertical arms, each with a servo at the base that rotates about a vertical axis. Upon each arm are between one and three servos which rotate 3D printed structures in the shape of numbers. A Wemos D1 Mini microcontroller commands the servos to the correct positions to display the current time. It also uses its WiFi connection to get accurate time updates directly from a network time server.

It’s quite an artistic build—and it’s rather enjoyable to watch this one flex and twist its way into displaying the right time. It’s also easier to read at a glance than some of the more unintelligible designs out there. Indeed, we see all kinds of neat and innovative clocks around these parts.

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Springs And Things Make For A Unique Timepiece

January 10, 2025 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

You never know when inspiration is going to strike, and for [Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi], it struck while he was playing with one of his daughter’s hair ties. The result is a clock called “Bezicron” and it’s a fascinating study in mechanical ingenuity.

The hair ties in question are simple objects, just a loose polymer coil spring formed into a loop that can be wrapped around ponytails and the like. In Bezicron, though, each digit is formed by one of these loops fixed to the ends of five pairs of arms. Each pair moves horizontally thanks to a cam rotating between them, changing the spacing between them and moving the hair tie. This forms each loop into an approximation of each numeral, some a little more ragged than others but all quite readable. The cams move thanks to a geared stepper motor on the rightmost digit of the hours and minutes section of the clock, with a gear train carrying over to the left digit. In between is the colon, also made from springy things pulsing back and forth to indicate seconds. The video below shows the clock going through its serpentine motions.

For our money, the best part of this build is the cams. Coming up with the proper shape for those had to be incredibly tedious, although we suspect 3D printing and rapid iterative design were a big help here. Practice with cam design from his earlier Eptaora clock probably helped too.

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Polarizer clock with rainbow glow clockface

Bending Light, Bending Time: A DIY Polarizer Clock

January 7, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 7 Comments

Imagine a clock where the colors aren’t from LEDs but a physics phenomenon – polarization. That’s just what [Mosivers], a physicist and electronics enthusiast, has done with the Polarizer Clock. It’s not a perfect build, but the concept is intriguing: using polarized light and stress-induced birefringence to generate colors without resorting to RGB LEDs.

The clock uses white LEDs to edge-illuminate a polycarbonate plate. This light passes through two polarizers—one fixed, one rotating—creating constantly shifting colours. Sounds fancy, but the process involves more trial and error than you’d think. [Mosivers] initially wanted to use polarizer-cut numbers but found the contrast was too weak. He experimented with materials like Tesa tape and cellophane, choosing polycarbonate for its stress birefringence.

The final design relies on a mix of materials, including book wrapping foil and 3D printed parts, to make things work. It has its quirks, but it’s certainly clever. For instance, the light dims towards the center, and the second polarizer is delicate and finicky to attach.

This gadget is a splendid blend of art and science, and you can see it in the video below the break. If you’re inspired, you might want to look up polariscope projects, or other birefringence hacks on Hackaday.

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FallingWater Clock Puts New Spin On A Common LCD

December 27, 2024 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

Sometimes, all it takes is looking at an existing piece of tech in a new way to come up with something unique. That’s the whole idea behind FallingWater, a gorgeous Art Deco inspired clock created by [Mark Wilson] — while the vertical LCD might look like some wild custom component, it’s simply a common DM8BA10 display module that’s been rotated 90 degrees.

As demonstrated in the video below, by turning the LCD on its side, [Mark] is able to produce some visually striking animations. At the same time the display is still perfectly capable of showing letters and numbers, albeit in a single column and with noticeably wider characters.

In another application it might look odd, but when combined with the “sunburst” style enclosure, it really comes together. Speaking of the enclosure, [Mark] used OpenSCAD to visualize the five layer stack-up, which was then recreated in Inkscape so it could ultimately be laser-cut from acrylic.

Rounding out the build is a “Leonardo Tiny” ATmega32U4 board, a DS3221 real-time clock (RTC), a couple of pushbuttons, and a light dependent resistor (LDR) used to dim the display when the ambient light level is low. All of the electronics are housed on a small custom PCB, making for a nicely compact package.

This build is as simple as it is stylish, and we wouldn’t be surprised if it inspired more than a few clones. At the time of writing, [Mark] hadn’t published the source code for the ATmega, but he has provided the code to generate the cut files for the enclosure, as well as the Gerber files for the PCB. If you come up with your own version of this retro-futuristic timepiece, let us know.

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Lathe Gears Make A Clock

December 27, 2024 by Al Williams 11 Comments

When you think of making something using a lathe, you usually think of turning a screw, a table leg, or a toothpick. [Uri Tuchman] had a different idea. He wanted to make a clock out of the gears used in the lathe. Can he do it? Of course, as you can see in the video below.

Along the way, he used several tools. A mill, a laser cutter, and a variety of hand tools all make appearances. There’s also plenty of CAD. Oh yeah, he uses a lathe, too.

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