Colorful Quinary Clock Makes The Most Out Of Five Neopixels

November 19, 2020 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

If binary digits are bits, are quinary digits “quits”? Perhaps, but whatever you call them, you’re going to have to wrap your head around some new concepts in order to make sense of this quinary display clock.

Why quinary? [Spike Snell] wanted to minimize the number of LEDs, and 5² is enough to cover all 24 hours. Binary clocks may have geek chic, but there are only so many ways to display ones and zeros.

[Spike]’s clock is unique because it shows each quit using a single WS2812 Neopixel. The values zero through four are each represented by a different color, meaning the user needs to memorize which color goes with which value, which we suspect is the hardest part of learning this clock. The clock’s software is fairly simple and runs on an ESP8266, and uses NTP to keep on track. The clock self-adjusts for Daylight Savings time, and it has a nice feature that dims the display in the evening to make living with it easier.

Even for those not up on their base-five arithmetic, [Spike]’s clock is still a nice, slowly evolving abstract art piece. And for those who grok the quinary clock, perhaps a career awaits you in an alternate future where bi-quinary relay computers caught on.

Domino Clock Tells The Time In Style

November 12, 2020 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

It seems there are as many ways to display the time as there are ways to measure it in the first place. [Kothe] saw a fancy designer domino clock, and wanted a piece of the action without the high price tag. Thus, the natural solution was to go the DIY route.

An Arduino Nano is the heart of the build, paired with a DS1307 RTC for accurate timekeeping. The case of the clock consists of a 3D printed housing, fitted with layers of lasercut acrylic. Behind this, a smattering of WS2812B addressable LEDs are fitted, which shine through the translucent grey plastic of the front panel. This enables each LED to light up a dot of the domino, while remaining hidden when switched off. Reading the time is as simple as counting the dots on the dominoes. The first domino represents hours, from 1 to 12, while the second and third dominoes represent the minutes.

As a timepiece, the domino clock serves well as a stylish decor piece, and could also be a fun way to teach kids about electronics and telling the time. Makers do love a good timepiece, and our clock tag is always overflowing with fresh hacks on a regular basis. If you’ve got your own fancy build coming together at home, you know who to call!

Big Workshop Clock Is 3D Printing Done Right

November 1, 2020 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Time is something uniquely important to humans, and they remain the only creatures on the planet to build devices to regularly track its progress. [Ivan Miranda] is one such creature, and built a giant 7-segment clock for his workshop that really ties the room together.

The clock is a testament to [Ivan]’s design skills in the 3D printed space. Taking advantage of his large format printer, each segment consists of a front panel, large single-piece diffuser, LED carrier, and backing plate. There are plenty of nice touches, from the interlocking ridges between each digit, to integral printed arrows on the inside that guide installation of the LED strips. Fit and finish approaches the level of a commercial product, a reward for [Ivan]’s years of practice in the field.

Electronically, an ESP8266 runs the show, synchronizing the time over its in-built WiFi connection. Each segment contains 9 WS2812B LEDs, wired up in a single long strip that’s addressed by the microcontroller. This means that the segments can be lit up to any color of the rainbow, though [Ivan] is a man who best appreciates the look of classic red.

[Ivan]’s long been a proponent of big 3D-printed builds — his tank-tracked electric skateboard is a particularly good example. Video after the break.

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A Clock From An Electricity Meter

October 29, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

Electric utilities across the world have been transitioning their meters from the induction analog style with a distinctive spinning disc to digital “smart” meters which aren’t as aesthetically pleasing but do have a lot of benefits for utilities and customers alike. For one, meter readers don’t need to visit each meter every month because they are all networked together and can download usage data remotely. For another, it means a lot of analog meters are now available for projects such as this clock from [Monta].

The analog meters worked by passing any electricity used through a small induction motor which spun at a rate proportional to the amount of energy passing through it. This small motor spun a set of dials via gearing in order to keep track of the energy usage in the home or business. To run the clock, [Monta] connected a stepper motor with a custom transmission to those dials for the clock face because it wasn’t possible to spin the induction motor fast enough to drive the dials. An Arduino controls that stepper motor, but can’t simply drive the system in a linear fashion because it needs to skip a large portion of the “minutes” dials every hour. A similar problem arises for the “hours” dials, but a little bit of extra code solves this problem as well.

Once the actual clock is finished, [Monta] put some finishing touches on it such as backlighting in the glass cover and a second motor to spin the induction motor wheel to make the meter look like it’s running. It’s a well-polished build that makes excellent use of some antique hardware, much like one of his other builds we’ve seen which draws its power from a Stirling engine.

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A Unique Display Makes An Unusual Clock

October 25, 2020 by Jenny List 28 Comments

Do you know the clock speed of the computer you’re reading this article on? Maybe Hackaday readers are more likely to reply “Yes!” to that question than the general public, but if there’s a takeaway it’s that for most computer users their clock speed is now an irrelevance. It’s quick enough for the job in hand and that’s all that matters. This was not always the case though, and a few decades ago the clock speed of a PC was its major selling point. Beige boxes would have seven-segment displays lit up with the figure, and it was an unusual example of one that [Ken Yap] used to produce a clock that he believes is one-of-a-kind; unless by some slim chance somebody else has rescued the same part.

The displays were hard wired without any signals from the processor, and what makes this one unusual is that as well as having a couple of digits in yellow it also sports a segmented “MHz” in red. This would have been quite a big deal on your 486 back in about 1994. To make a clock from this unpromising start required a little creative thinking, and he manages it by using the “M” and the “H” digits to represent minutes and hours, and displaying each figure in turn. The display is wired on a piece of protoboard with an STM8 dev board, and yes, as you can see in the very short video below the break, it does tell the time.

Custom displays are more usually seen in the world of LCDs than LEDs, so this one remains a rarity on these pages. Happily there are projects out there in which people spin their own takes on the idea.

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The Clock Under The Dome

October 25, 2020 by Matthew Carlson 3 Comments

In what can only be described as a work of art, [suedbunker] has created a clock under a glass dome. Sporting Nixie tubes, a DS3223, BCD encoders, and MPSA43 transistors driven by an MCP23008 I/O expander it is truly a sight to behold. [suedbunker] has previously created the Circus Clock, a similar clock that celebrated a diversity of ways of displaying the time.

The dome clock represents a continuation of that idea. Reading the clock requires looking at the horizontal and vertical numbers separately. The hours are on the horizontal and minutes are on the vertical. Monday to Sunday is represented in the neon bulbs on the back. The power supply at the bottom provides a wide range of voltages including 5 V, 12 V, 24 V, 45 V, 90 V, 150 V, and -270 V for all the various types of lights. For safety, an optocoupler is used on the -270 volts to drive the clear seven-segment display.

An Arduino Nano controls the whole clock by communicating with the DS3232 real-time clock module and the port expanders via I2C. The soldering and wiring work, in particular, is tidy and beautiful. We look forward to future clocks by [suedbunker] and his wife.

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A Linear Stencil Clock Built For Quiet Operation

October 22, 2020 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

We around the Hackaday shop never get tired of seeing new ways to mark the passage of time. Hackers come up with all manner of interesting timekeeping modalities using every imaginable material and method of moving the mechanism once per whatever minimum time unit the hacker chooses to mark.

But honestly, there are only so many ways to make a clock, and while we’re bound to see some repeats, it’s still nice to go over old ground with a fresh approach. Take this linear sliding stencil clock for instance. [Luuk Esselbrugge] has included some cool design elements that bear a closer look. The video below shows that the display is made up of four separate stepper motors, each driving a vertical stencil via a rack-and-pinion mechanism. There a simple microswitch for homing the display, and a Neopixel for lighting things up.

The video below shows that the stencils move very, very slowly; [Luuk] says that this is to keep the steppers as quiet as possible. Still, this means that some time changes take more than a minute to accomplish, which is a minor problem. The Neopixel also doesn’t quite light up just one digit, which should be a pretty easy fix for version 2. Still, even with these issues, we like the stately movements of this clock, and appreciate [Luuk]’s attempts to make it easier to live with.

Don’t let the number of clocks you see on these pages dissuade you from trying something new, or from putting your twist on an old design. Start with fridge magnets, an old oscilloscope, or even a bevy of steel balls, and let your imagination run wild. Just make sure to tell us all about it when you’re done.

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