Winter Is Coming, This Clock Will Let You Know When

December 2, 2019 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

For Game of Thrones fans, it’s an awkward time. The show has ended its run on HBO (not without a certain level of controversy), the planned prequel is still years away, and who knows when George R. R. Martin will actually get around to writing the final books in the series. Fans have no choice but to entertain themselves while waiting for further tales of adventure from Westeros, which is how we get things like this motorized clock from [Techarge].

Inspired by the now iconic opening sequence from the HBO series, elements of the 3D printed model spin around while the theme song is played courtesy of a DFPlayer Mini MP3 player module and small 2 watt speaker. The audio hardware, motor, and four digit LED display module in the front are all connected to an Arduino with a custom PCB shield, giving the inside of the clock a very clean and professional appearance.

Around the back side [Techarge] has two small push buttons to set the hour and minutes, and a large toggle to control the music and movement. As of right now it needs to be switched on and off manually, but a future enhancement could see it kick on hourly. We’d also like to see an RTC module added to the PCB, or better yet, switch over to the ESP8266 and just pull the time down from NTP.

Who knows? By the time you’ve built one of these clocks for yourself, and the hand-made Iron Throne phone charger stand to go with it, maybe ol’ George will have slipped out a new book. But don’t count on it.

Turning OLEDs And Acrylic Into Faux Nixie Tubes

November 26, 2019 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Love ’em or hate ’em, Nixies and the retro clocks they adorn are here to stay. At least until the world’s stock of surplus Soviet tubes is finally depleted, that is. The glow discharge tubes were last mass manufactured in the 1980s, and while they’re not too hard to get a hold of yet, they will be eventually. And what better way to get ready for that dreaded day than by rolling your own OLED faux Nixie tubes?

Granted, [Derek]’s faux Nixies, appropriately dubbed “Fixies,” require just a touch of willing suspension of disbelief. We’ve never see Nixies with tiny jam jars as envelopes, so that’s probably the first giveaway. But looking past that, the innards of these fake displays do a pretty convincing job of imitating the texture of the real thing.

The numbers themselves are displayed on a 128×64 white OLED display using a Nixie-like True Type font. An orange acrylic filter in front of the display gives it that warm amber Nixie glow, with laser etchings mimicking both the fine hexagonal anode grid and the ghostly cathodes of the non-illuminated numerals. The tubes looked convincing enough that a clock was in order, and after sorting through an I2C bottleneck with the help of a multiplexer, [Derek] had a pretty decent faux-Nixie clock, complete with a solenoid-actuated mechanical gong. The double-digit display for the seconds will no doubt cause some consternation among Nixie purists, but that’s probably part of the fun.

Of course, just because Nixies aren’t being mass-produced today doesn’t mean you can’t get new ones. You just have to be willing to pay for them, and [Dalibor Farný] will gladly set you up with his handmade artisanal Nixies, or even a clock kit using them.

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Agora, A Hackable E-Paper Clock

November 26, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 10 Comments

[Daniel Zilinec] appreciates the aesthetics of e-paper and thought it would make a great clock.

The natural appearance of e-paper certainly appeals to a lot of hackers. We’ve seen everything from typewriters to trackers for imaginary money. The Agora clock is designed to be battery powered,;a classic night-stand alarm clock. With its wide angle viewing and even response to light it will be easily viewable even at dawn.

He saves the user a lot of time by designing the PCB up-front. It’s got a charging IC built in, back-light LEDs and pads for buttons. All you need to do is print out the case from the available thingiverse files and assemble. The schematic and firmware are available for the more enterprising hacker to work out as well.

There’s also a somewhat puzzling watch version of the clock. It would certainly be a fashion statement to wear one of these. Still, the is something nice about the organic feel and possible fonts that make it worth considering.

Keeping Time With Blinkenlights

November 24, 2019 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

If we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that hackers like weird clocks, and they love packing as many multicolored LEDs into a device as is humanly possible. Combine both of those concepts into one project, and you’ve got a perfect storm. So as far as unnecessarily complex timepieces go, we’d say the “Crazy Clock 4” built by [Fearless Night] ranks up there among the all-time greats.

This Arduino Pro Mini powered clock syncs the current time via GPS, with a temperature compensated DS3231 RTC to keep it on the straight and narrow between satellite downlinks. Once the clock has the correct time, how do you read it? Well, at the top you’ve got a basic numerical readout for the normies, and next to that there’s a circular LED display that looks like it could double as a sci-fi movie prop. On the lower level there’s a binary clock for the real show-offs, and as if that wasn’t enough, there’s even dual color-coded analog meters to show the hours and minutes.

[Fearless Night] has provided everything you need to follow along at home, from the Arduino source code to the 3D models of the case and Gerber files for the custom PCB. Personally we think just the top half of the clock would be more than sufficient for our timekeeping needs. If nothing else it should help save some energy, as the clock currently pulls an incredible 20 watts with all those LEDs firing off.

Should you decide to take a walk down memory lane and check out some of the other interesting LED clocks we’ve featured in the past, you’d be busy for quite awhile. But for our money, it’s still hard to beat the impossibly obtuse single-LED clock.

Date Clock Requires (Almost) No Interaction

November 19, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

A lot of commercial offerings of technology aimed at helping the elderly seem to do a good job on the surface, but anything other than superficial interaction with them tends to be next to impossible for its intended users. Complicated user interfaces and poor design consideration reign in this space. [7402] noticed this and was able to design a better solution for an elderly relative’s digital day planner after a commercial offering he tried couldn’t automatically adjust for Daylight Savings.

Of course, the clock/day planner has a lot going on under the surface that the elderly relative may not be able to use, but the solution to all of that was to make it update over the network. This task [7402] plans to do remotely since the relative does not live anywhere nearby. It is based on a Raspberry Pi connected to a Uniroi screen which automatically dims but can be switched off by means of a large button in the front. The UI shows the date, time, and a number of messages or reminders in large font in order to improve [7402]’s relative’s life.

This is a great idea for anyone with their own elderly relative which might need something like this but won’t want to interact with the technology other than the cursory glance, but the project is also a great illustration of proper design for the intended users. Commercial offerings often had hidden buttons and complicated menus, but this has none of that, much like this well-designed walker for an elderly Swede.

Rise And Shine With This Japanese-Inspired Clock

November 3, 2019 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

On the Hackaday.io page for his gorgeous “Sunrise Alarm Clock”, [The Big One] is quick to point out that his design is only inspired by Japanese lanterns, and does not use authentic materials or traditional woodworking techniques. Perhaps that’s an important fact to some, but we’ll just say that the materials used seem far less important when the end result looks this good.

Unfortunately [The Big One] hasn’t provided any interior shots of his clock, as it sounds like the aesthetics of the internal wiring isn’t quite up to the standard set by the outside of it. But he has provided a concise parts list, a wiring diagram, and source code, so we’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s under the hood.

The clock is powered by the uBBB 32u4, an ATMega32u4 development board that [The Big One] developed in conjunction with [Warren Janssens]. It uses the popular MAX7219 LED matrix for the display, and a DS3231 RTC module to help keep the time. There’s also a DFPlayer Mini module onboard that allows him to play whatever sound effects or music he wants when the alarm goes off.

Of course the star of the show is the LED strips which illuminate the shōji-style column. These have apparently been wrapped around a coffee can of all things, which not only serves as a convenient way of holding the strips, but [The Big One] says actually makes the speaker sound a bit better. Hey, whatever works.

This isn’t the first “lantern” clock to grace these pages, but compared to the high-tech presentation of previous projects, we can’t help but be impressed by the grace and elegance of this wooden masterpiece.

Retrotechtacular: The Speaking Clock Goes Silent

October 30, 2019 by Dan Maloney 28 Comments

It used to be that time was a lot more relative than it is today. With smartphones synced to GPS and network providers’ clocks, we all pretty much have access to an authoritative current time, giving few of us today the wiggle room to explain a tardy arrival at work to an impatient boss by saying our watch is running slow.

Even when that excuse was plausible, it was a bit weak, since almost every telephone system had some sort of time service. The correct time was but a phone call away, announced at first by live operators then later by machines called speaking clocks. Most of these services had been phased out long ago, but one, the speaking clock service in Australia, sounded for the last time at the end of September.

While the decommissioned machine was just another beige box living in a telco rack, the speaking clocks that preceded it were wonderfully complex electromechanical devices, and perfect fodder for a Retrotechtacular deep-dive. Here’s a look at the Australian speaking clock known as “George” and why speaking clocks were once the highest of technology.

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