City Clock Is Beautiful Tribute To Parisian Architecture

January 4, 2020 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

Binary clocks are often created as a programming exercise, or to display the time in a project with the minimal practical components. Displaying the time in binary needn’t always be for practicalities sake, however. The City Clock shows that it can be applied quite artfully, too.

The electronic side of things is simple – an Arduino Nano runs 13 LEDs, with a digital IO pin for each. Including a real time clock module is optional, though we imagine pretty essential if you wish the clock to keep accurate time. The LEDs are fitted into a grid, which is fitted behind the windowed facade of the building. This helps block light leaks between adjacent segments, giving a more polished look to the final design. The whole assembly is built out of lasercut wood, making it a quick and easy build if you’ve got such a tool handy.

It’s a simple concept, but one that is particularly striking in action. Even to those unaware of its horological abilities, it presents the appearance of a living building, with inhabitants switching lights on and off throughout the day. It would make an excellent bookshelf or coffee table piece, and we’re highly tempted to give building our own a go. Video after the break.

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Voltmeter Clock Looks Great On Display

January 3, 2020 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Voltmeters are cheap, and have a great industrial aesthetic about them. This makes them prime candidates for hackers looking to do a clock build. [Brett Oliver] went down this very road, and built a very stylish timepiece along the way.

[Brett] initially wanted to go with 240-degree voltmeters, however the cost was prohibitive, so settled for the more common 90-degree models. New dials were produced by first sanding down the old dials, repainting in an old-fashioned off-white, and then applying the new graphics with inkjet transfer paper.

The attention to detail continues with the case. [Brett] aimed to build the clock with an old-school lab equipment aesthetic. A large piece of mahogany was crafted into the base. A clear plastic cover was sourced from eBay, which really makes the piece. Large buttons and toggle switches were chosen to complete the look.

On the electronic side of things, it’s all run by a PIC16F628A, which controls the voltmeters via PWM. Running with a 20MHz crystal, the PIC is not a great timekeeper. Instead, the whole show is synchronized to [Brett]’s master clock we featured a few years back.

Building a clock is a rite of passage for a hacker, and [Brett]’s example goes to show how craftsmanship can really pay off in this pursuit. Video after the break.
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Analog Meter Clock Uses Parts From A Simpler Time

December 29, 2019 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

Clocks with hands that turn are all well and good for the common folk, but hacker types prefer something different. [Sjm4306] is one such person, and developed this analog dial clock with parts we’d almost consider retro by modern standards.

The microcontroller at the heart of the build is a PIC16F886. An 8-bit micro from the Microchip brand, it features no Arduino bootloader or USB interface, being flashed via a dedicated programmer. This is combined with a DS1302 real-time clock to keep accurate time, and a MCP4922 DAC which is responsible for generating the output to drive the dials. The dials themselves are sourced from eBay, being simple voltmeters. They’re given a new backing to display hours and minutes instead of volts, and backlit with LEDs for style.

In this day and age, we’re more used to seeing high-end micros used with integrated DACs and USB programming, but it’s nice to see the parts of yesteryear being used, too. It’s not the first clock we’ve seen from [sjm4306], either. Video after the break.

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Word Clock Does The Job With Laser-Etched Acrylic

December 26, 2019 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

As far as telling the time, word clocks go out of their way to spell it out for you. As long as you know the language, they’re a stylish and effective way to get the message across. [Simon] built an elegant, stripped-back word clock of his own, with a laser cutter helping to get the job done.

The core of the build is an Arduino Nano, hooked up to a string of 22 WS2812B LEDs, driven via the FastLED library. An NXP PCF8563T serves as the real-time clock, to ensure stable and accurate timekeeping. The electronics are all housed inside an enclosure that appears to be constructed from PCBs, with instructions on operating the clock printed on the base.

The actual display is via laser-cut and laser-etched acrylic. The display piece slides into the top of the clock, with the LEDs edge lighting various segments to display the relevant words that make up the current time. The clock is designed in such a way that these display slides can be easily switched out to change the look of the clock, with different fonts and designs.

It’s a quick and clean take on the popular word clock design, and one any makerspace could whip up in a weekend. As far as word clocks go, however, the sky really is the limit when it comes to complexity. Video after the break.

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Color Coded Clock Runs On Roman Numerals

December 24, 2019 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

Roman numerals are, by modern standards, a bit unusual. By virtue of using designations for both 5 and 10, and not scaling well to higher numbers, they’ve fallen out of favor outside of some specific uses. One of those is in time keeping, in which many clocks use the classical numerals instead of the more popular Arabic replacements. [Nicola]’s clock does too, albeit in a rather unusual way.

A diagram of the clock displaying the times 18:40 and 23:04.

The build begins with a faux-neon palm tree LED decoration, which is gutted and refitted with a WS2812B LED strip, run by an Arduino Nano. An RTC is used to keep accurate time, and the time is set by running a one-off program to initialise the clock.

To tell the time, the LEDs are color coded. However, instead of using a binary representation that many can find unfamiliar, colors are chosen instead to correspond to Roman numerals. Blue, green, red and yellow are chosen to represent 1, 5, 10, and 50, or I, V, X, and L respectively. The Github has more details for the curious. The clock uses 24 hour time, and we think we’ve figured out how the display works – with hours on the left and minutes on the right.

It’s fun to see an LED clock that takes a different bent on the usual themes. We’ve seen plenty over the years, from the byte clock to this stunning blinkenlights build. If you’ve cooked up your own special timepiece, be sure to let us know.

Tiny Bubbles In The Clock

December 20, 2019 by Al Williams 9 Comments

When [DonHo] sang about tiny bubbles, he probably wasn’t thinking of them embedded in glycerine. But that’s where the bubbles in [ShinodaY]’s clock reside. The viscous fluid holds the bubbles better allowing the time to be read more easily. You can watch the relaxing display in the video below.

The theory of operation is simple and reminds us somehow of a reverse Tetris game. Solenoid valves at the base release air bubbles to form a row of the display. The bubbles rising makes room for the next row. The display has as many columns as there are air outlets at the bottom. Spacing the bubble pixels is as simple as adjusting the timing between air bubbles.

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Numitron Clock Is A Tidy ’70s Throwback

December 20, 2019 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

As far as hacker clock builds go, the more obscure the parts involved, the better. By this yardstick, [sjm4306] has a great piece on his hands with this Numitron-based build.

The Numitron was a type of display popular in the 1970s, and often used in aircraft avionics and other high-end hardware. The display is a 7-segment type, but using filaments instead of LEDs. [sjm4306] was able to lay his hands on four of these devices, along with some bulbs to act as the digit seperator and AM/PM indicator. Due to being incandescent in nature, multiplexing wasn’t a practical option, with lower duty cycles drastically dimming the display. Instead, a 32-bit cascaded shift register was used to enable all the segments to be driven at the same time.

It’s a great build that uses some genuine original display hardware to create a clock with a compelling vintage aesthetic. This would make a great gift to a pilot from the era, or any hacker that likes the unusual display technologies of yesteryear. You can even build a Numitron watch, if you’re so inclined. Video after the break.

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