Decorative Light Box Lets You Guess The Time

October 19, 2018 by Sven Gregori 7 Comments

Telling time by using the current position of the sun is nothing revolutionary — though it probably was quite the “life hack” back in ancient times, we can assume. On the other hand, showing time by using the current position of the sun is what inspired [Rich Nelson] to create the Day Cycle Clock, a color changing light box of the Philadelphia skyline, simulating a full day and night cycle in real time — servo-controlled sun and moon included.

At its core, the clock uses an Arduino with a real-time clock module, and the TimeLord library to determine the sunrise and sunset times, as well as the current moon phase, based on a given location. The sun and moon are displayed on a 1.44″ LCD which doubles as actual digital clock in case you need a more accurate time telling after all. [Rich] generally went out of his way with planning and attention to detail in this project, as you can see in the linked video, resulting in an impressively clean build surely worthy as gift to his brother. And if you want to build one for yourself, both the Arduino source code and all the mechanical parts are available on GitHub.

An interesting next iteration could be adding internet connectivity to get the current weather situation mixed into the light behavior — not that it would be the first time we’d see weather represented by light. And of course, simulating the northern lights is also always an option.

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Epic Clock Clocks The Unix Epoch

September 18, 2018 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

Admit it: when you first heard of the concept of the Unix Epoch, you sat down with a calculator to see when exactly 2³¹-1 seconds would be from midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. Personally, I did that math right around the time my company hired contractors to put “Y2K Suspect” stickers on every piece of equipment that looked like it might have a computer in it, so the fact that the big day would come sometime in 2038 was both comforting and terrifying.

[Forklift] is similarly entranced by the idea of the Unix Epoch and built a clock to display it, at least for the next 20 years or so. Accommodating the eventual maximum value of 2,147,483,647, plus the more practical ISO-8601 format, required a few more digits than the usual clock – sixteen to be exact. The blue seven-segment displays make an impression in the sleek wooden case, about which there is sadly no detail in the build log. But the internals are well documented, and include a GPS module and an RTC. The clock parses the NMEA time string from the satellites and syncs the RTC. There’s a brief video below of the clock in action.

We really like the look of [Forklift]’s clock, and watching the seconds count up to the eventual overflow seems like a fun way to spend the next two decades. It’s not the first Epoch clock we’ve featured, of course, but it’s pretty slick.

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A 3D Printed Marble Clock

September 12, 2018 by Rich Hawkes 11 Comments

There are clocks with pendulums, gears, and circuits. How about one with marbles? Initially designed in the ’70s, rolling ball clocks came in many designs and materials, but this is the future, so [gocivici] has created an Instructable to show you how you can 3D print and build your own.

Three rows of marbles keep track of the time, one for one hour intervals, one for five-minute intervals and a third for one minute intervals. It makes reading the time a bit more difficult than a pair of hands, but more fun. The clock uses the weight of the marbles to know when a row needs resetting. When the fifth marble drops onto the minute row, its weight causes the row to tilt, sending all but one marble down to the bottom of the machine. The marble that caused the tilting is sent down to the row underneath, perhaps causing a cascade of marbles down to the bottom.

There is something quite satisfying about seeing the marbles moving around in [gocivici]’s mechanical marble clock. Sure, it’s probably too loud for the nightstand, but it keeps time and looks great. In this build a stepper motor drives the main wheel which acts as an elevator, grabbing a marble from the bottom and raising it to the top to tumble down and find its position among the rows.

Of course, at Hackaday we love clocks so there have been many clock builds showcased here; all you need do is a quick search for “clock” to find some incredible designs and builds. We’ve also featured similar marble clocks.

via BoingBoing

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The Tide Is High, And This Clock Lets You Know

September 9, 2018 by Sven Gregori 7 Comments

In case you happen to have an ocean nearby, you’re probably familiar with its rising and falling tides. And if mudflat hiking is a thing in your area, you’re also aware of the importance of good timing and knowing when the water will be on its way back. Tide clocks will help you to be prepared, and they are a fun alternative to your usual clock projects. If you’re looking for a starting point, [rabbitcreek] put together an Arduino-based tide clock kit for educational purposes.

If you feel like you’re experiencing some déjà vu here, this indeed isn’t [rabbitcreek]’s first tide clock project. But unlike his prior stationary clock, he has now created a small and portable, coin-cell version to take with you out on the sea. And what shape would better fit than a 3D printed moon — unfortunately the current design doesn’t offer much waterproofing.

For the underlying tide calculation itself, [rabbitcreek] uses just like in his previous project [Luke Miller]’s location-based library for the ubiquitous DS1307 and DS3213 real-time clocks. Of course, if you also want to keep track of other events on your clock, why not set up calendar events for the next rising tide?

Transistor Logic Clock Gets Stacked Up

September 6, 2018 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

A couple years back we covered a very impressive transistor logic clock which was laid out so an observer could watch all of the counters doing their thing, complete with gratuitous blinkenlights. It had 777 transistors on 41 perfboards, and exactly zero crystals: the clock signal was extracted from the mains frequency of 50 Hz. It was obviously a labor of love and certainly looked impressive, but it wasn’t exactly the most practical timepiece we’d ever seen.

Creator [B Brett] recently wrote in to share news that the second version of his transistor logic clock has been completed, and we can confidently say it’s a triumph. He’s dropped the 41 perfboards in favor of 9 professionally fabricated PCBs, which this time around are stacked vertically to make it a bit more desktop friendly. The end goal of a transistor logic clock that you can take apart to study is the same, but this “MkII” as he calls it is a far more refined version of the concept.

In addition to using fewer boards, the new MkII design cuts the logic down to only 283 transistors. This is thanks in part to the fact that he allowed himself the luxury of including an oscillator this time. The clock uses a standard watch crystal at 32.768 KHz, the output of which is converted into a square wave through a Schmitt trigger. This is then fed into a divider higher up the stack which uses flip flops to produce 1Hz and 2Hz signals for use throughout the rest of the clock.

In addition to the original version of this project, we’ve also seen a beautiful single-board wall mounted version, and even a “dead bug” style one built from scraps.

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A BCD Clock For Your Desk

September 1, 2018 by Jenny List 8 Comments

We see so many clocks here at Hackaday, and among those we see our fair share of binary clocks. But to see one that at first sight looks as though it might be a commercial product when it is in fact a one-off project is something special. That’s just what [Tobi4sDE] has done though, with his desktop BCD binary LED clock.

The front panel is a black PCB on which sit the LEDs that form the binary display, and its back holds an ATMega328P microcontroller and DS3231 real-time clock. A smart desktop case is 3D-printed, and while the clock is USB-powered it features a CR2032 coin cell as a backup to hold the time while the USB is disconnected.

Unexpectedly he’s used a mini USB socket rather than the expected micro USB, but the rest of the clock is one we’d probably all have on our desks given the chance. We’d even go so far as to say we’d have this one as a kit if it were available.

Of course, regular readers will notice that this isn’t the only high-standard BCD timepiece you’ll have seen recently, though the other one was a wristwatch.

An Abstract Kind Of Clock: The Chinese Remainder Clock

August 27, 2018 by Tucker Ervin 15 Comments

Hackaday likes clocks, a lot. Speaking personally, from my desk I can count at least eight clocks, of which seven are working. There’s normal quartz movement analog clocks, fun automatic wristwatches, run-of-the-mill digital clocks, a calculator watch, and a very special and very broken Darth Vader digital clock/radio combo that will get fixed one day — most likely. Every clock is great, and one of life’s great struggles is to see how many you can amass before you die. The more unique the clock is, the better, and nothing (so far) tops [Antonella Perucca]’s Chinese Remainder Clock.

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