A One LED Clock

July 29, 2016 by Jenny List 18 Comments

Esoteric clocks are something of a staple among hardware hacker projects. If it can be made to tell the time correctly, even if only twice a day, the chances are someone’s made a clock from it. And if the only person who can read that clock is its creator, so much the better. Universal accessibility is not always a virtue in the world of unusual timepieces.

[Setvir] writes to us with details of his One LED Clock. It’s an Arduino Pro Micro with an RTC module and an LED. That’s all, time is communicated to the world through LED flashes. You might expect therefore that it would use Morse Code, but he’s come up with his own timing communication scheme which does have some merit. Long flashes cover a quarter of the clock face, while short flashes cover individual hours or five-minute segments. He goes into detail on the project page and we can see that once you are used to the scheme it has an elegance to it, but it certainly ticks the essential unreadable-to-the-uninitiated box for an esoteric clock.

We like it though for its simplicity and for the flashing scheme, which once explained is both efficient and easy to read. If you would like to have a go yourself he’s published his code, so go forth and cover the world with baffling single-LED timepieces!

We’ve featured a few minimalist LED clocks before, at least one with a minimal face, and another single-LED offering. But that one used a bi-colour LED, so [Setvir] takes the minimalism crown.

Simple Clock Is Great Stepper Motor Project

July 21, 2016 by Elliot Williams 23 Comments

You’d think that we’ve posted every possible clock here at Hackaday. It turns out that we haven’t. But we have seen enough that we’ve started to categorize clock builds in our minds. There are the accuracy clocks which strive to get every microsecond just right, the bizzaro clocks that aim for most unique mechanism, and then there are “hello world” clocks that make a great introduction to building stuff.

Today, we’re looking at a nice “hello world” clock. [electronics for everyone]’s build uses a stepper motor and a large labelled wheel that rotates relative to a fixed pointer. Roll the wheel, and the time changes. It looks tidy, it’s cyclical by design, and it’s a no-stress way to get your feet wet driving stepper motors. And it comes with a video, embedded below.

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Walnut Guitar Back Yields Wood For Classy Word Clock

July 10, 2016 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

Word clocks are cool, but getting them to function correctly and look good is all about paying attention to the details. One look at this elegant walnut-veneered word clock shows what you can accomplish when you think a project through.

Most word clocks that use laser-cut characters like [grahamvinyl]’s effort suffer from the dreaded “stencil effect” – the font has bridges to support the islands in the middle of characters like “A” and “Q”. While that can be an aesthetic choice and work perfectly well, like in this word clock we featured a few months back, [grahamvinyl] was going for a different look. The clock’s book-matched walnut guitar back was covered in tape before being laser cut; the tape held the letters and islands in place. After painstakingly picking out the cutouts and tweaking the islands, he used clear epoxy resin to hold everything in place. The result is a fantastic Art Deco font and a clean, sleek-looking panel to sit on top of an MDF light box for the RGB LED strips.

The braided cloth cable adds a vintage look to the power cord, and [grahamvinyl] mentions some potential upgrades, like auto-dimming and color shifting. This is very much a work in progress, but even at this point we think it looks fabulous.

[via r/diy]

Transistor Logic Clock Has 777 Transistors

June 1, 2016 by Moritz Walter 23 Comments

Sometimes, the parts list says it all. 777 transistors, 1223 resistors, 136 LEDs, 455 crimp connectors, 41 protoboards and 500 grams of solder. That’s what went into this transistor logic clock build.

While additional diodes and capacitors were tolerated in this project, a consequent implementation of a discrete transistor logic clock, of course, does not contain a quarz oscillator. Instead, it extracts its clock signal from the mains frequency in its power supply. Because mains frequency is slow, it can be stepped down to a clock-applicable 1 Hz by a simple counter unit which already spreads its discrete transistors across 4 protoboards.

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Hackaday Prize Entries: Inventing New Logic Families

May 30, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 46 Comments

One of the favorite pastimes of electronics hobbyists is clock making. Clocks are a simple enough concept with a well-defined goal, but it’s the implementation that matters. If you want to build a clock powered only by tubes and mains voltage, that’s a great skill tester. A relay-based timepiece is equally cool, and everyone should build a Nixie tube clock once in their lives.

For [Ted]’s Hackaday Prize entry, he’s building a clock. Usually, this would be little cause for celebration, but this is not like any clock you’ve ever seen. [Ted] is building this clock using only diodes, and he’s inventing new logic families to do it.

Using diodes as logic elements has been around since the first computers, but these computers had a few transistors thrown in. While it is possible to make AND and OR gates using only diodes, a universal logic gate – NANDs and NORs – are impossible. For the computers of the 1950s, that means tubes or transistors and DTL logic.

For the past few years, [Ted] has been working on a diode-only logic family, and it appears he’s solved the problem. The new logic family includes a NOR gate constructed using only diodes, resistors, and inductors. The key design feature of these gates is a single diode to switch an RF power supply on and off. It relies on an undocumented property of the diodes, but it does work.

Although [Ted] can create a NOR gate without transistors — a feat never before documented in the history of electronics — that doesn’t mean this is a useful alternative to transistor logic. The fan-out of the gates is terrible, the clock uses about 60 Watts, and the gates require an AC power supply. While it is theoretically possible to build a computer out of these gates, it’s doubtful if anyone has the patience to do so. It’s more of a curiosity, but it is a demonstration of one of the most mind-bending projects we’ve ever seen.

You can check out a video of the diode clock below.

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CNC Clock Mills Itself, Displays The Time

May 28, 2016 by Elliot Williams 42 Comments

[Christian] wrote and sells some CAM/CNC controller software. We’re kinda sticklers for open source, and this software doesn’t seem to be, so “meh”. But what we do like is the Easter egg that comes included: the paths to mill out the base for a clock, and then the codes to move steel ball-bearings around to display the time.

Of course we’d like to see more info (more, MORE, MOAR!) but it looks easy enough to recreate. We could see redesigning this with marbles and a vacuum system, for instance. The seats for the ball bearings don’t even need to be milled out spheres. You could do this part with a drill press. Who’s going to rebuild this for their 3D printer? You just have to make sure that the machine is fast enough to move the balls around within one minute.

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Electronic Driver Replaces Master Clock

May 15, 2016 by Jenny List 13 Comments

In these days of cheap microprocessors and easy access to accurate timing through NTP or from the likes of MSF, WWVB, or DCF77, it’s no problem to ensure that any number of clocks keep the same time. In a simpler age though they didn’t have these tools at their disposal, so when a large organisation wished to ensure that all its parts ran on the same time they used an electromechanical solution. A master clock of as high a quality as the clockmakers of the day could build was fitted with a microswitch. The switch would send pulses to slave clocks which had a solenoid where a traditional clock has a pendulum. Thus every clock in the system lost or gained time at the same rate.

[Edo Lelic] has a rather nice Iskra slave clock, but unfortunately not the master that once drove it. Undeterred by this setback, he’s created an electronic driver board that generates the required 100mS pulses. His weapon of choice was a PIC microcontroller and an H-bridge driver to deliver their required voltage and polarity. The clock was designed to accept 100V pulses, but since it has an internal series resistor he determined that the solenoid was happy with a mere 24V. Source code is available, downloadable at the bottom of the linked article.

These clocks are an unseen piece of technology that is disappearing without our noticing. If you find one – or even better if you find a master clock – you’ll find it to be a very high quality timepiece indeed. A master clock would be well worth snapping up. At least now you won’t have to look too far for a driver for it.

We haven’t seen too many projects like this here at Hackaday. Save for a rather nice digital master clock build, it’s uncharted territory. Almost justification for a Retrotechtacular piece, perhaps.

Thanks [Muris Pučić] for the tip.