Unary Clock For The Binary-Challenged

May 14, 2016 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

If binary clocks have you confused by all the math required to figure out what time it is, we have the solution for you: a unary clock. After all, what’s simpler than summing up powers of two? Powers of one! To figure out the time, you start with the ones digit. If it’s on, you add one to the total. Then move on to the next digit. Since 1² equals one, you add another one if it’s lit. Then on to the third LED. 1³ = 1, so if it’s lit, you add another one, and so on.

OK, we’re messing around. Calling this a “unary” clock is ridiculous. When it’s seven o’clock, there are seven LEDs lit. Nice and easy to read. Sixty minute LEDs is silly, so here each minute LED stands for five minutes. Good enough.

What we really like about this clock is the build. It’s intended as educational for school kids, so it has to be simple to build and easy to personalize. Building the body out of Lego bricks fits the specs nicely. Transparent Lego bricks are used to give the white LEDs some color. That was too bright, so [Shrimping It] added paper cutouts from a hole punch as diffusers.

Clock builds are a great intro to electronics because they offer so many possibilities. Whether you want to go geary, use the clock as an excuse to try out fabrication techniques, or showcase a neat display technology, your imagination has a lot of room to wander. Show us yours?

Slim And Classy Word Clock Shows The Weather Too

April 27, 2016 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

Word clocks are a neat twist on traditional timepiece user interfaces. Spelling out the time with words and phrases rather than numerals fancies up a clock nicely. And if you add the current weather and forecast to the display, you get this attractive and handy word-based time and weather display.

For this clock, one of the many custom builds on [GMG]’s site that betray a certain passion for unusual timepieces, an 8×32 array of Neopixels lives behind a laser-cut sheet of steam-bent birch plywood. Each pixel is masked by either an alphanumeric character or an icon representing weather conditions. An ESP8266 fetches time and weather data and drives the display serially, controlling the color of each cell and building up the display. The video below shows the clock doing its thing.

Sure, we’ve featured plenty of word clocks before, even some with weather display, but we like the slim and understated design of this build. We’re particularly impressed by the lengths [GMG] took in packing as much capability into the 256-pixel display as possible, like the way “today” and “tomorrow” overlap. And if you’ve got an eye for detail, you might spot what gets displayed when it’s over 80° and 80% relative humidity.

Continue reading “Slim And Classy Word Clock Shows The Weather Too” →

Plexitube Owl Clock Watches You Sleep

April 24, 2016 by James Hobson 17 Comments

Wait, plexitube? Is that a typo? Surely we mean Nixie tubes!

For a Christmas project [Kurt] wanted to build some owl-inspired clocks — with bit of a retro feel. Given the complexities of finding and using actual Nixie tubes, he went with an alternative — a Plexitube.

lightguidescloseup — Closeup of Plexitube

Plexitubes look like futuristic Nixie tubes. They can have different stylized numbers. They’re crisp, they’re bright, and they are completely customizable. They’re made of edgelit acrylic! By laser etching the design onto pieces of acrylic and feeding LED light into the edge, very much like how a light-pipe works, it’s possible to have a neon-light effect — using nothing more than plastic and some LEDs.

He designed custom PCBs for the project, with SMD LEDs for the plexitubes. Making use of a laser cutter, he designed the actual owl to be made out of lightly formed wood cutouts — the entire thing looks absolutely fantastic.

As far as “Nixie tube” clocks this has gotta be one of the most aesthetically pleasing ones we’ve seen in a while, but if you’re looking for an all-out-Nixietube-extravaganza… take a look at this whopping thirteen tube clock.

[Thanks for the tip Lawrence!]

Gear Clock Uses Stepper Motor

April 24, 2016 by Al Williams 11 Comments

[Rjeuch] liked a wooden clock he saw on the Internet, but the gears were produced with a proprietary software tool. So he built his own version. Unlike the original, however, he chose to use a stepper motor to drive the hands.

The clock’s gears aren’t just for show, and the post does a good job explaining how the gears work, how you might customize them, and how they fit together. The clock’s electronics rely on an Arduino.

Continue reading “Gear Clock Uses Stepper Motor” →

Nixie Timer Is Easy To Read Across The Kitchen

April 22, 2016 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

Nixie clocks. Nixie power meters. Nixie thermometers, speedometers, and even Nixies for personal adornment. Is there anything that hasn’t been Nixie-fied? How about a Nixie kitchen timer? Beyond the Nixie tube, this is a great build. Check out the video below the break.

As so often happens with Nixie aficionados, [Kouichi Kuroi] started with tubes and searched for a project to use them on. A wonky kitchen timer provided the thinly veiled excuse for the build – after all, anyone can drop a couple of yen on a commercial replacement, right? The timer features four IN-12 tubes and a large numeric keypad up front on a laser-cut acrylic case. For those who quibble with the keypad’s aesthetics and the wisdom of a Nixie project in the kitchen environment, [Ko] points out that an IP65 keypad would have more than doubled the price of the build, and a little common sense goes a long way to keeping the high-voltage side from meeting anything wet. In addition to countdown capability, the timer can also act as a stopwatch and display the time of day, and the Nixie tubes provide great visibility compared to seven-segment LCD timers.

As for the aforementioned Nixie projects, here’s a clock, power meter, thermometer, speedometer and necklace that we’ve featured before. What’s next for Nixies? We don’t know, but we’re keen to see what you come up with.

Continue reading “Nixie Timer Is Easy To Read Across The Kitchen” →

E-paper Tide Clock Easy To Mistake For Art Print On The Wall

April 12, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 23 Comments

[Stephen B.] kickstarted a MicroPython board. When he got it, he was pleasantly surprised to find that it worked great. His jaded soul balmed with a good experience, he found himself armed with a tool in search of a project. Then he remembered something that had stuck with him, which was a tide clock.

He lives 70 miles from the sea, but his stepmother had a birthday coming up. She went swimming daily, so he had his excuse to build. Unlike his inspiration project, a bunch of seven segment LEDs would not be received well by a technically disinclined stepmother with a well decorated home. So, instead of those, he went with an epaper display. It looks great.

He wanted to use the Kindle display to save money, but the weird power levels needed scared him off. He spent a bit more on a module, but it was probably worth it in time savings. Micropython board, an RTC, a battery, and e-paper display in hand, he had everything needed to build the clock but aesthetics.

Luckily a local frame shop entertained him by letting him pick up frames until he could find one that fit. He put a nice shoreline print together, installed the devices into the frame, and ended up with a really good looking clock. Sure it only tells time four times a day, but that’s enough if you live a life by the sea.

Neopixel Bedroom Clock Uses ESP8266

April 9, 2016 by Jenny List 5 Comments

When [Vance] joined his local hackspace he sought a project to take advantage of the new tools at his disposal. His solution: an attractive LED colour wheel clock using neopixels driven by an NTP-synchronised ESP8266. Each neopixel illuminates a segment of the clock face through frosted diffuser, the hours are tracked as a red light, the minutes blue, and the seconds green. As each color passes another they are mixed, creating a changing colorscape. 12 neopixels are used, and the whole clock is mounted in a laser cut enclosure.

After an initial prototype on a piece of stripboard he created a PCB in KiCad, complete with space for a 3.3v regulator. This and the source code can be found on the project’s GitHub repository.

The resulting clock is a very high quality build as well as being attractive and useful in its own right. The video shows the color mixing in action, or at least the cyan and yellow products of it. Continue reading “Neopixel Bedroom Clock Uses ESP8266” →