This wall clock built by [Alf Müller] is lovely, using two NeoPixel rings to mark the time by casting light onto a 3D-printed ring. The blue shows the minutes, made more discrete by a grid inside the ring. The green shows the hours. [Alf] has provided the code so you can rework the color scheme. It might be interesting to add seconds with the red LEDs, or perhaps a countdown triggered by a touch sensor…
Continue reading “3D-Printed LED Wall Clock Does Lots With Little”
[Ivan Miranda] is taking a very interesting approach to a marble clock. His design is a huge assembly that uses black and white marbles to create a (sort of) dot matrix display. It’s part kinetic art and part digital clock, all driven by marbles.
Here’s how it works: black and white marbles feed into a big elevator. This elevator lifts marbles to the top of the curved runs that make up the biggest part of the device. The horizontal area at the bottom is where the time is shown, with white and black marbles making up the numerical display. But how to make sure the white marbles and black marbles go in the right order?
The solution to that is simple. Marbles feed into the elevator in an unpredictable order. An array of sensors detects the color of each marble. Solenoids simply eject any marble that isn’t in the right place. For example, if the next marble for track n needs to be white, then simply kick out any black marbles in that position until there’s a white one. Simple, effective, and guarantees plenty of mesmerizing moving parts.
Of course, this means that marble ejection and marble color sensing need to be utterly reliable, and [Ivan] ran into problems with both. Marble ejection took some careful component testing and selection to get the right solenoids. Color sensing (as well as detecting empty spaces) settled on IR-based sensors commonly used in line-following robots.
You can watch the clock in action in the video embedded below just under the page break. We recommend giving it a look, because [Ivan] does a great job of showing all of the little challenges that reared their heads, and how he addressed them. There are still a few things to address, but he expects to have those licked by the next video. In the meantime, [Ivan] asks that if anyone knows a source for high quality glass marbles in bulk, please let him know. Low quality ones vary in size and tend to get stuck.
Marble clocks are great expressions of creativity, especially now that 3D printing is common. We love clock hacks, so if you ever create or run across a good one, let us know about it!
Continue reading “It’s A Marble Clock, But Not As We Know It”
Modern life can be stressful. Many of us struggle to balance work, family, exercise, and an ever-growing list of hacking projects, all of which claim our attention during the day. If you sometimes feel that those 24 hours just don’t cut it, you might be in luck: [HIGEDARUMA] has built a clock that can stretch your day by up to five hours.
Sadly, [HIGEDARUMA] hasn’t invented time travel (yet). What his clock does instead is slow down its own pace in the evening to push back the midnight hour. When it finally does reach 12:00 a.m., the clock’s pace is accelerated to ensure it’s back in sync with the rest of the world by six in the morning. It might seem silly, but there is a certain logic to it: [HIGEDARUMA] explains that evenings felt much longer when he was a child and that he would like to try and experience that again. Our sense of time may change over our lifetime, even if the actual passage of time doesn’t.
Timescales aside, the 29-hour clock is a neat piece of work from a hardware point of view. The case is made from 4 mm laser-cut MDF with wood-grain foil on the outside. Inside, there’s an ESP32 to run the show, along with an RTC module and three four-digit seven-segment LED displays. A chunky “volume” knob on the front lets you choose how much you’d like your day to be stretched.
We’ve seen clocks with non-linear dials before, as well as extremely linear ones, but this might be the first one with a non-constant pace. It makes us wonder what the passage of time feels like for those frozen in ice for 46,000 years.
Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2023: Stretch Your Day With This 29-Hour Clock”
The rise of 3D printing has given us incredible things, from awesome tchotchkes to intricate chocolates to useful things like spare body parts. But none has been so vital to comedy as say, printing hats for sea urchins. That’s right, sea urchins like to cover up with various things and will happily don, say, a 3D printed hat if presented the opportunity.
So anyway, this is a tide clock that uses a printed sea urchin and various hats to tell the time until/between low and high tide. How? It uses the position of a given hat relative to a couple nOOds LED strands, one for high tide and another for low.
Inside the large bamboo enclosure is an TTGO that fetches cheaply-obtained tide information and displays it on the screen. The TTGO also controls a servo that moves the sea urchin around. As it moves, a magnet in the urchin’s head (?) attracts the next hat.
Before settling on the current design, [rabbitcreek] experimented with both a sand dollar and a sea urchin skeleton. All the files are available if you want to whip up your own.
This isn’t [rabbitcreek]’s first foray into tide clocks. Here’s a solar number that should last for years.
In retrocomputing circles, it’s often the case that the weirder and rarer the machine, the more likely it is to attract attention. And machines don’t get much weirder than the DEC Rainbow 100-B, sporting as it does both Z80 and 8088 microprocessors and usable as either a VT100 terminal or as a PC with either CP/M or MS-DOS. But hey — at least it got the plain beige box look right.
Weird or not, all computers have at least a few things in common, a fact which helped [Dr. Joshua Reichard] home in on the problem with a Rainbow that was dead on arrival. After a full recapping — a prudent move given the four decades since the machine was manufactured — the machine failed to show any signs of life. The usual low-hanging diagnostic fruit didn’t provide much help, as both the Z80 and 8088 CPUs seemed to be fine. It was then that [Joshua] decided to look at the heartbeat of the machine — the 24-ish MHz clock shared between the two processors — and found that it was flatlined.
Unwilling to wait for a replacement, [Joshua] cobbled together a temporary clock from an Arduino Uno and an Si5351 clock generator. He connected the output of the card to the main board, whipped up a little code to generate the right frequency, and the nearly departed machine sprang back to life. [Dr. Reichard] characterizes this as a “defibrillation” of the Rainbow, and while one hates to argue with a doctor — OK, that’s a lie; we push back on doctors all the time — we’d say the closer medical analogy is that of fitting a temporary pacemaker while waiting for a suitable donor for a transplant.
This is the second recent appearance of the Rainbow on these pages — [David] over at Usagi Electric has been working on the graphics on his Rainbow lately.
Sometimes you find something that looks really cool but doesn’t work, but that’s an opportunity to give it a new life. That was the case when [Davis DeWitt] got his hands on a weird Soviet-era box with four original Nixie tubes inside. He tears the unit down, shows off the engineering that went into it and explains what it took to give the unit a new life as a clock.
A lot can happen over decades of neglect. That was clear when [Davis] discovered every single bolt had seized in place and had to be carefully drilled out. But Nixie tubes don’t really go bad, so he was hopeful that the process would pay off.
The unit is a modular display of some kind, clearly meant to plug into a larger assembly. Inside the unit, each digit is housed in its own modular plug with a single Nixie tube at the front, a small neon bulb for a decimal point, and a bunch of internal electronics. Bringing up the rear is a card edge connector.
Continues after the break…
Continue reading “Turning Soviet Electronics Into A Nixie Tube Clock”
The world’s first quartz wristwatches were miles ahead of electric and mechanical wristwatches by most standards of the time, their accuracy was unprecedented and the batteries typically lasted somewhere on the order of a year. Modern smart watches, at least in terms of battery life, have taken a step backwards — depending on use, some can require daily charging.
If you’re looking to bridge the gap between a day and a year, you might look into a smart watch with an e-ink display. One option is the ESP32-based LILYGO T-Wrist. Of course, it’s not a smart watch without some software to run on it, which is where qpaperOS comes in.
Developed by [qewer33], this open source firmware for the T-Wrist is designed to get the most out of the battery by updating only once per minute. With a 250 mAh battery, it should last about five days on a charge. Of course, with the power of the ESP32 comes a whole host of other features including GPS, a step counter, and a weather display, although since the firmware is still under development, some of these features have yet to be implemented.
With all of the code available, qpaperOS could make an excellent platform from which to build your own smart watch around. Or perhaps you could chip in and add some of the features on the whislity. The ESP32 is a capable and versatile chip, even capable of playing popular 8-bit video games, although we’re not sure this functionality would fit in a smart watch and preserve battery life at the same time.
