Around Father’s Day each year, we usually see a small spate of dad-oriented projects. Some are projects by dads or granddads for the kids, while others are gifts for the big guy. This analog meter clock fits the latter category, with the extra bonus of recognizing and honoring the influence [Micheal Teeuw]’s father had on him with all things technological.

[Michael] had been mulling over a voltmeter clock, where hours, minutes and seconds are displayed on moving coil meters, for a while.  A trio of analog meters from Ali Express would lend just the right look to the project, but being 200-volt AC meters, they required a little modification. [Michael] removed the rectifying diode and filtering capacitor inside the movement, and replaced the current-limiting resistor with a smaller value to get 5 volts full-range deflection on the meters. Adobe Illustrator helped with replacing the original scales with time scales, and LEDs were added to the meters for backlighting. A TinyRTC keeps time and generates the three PWM signals to drive the meters. Each meter is mounted in its own 3D-printed case, the three of which are linked together into one sleek console. We love the look, which reminds us of an instrument cluster in an airplane cockpit.

Bravo to [Michael’s Dad] for getting his son into the tinkering arts, and cheers to [Michael] on the nice build. We like seeing new uses for old meters, like these server performance monitoring meters.

[via r/DIY]

In 2012, [Bruno] wanted to detect some bats. Detect bats? Some varieties of bat (primarily the descriptively named “microbats”) locate themselves and their prey in space using echolocation, the same way your first robot probably did. The bat emits chirps from their adorably tiny larynx the same way a human uses its vocal cords to produce sound. The bat then listens for an echo of that sound and can make inferences about the location of its presumed prey in the volume around it. Bat detectors are devices which can detect these ultrasonic sounds and shift them into a range that humans can hear. So how would you build such a device? [Bruno]’s PicoBat probably sets the record for component count and code simplicity.

With no domain expertise the most conspicuous way to build a bat detector is probably to combine the glut of high performance microcontrollers with a similarly high performing analog to digital converter. With a little signal processing knowledge you sample the sounds at their native frequency, run them through a Fast Fourier transform, and look for energy in the ultrasonic frequency range, maybe about 20 kHz to 100 kHz, according to Wikipedia. With more knowledge about signal interference it turns out there are a surprisingly large number of ways to build such a device, including some which are purely analog. (Seriously, check out the Wikipedia page for the myriad ways this can be done.)

[Bruno] did use a microcontroller to build his bat detector, but not in the way we’d have expected. Instead of using a beastly high performance A/D and a similarly burly microcontroller, the PicoBat has a relatively tame PIC12 and a standard ultrasonic transducer, as well as a piezo buzzer for output. Along with a power rail, that’s the entire circuit. The code he’s running is similarly spartan. It configures a pair of GPIOs and toggles them, with no other logic. That’s it.

So how does this work? The ultrasonic transducer is designed mechanically to only receive sounds in the desired frequency range. Being piezoelectric, when enough sound pressure is applied the stress causes a small voltage. That voltage is fed into the PIC not as a GPIO but as a clock input. So the CPU only executes an instruction when ultrasonic sound with enough intensity hits the transducer. And the GPIO toggling routine takes four clock cycles to execute, yielding a 1:4 clock divider. And when the GPIOs toggle they flip the potential across the buzzer, causing it to make human-audible sound. Brilliant!

Check out [Bruno]’s video demo after the break to get a sense for how the device works. You might be able to do this same trick with other components, but we’re willing to be that you won’t beat the parts count.

Clock movements are beautifully complex things. Made up of gears and springs, they’re designed to tick away and keep accurate time. Unfortunately, due to the vagaries of the universe, various sources of error tend to creep in – things like temperature changes, mechanical shocks, and so on. In the quest for ever better timekeeping, watchmakers decided to try and rotate the entire escapement and balance wheel to counteract the changing effect of gravity as the watch changed position in regular use.

They’re mechanical works of art, to be sure, and until recently, reserved for only the finest and most luxurious timepieces. As always, times change, and tourbillions are coming down in price thanks to efforts by Chinese manufacturers entering the market with lower-cost devices. But hey – you can always just make one at home.

That’s right – it’s a 3D printed gyrotourbillion! Complete with a 3D printed watch spring, it’s an amazing piece of engineering that would look truly impressive astride any desk. All that’s required to produce it is a capable 3D printer and some off-the-shelf bearings and you’ve got a horological work of art.

It’s not the first 3D-printed tourbillion we’ve seen, but we always find such intricate builds to be highly impressive. We can’t wait to see what comes next – if you’re building one on Stone Henge scale for Burning Man, be sure to let us know. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Keith for the tip!]

You always hear that people talk about the weather. But it seems to us we see more clocks than we do weather stations. A case in point is [frank_scholl’s] clock made from an old hard drive. We found it interesting that the clock has no microcontroller at all. The custom PCB is all digital and uses the line frequency to drive counters which, in turn, drive the motors.

The one catch is that you have to have a hard drive that uses a very particular motor scheme for this to work. The platter rotation shows the hour and the head’s track position counts off the minutes from 0 to 59. Two buttons can speed up either rotation for the purpose of setting the clock. You can see it all in the video below.

The schematic is a little hard to follow since it doesn’t use conventional logic symbols, but you can probably figure it out. Obviously, it would need a little tweaking for 60 Hz and your motor connections are unlikely to be the same.

Even if you can’t find a hard drive that fits the bill, it would be easy enough to refit a modern drive with some motors. As cool as the logic circuit is, we would have been tempted to punt and do it with a microprocessor, too.

We like when we see technology gizmos repurposed like this. We’ve seen clocks made with meters, for example. We actually saw something very similar to this before, but it did use a CPU.

Among all the timepieces that we feature here at Hackaday, surprisingly we bring you relatively few clocks. That might seem an incomprehensible statement given the plethora of, well, clocks, that appear here, but it’s one that hinges upon the type of clock. Electronic clocks of extreme skill, complexity, and beauty, yes, but traditional mechanical clocks? Not so many.

So [Thonemeister]’s wall-mounted brass alarm clock was a welcome sight on our tips line, and his write-up is a fascinating exposition of the path taken by a novice clockmaker on their first build. He starts by describing his workshop, then steps methodically through each of the constituent parts of the clock.

We see the frame, escapement mechanism, gears, and movement taking shape, and we learn something about clockmaker’s tools from the pitfalls he encountered. He was a complete lathe novice at the start of this build, and it’s fun to follow along with his learning curve. As we see thed finished clock taking shape, we even get to see the little touches like forming the hooks for the weights. He bought the bell for the clock off-the-shelf, not wishing to expend the considerable piece of brass stock it would have taken to machine it himself. But for the most part, this is an engaging scratch build you won’t want to miss.

Many of us will never make a traditional clock. But that need not stop us finding the work that goes into one an extremely fascinating read. We have more for you if this has whetted your appetite: you’ll be interested in the escapement mechanism, and if brass is a bit much, how about wood?

People love books, and if you’re anything like [tjaap]’s girlfriend, you may easily devour your eighty books and more a year. Maybe to keep better track of time during her reading sessions, her wish was to get a clock for the living room, so [tjaap] stepped up. Being a maker at heart, he decided to skip the ready-made options, and instead build one in the most fitting way imaginable: by displaying the time as literary quotes on a jailbroken Kindle.

Unlike your average word clock, [tjaap]’s literary clock displays (almost) every minute a different sentence that, in one form or another, contains the current time. Thanks to the internet, he didn’t have to compile the whole list of book quotes for each and every minute of the day by himself, but it still required some work to put it all in the form he needed. Eventually he had a script that converted each quote into an image, and a shell script on the Kindle to display them according to the time. As a bonus, the origin of the quote is displayed only optionally, turning the clock into a simple trivia quiz along the way.

It shows that themed, personalized clocks are always a great subject for a gift, just like the one made from analog meters we saw around Father’s Day.

We love it when something common gets put to a new and unusual use, especially when it’s one of those, “Why didn’t I think of that?” situations. This digital clock with a suspended display is just such a thing.

The common items in this case were “filaments” from LED light bulbs, those meant to mimic the look of clear-glass incandescent light bulbs. [Andypugh] had been looking at them with interest for a while, and realized they were perfect as the segments for a large digital clock. The frame of the clock was formed from bent brass U-channel and mounted to an oak base via turned stanchions. The seven-segment displays were laid out in the frame and the common anodes of the LED filaments were connected together, with the cathode for each connected to a very fine wire. Each wire was directed through a random hole in the frame and channeled down into the base, to be hooked to one of the four DS8880 VFD driver chips. The anode wires form a lacy filigree behind the segments, which catch the light and make then look a little like a spider’s web. It looks great, but nicht für der gefingerpoken – the frame is at 80 VDC to drive the LED segments. The clock is synced to the UK atomic clock with a 60-kHz radio link; see the long, painful sync process in the video below.

We like the open frame look, which we’ve seen before with an equally dangerous sculptural nixie clock. And this gives us some ideas for what to do with those filament LEDs other than turning them back into a light bulb. And if [Andy] sounds familiar, it could be because he’s appeared here before. First of all resurrecting the parts bin for an entire classic motorcycle marque, and then as the designer of SMIDSY, a robot competitor in the first incarnation of the UK Robot Wars series.

What’s going to keep a clock running for a century, unattended? Well, whatever’s running it will have to sip power, and it’s going to need a power source that will last a long time. [Jan Waclawek] is looking into solar power for daytime, and capacitors for nighttime, to keep his clock running for a hundred years.

This project carries on from [Jan]’s previous project which looked at what kind of power source could power the gadgets around his house for a century without needing intervention – ie., no batteries to replace, no winding etc. [Jan] whittled his choices down to a combination of solar power and polypropylene film capacitors. Once the power had been sorted, a clock was chosen in order to test the power supply. The power consumption for a clock will be low during the night – it would only need a RTC circuit keeping track of the time – so a few low-leakage capacitors can be used. When daylight returns or a light is switched on, the solar circuit would power the clock’s display.

At the moment, [Jan] has a proof of concept circuit working, using the ultra-low-power microcontroller on a STM32L476 DISCOVERY board and a few 10 μF 0805 size capacitors, when fully charged by the solar panel, the clock’s display lasts for about two minutes.

Take a look at [Jan]’s project for more details, and check out his previous project where he narrowed down the components for a hundred-year power supply. [Jan]’s prototype can be seen in action after the break. Also take a look at this master clock that signals slave clocks and runs for a year on a single AA battery.

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.

What separates [Antonella Perucca]’s clock from the rest lies in the Chinese Remainder Theorem, an eighteen hundred year old idea from Chinese mathematician Sunzi. Basically, when applied to the positive integers, the Chinese Remainder Theorem states that the set of integers modulo some positive integer N is equivalent (isomorphic as rings) to the product of the sets of integers modulo factors of N such that these factors are all relatively prime to each other and their product is N.

It sounds a mouthful, but it actually makes a lot of intuitive sense. Take for example N = 6. The set of integers modulo 6 is S = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5}.  2 and 3 are relatively prime to each other and their product is 6. The set of integers modulo 2 and 3 are {0, 1} and {0, 1, 2} respectively. If you form the product of these two sets, you get the set T = {(0,0), (1,0), (0,1), (1,1), (0,2), (1,2)}. If you take any element x from S and send it to the element (x mod 2, x mod 3) in T, you quickly see how the two sets can be considered equivalent. Each element in S is sent to one and only one element in T, and both sets have the same number of elements. Taking N to be 6 may seem like an easy number to work with, but the beauty of the Chinese Remainder Theorem shows this same concept holds for any positive integer.

Now how does this apply to clocks? Well, two relatively prime factors of 12 are 3 and 4. Three relatively prime factors of 60 are 3, 4, and 5. We’re doing clock arithmetic modulo 12 and 60 anyway. Thus we can directly apply our theorem. Each hour can be represented uniquely by its remainder modulo 3 and 4. Each minute and second show up as their remainders modulo 3, 4, and 5. In the diagram above, imagine each circle starts at 0 and goes up clockwise by 1 for each bubble. The hours are the inside circles, the minutes are the outside circles, and the seconds are the tiny bubbles following the minutes. A clock starts to emerge then. Of course, you don’t have to stick with the somewhat familiar circular clock-face. You can use the same concept digitally, as in the image the very top of the article. Or you can go even further off the beaten track and rely completely on shaded polygons for that true abstract feel.

[Antonella Perucca] introduced the idea in “The College Mathematics Journal” less than a year ago, so it hasn’t seen too much use yet. However, anything that’s been done with regular clocks can be done with this one, and by sharing its existence, hopefully we get some really intriguing projects. It can even be in binary, for old time’s sake.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Do you talk to your alarm clock? I do. I was recently in a hotel room, woke up in the middle of the night and said, “Computer. What time is it?” Since my Amazon Echo (which responds to the name Computer) was at home, I was greeted with silence. Isn’t the future great?

Of course, there have been a variety of talking clocks over the years. You used to be able to call a phone number and a voice would tell you the time. But how old do you think the talking clock really is? Would you guess that this year is the 140th anniversary of the world’s first talking clock? In fact, it doesn’t just hold the talking clock record. The experimental talking clock Frank Lambert made is also the oldest surviving recording that can be still be played back on its original device.

In 1878, the phonograph had just been invented and scratched out sounds on a piece of tin foil. Lambert realized this wouldn’t hold up to multiple playbacks and set out to find a more robust recording medium. What he ended up building was a clock that would announce the time using lead to record the speech instead of tin foil.

Can You Hear Me Now?

The speech is pretty hard to understand as you might expect. There is a page that does a great analysis of the recordings by David Winter. As audio processing gets better, it is possible you could pull more intelligence out of the recording, but parts of it are pretty clear, as you can hear (or not hear, as the case may be) in the video below.

Interestingly — according to that analysis — some of the recordings are things like “Five o’clock time to work” and “Come on man! Get up! Get up!” This meshes neatly with a quote from Edison in a newspaper from the same year that a clock company had a phonograph that would announce the lunch hour. Edison speculated that you could construct an alarm clock with a phonograph that said “Halloo, there! Five o’clock! What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you get up?” You have to wonder if Lambert had read that same article.

What is the Oldest Recording?

If you think this is the oldest recording, you’d be sort of wrong. In all fairness, though, while that is older, it wasn’t meant to be a recording. But modern technology can pull the voice out of it just the same. There have been rumors of Lincoln’s voice and a few other old recordings that don’t really exist. That link also has the story of a macabre recording attempt using ears from cadavers. Turns out the oldest recording of a president was from Benjamin Harrison.

One thing to remember is that these old recordings didn’t benefit from electronic amplification. So the speaker had to yell into the horn to get the needle to cut into the recording medium. I’d imagine you’d sound a little different doing that then you would in ordinary conversation. Of course, shouting too loud would cause distortion, so there was a definite art involved.

All of this makes us think of Arthur Sullivan’s response in 1888 when his song “The Lost Chord” was recorded. He reportedly said, “I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the result of this evening’s experiments: astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be on record forever.”

Clocks to Jukeboxes

It is hard to realize that back in the late 1800s it wasn’t clear what good a phonograph was. Edison famously envisioned the device as an electronic note taker or something like a dictaphone. He didn’t imagine it creating a worldwide market for prerecorded music. He probably didn’t dream of the phonograph parlors where patrons paid a nickel to listen to specific recordings, either. Even as late as 1906, the public had to be advised of what the machine could do and that included recording, learning languages, theater, and music, too.

Turns out a French poet, Charles Cros, had the idea about the same time as Edison but didn’t develop it. His design looked more like the familiar gramophone and less like the Edison device. Since he was a poet, we wonder if he had a better idea of how it would be used. Of course, he was also convinced there were cities on Mars and wanted the French government to build a giant mirror to burn lines in the Martian sand as a way to communicate with the inhabitants.

It really isn’t unusual for new technology to make false starts in function. Home computers, at one time, were envisioned for balancing your checkbook and storing recipes. A talking clock isn’t that farfetched if you have a solution in search for a problem.

Of course, a talking clock now is no big deal. My Google Home and my Amazon Echo will do it and even act like alarm clocks. You can’t even call to hear the time on your phone anymore. Then again, it is more fun to roll your own anyway. Even an Arduino can do it with a little help.

The ticking clock on the bomb is a Hollywood trope that simply refuses to die. Adding to the stress levels of the bomb squad and creating great suspense for the watcher, it’s always interesting to wonder why the average bomb maker is so courteous as to supply this information to law enforcement. Regardless, if you’d like to build a dramatic prop and are mature enough to do so responsibly, [Giorgio] has the guide you need.

The build is a straightforward one, relying on an Arduino to run the show. This is hooked up to a classic 7-segment LED display, upon which the countdown is displayed. For extra flair, an MP3 player is fitted to play the Mission Impossible theme. It all adds to the tension as you wipe the sweat from your brow, trying to decide if you’re cutting the right wire.

It’s a build that would be an excellent prop for a film production or a fun game at a holiday party. However, it’s also a build that could easily be mistaken for the real thing by those less technically inclined. Even the most innocuous homebrew projects have caused problems for innocent hackers in the past. Fake bombs can be incredibly dangerous, just like the real thing, so it’s important to be careful.

We’ve seen other takes on this kind of build before, too. As always, build responsibly.

Designing a good clock takes a lot of considerations. It’s not just hands, faces, and numbers anymore; there are also word clocks, electronic clocks, marble clocks, or water clocks, and just about anything else imaginable can be used to tell time. Of course, electronic clocks are great for their versatility, and this one shows off an analog-looking clock that is (of course) digital, leveraging all of the perks of analog with all of the upsides of digital electronics.

One of the key design considerations that [Sasa] had while building this piece was that it needed to be silent. LEDs certainly fit that description, so the decision was made to go with an WS2812b ring. It runs using a STM ST32F103 Nucleo board (and a cheaper version of it in later versions of this clock) which shows a red LED for the current hour, yellow LEDs for the traditional analog clock divisions, a green LED for the current minute, and glows the rest of the LEDs up to the current minute with a rainbow pattern.

This is a really clean, simple build with good design at its core, and would be easy to replicate if you’re looking for an eye-catching clock to build. As a bonus, all of the schematics and code are available on the project site, so everything you need is there. If you’re looking for more inspiration, there are some clocks that are even more unique, like this marble clock that is a work of art — but is anything but silent.

We’ve featured a great many unique clocks here on Hackaday, which have utilized nearly every imaginable way of conveying the current time. But of all these marvelous timepieces, the Morse code clock has the distinct honor of simultaneously being the easiest to construct and (arguably) the most difficult to read. As such, it’s little surprise we don’t see them very often. Which makes this latest entry into the field all the more interesting.

[WhisleyTangoHotel] has taken the basic concept of the Morse clock, which at its most simplistic could be done with a microcontroller and single LED, and expanded it into a (relatively) practical device. With both audio and visual signaling, and support for pulling the time from NTP, this is easily the most polished Morse code clock we’ve ever seen. Using it still requires you to have a decent grasp on Samuel Morse’s now nearly 200 year old encoding scheme of course, but on the bright side, this clock is sure to help keep your CW skills sharp.

For those following along at home, [WhisleyTangoHotel] provides a hand-drawn diagram to show how everything connects together in his Morse timepiece, but there’s nothing on the hardware side that’s likely to surprise the Hackaday reader. A single momentary push button represents the device’s sole user input, with the output being handled by a LED “tower” and speaker on their own respective pins on the microcontroller. Here a Adafruit Feather HUZZAH is used, but any ESP8266 would work in its place.

Of course, the advantage of using an ESP8266 board over your garden variety MCU is the Wi-Fi connectivity. This allows the clock to connect to an NTP server and get the current time before relaying it to the user. Some might think this overkill, but it’s really a critical feature; the lack of a proper RTC on the ESP means the clock would drift badly if not regularly synchronized. Assuming you’ve got a reliable Internet connection, this saves you the added cost and complexity of adding an external RTC.

[WhisleyTangoHotel] wraps up his blog post by providing his ESP8266 Arduino source code, which offers an interesting example in working not only with NTP and time zones on the ESP, but how to handle parsing strings and representing their principle characters in Morse code.

Interestingly enough, in the past we’ve seen a single LED clock that didn’t use Morse code to blink out the time, which might be a viable option as an alternate firmware for this device if you’re not in the Samuel Morse fan club.

The old-fashioned alarm clock was a staple of cartoons in years past, with loud clanging bells and slap-to-shutoff functionality. Despite being an excellent dramatic device, these classic timepieces began to lose favor to the digital clock radio, and, in more recent times, the smartphone alarm. However, [LenkaDesign] has come up with this excellent build that combines the best of the old and the new.

The build starts with an old alarm clock. The clockwork internals are removed, but the bells remain, powered instead by a brushed DC motor. An Arduino Nano is the brains of the operation, interfacing with the now-ubiquitous temperature, humidity and barometric pressure sensors. Time is displayed on a Nokia 5110 LCD screen of the type popular a decade ago when options for small hobby project displays were significantly more limited then they are today.

As a nice touch, an old circuit board lends a new face to this clock, with a trio of big chunky buttons to act as controls. The LCD uses attractive icons to help convey information, making the most of the graphical capabilities available. There’s even a rudimentary weather forecasting algorithm that uses barometric pressure changes to predict the likelihood of rain.

Overall, it’s a tidy build that promises to serve as a great alarm clock, given the high volume of the original bells. Alarm clocks have always been a hacker staple, but if you’re still struggling to get out of bed this fire bell build should rattle your fillings loose on a daily basis. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!]