We love clocks, and [Chris] got our attention with the internet enabled Light Clock. Time is displayed via RGB LED strip in a number of different ways around a 3D printed white disk. All the modes are based on two selectable colors to indicate hours and minutes, either in a gradient fashion or a hard stop.

Light is provided by a 144 LED neopixel strip and is powered by a beefy 4 amp 5 volt power supply, which also powers the controller. Brains are provided by a ESP8266 powered NodeMCU-12E board, and software is written using ESP8266 for Arduino core.

Being a WiFi enabled micro controller it is a simple matter of connecting to the clock using WiFi and using the embedded web pages to select your local timezone, color palette, and display mode. The correct time is set by network and will never be wrong. While there is a Kickstarter for selling the finished project, instructions and software are provided for making your own if you wish.

Join us after the break for the promotional Kickstarter and demonstration video

The Arduino is a popular microcontroller platform for getting stuff done quickly: it’s widely available, there’s a wealth of online resources, and it’s a ready-to-use prototyping platform. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you want to enjoy programming every bit of the microcontroller’s flash ROM, you can start with an arbitrarily tight resource constraint and see how far you can push it. [lucas][Radical Brad]’s demo that can output VGA and stereo audio on an eight-pin DIP microcontroller is a little bit more amazing than just blinking an LED.

[lucas][RB] is using an ATtiny85, the larger of the ATtiny series of microcontrollers. After connecting the required clock signal to the microcontroller to get the 25.175 Mhz signal required by VGA, he was left with only four pins to handle the four-colors and stereo audio. This is accomplished essentially by sending audio out at a time when the VGA monitor wouldn’t be expecting a signal (and [lucas][Rad Brad] does a great job explaining this process on his project page). He programmed the video core in assembly which helps to optimize the program, and only used passive components aside from the clock and the microcontroller.

Be sure to check out the video after the break to see how a processor with only 512 bytes of RAM can output an image that would require over 40 KB. It’s a true testament to how far you can push these processors if you’re determined. We’ve also seen these chips do over-the-air NTSC, bluetooth, and even Ethernet.

3D printed clocks have been done before, but never something like this. It’s a 3D printed clock with a tourbillon, a creative way to drive an escapement developed around the year 1800. Instead of a pendulum, this type of clock uses a rotating cage powered by a spring. It’s commonly found in some very expensive modern watches, but never before has something like this been 3D printed.

[Christoph Lamier] designed this tourbillon clock in Autodesk Fusion 360, with 50 printable parts, and a handful of pins, screws, and washers. The most delicate parts – the hairspring, anchor, escapement wheel, and a few gears were printed at 0.06 layer height. Everything else was printed at a much more normal resolution with 0.1mm layer height.

Because nearly the entire clock is 3D printed, this means the spring is 3D printed as well. This enormous 2 meter-long spiral of printed plastic could not have been printed without altering a few settings on the printer. The setting in question is Cura’s ‘combing’ or the ‘avoid crossing perimeters’ setting. If you don’t disable this setting, the print time increases by 30%, and moving the print head causes the plastic to ooze out over the spring.

There’s a 26-minute long video of the 3D printed tourbillon clock in action that is horrendously boring. It does demonstrate this clock works, though. You can check out the more interesting videos below.

Thanks [LupusMechanicus] for the tip.

A proper smartwatch can cost quite a bit of money. However, there are some cheap Bluetooth-connected watches that offer basic functions like show your incoming calls, dial numbers and display the state of your phone battery. Not much, but these watches often sell for under $20, so you shouldn’t expect too much.

Because they’re so cheap, [Lee] bought one of these (a U8Plus) and within an hour he had the case opened up and his camera ready. As you might expect, the biggest piece within was the rechargeable battery. A MediaTek MT6261 system on a chip provides the smart part of the watch.

[Lee] noticed some pads on the underside of the board. Two were marked as RXD and TXD, so he (correctly) assumed they would be a serial port. He also identified pads he thinks are for JTAG. Using a Bus Pirate, he was able to read the output from the serial port easily.

If you Google MT6261, you’ll see there are several ways to unlock and flash the chip that is essentially an ARM CPU with supporting I/O devices. That means for under $20 you could have a wearable development platform if you put in the work to get an adequate toolchain going. The MediaTek wiki would be a good place to start although it doesn’t list the MT6261 directly. A quick web search indicates that the MT6571 may be similar enough to get started.

Compared to other homebrew smartwatches that we’ve seen before, the U8Plus would make a very clean-looking build. Then again, maybe you want an obvious homebrew watch on your wrist.

[Voja Antonic] has built a clock that tells the time in binary with square waves, and trolls the uninitiated in electronics.

The clock itself is very attractive. If you look closely you can see the circuitry backlit behind the dot LED matrix display. The whole thing is housed in a nicely folded steel case. RGB LEDs are used to good effect to highlight some additionally obfuscating circuit schematics. The workmanship is very top notch, and we would gladly host such an object on our desks.

The clock’s standard time telling mode is three sets of square waves showing the binary values for the hours, minutes, and seconds. Every now and then the clock will glitch out. The waves will distort. The colors will change. And every now and then, tantalizingly, the alpha-numeric time will show up for just a split second, before returning to those weird squiggles again.

We’ve seen a whole slew of binary clocks before. This one, for instance. But the waveform display makes us feel just that little bit more at home — it’s just like we’re sitting in front of our oscilloscope.

Once upon a time, [Mike] bought an hourglass for his sister. He intended to build it into a clock and give it to her as a gift, but life and other projects got in the way. Fast forward a couple of decades to the point when it all came together and [Mike] had everything he needed on hand to build a beautiful wooden clock that automatically flips the hourglass over.

Every 60 minutes, the bulb, which is situated inside a handcrafted maple ring, rotates 180 degrees to restart the flow of sand. Whatever number is at the top of the outer wheel denotes the current hour. The digit for the next hour is always at the five o’clock position relative to the current hour. This works out because the pockets on the outside of the bulb’s ring share a 5:6 ratio with the gear teeth on the outer ring. Confused? Watch the time-lapse video from [Mike]’s that shows it in action.

[Mike] was determined to build this clock using only things he already had on hand, like a cheap digital watch to keep time and a car window motor to rotate the hourglass. He hacked a USB port into the watch so he could use the hourly chime function to trigger the motor through a quad op-amp. The motor runs until it is triggered to shut off optically—a pair of slits cut into the gear that moves the hourglass pass over a sensor. [Mike] built a beautiful box to hold the guts from a nice piece of walnut and spared no detail in the design.

There are a ton of build pictures on the projects site and an in-depth video tour of the clock, which is embedded after the break. Whether they are designed to amaze or confuse, we love a good clock build around here. If you’re into hourglasses, we featured a digital version not too long ago.

Metalwork of any kind is fascinating stuff to watch. When the metalwork in question is in service of the clockmaker’s art, the ballgame changes completely. Tiny screws and precision gears are created with benchtop lathes and milling machines, and techniques for treating metals border on alchemy – like heat-bluing of steel clock hands for a custom-built clock.

If you have even a passing interest in metalwork and haven’t followed [Clickspring]’s YouTube channel, you don’t know what you’re missing. [Chris] has been documenting a museum-quality open-body clock build, and the amount of metalworking skill on display is amazing. In his latest video, he covers how he heat-blues steel to achieve a wonderful contrast to the brass and steel workings. The process is simple in principle but difficult in practice – as steel is heated, a thin layer of oxides forms on the surface, enough to differentially refract the light and cause a color change. The higher the heat, the thicker the layer, and the bluer the color. [Chris] uses a custom-built tray filled with brass shavings to even out the heat of a propane torch, but even then it took several tries to get the color just right. As a bonus, [Chris] gives us a primer on heat-treating the steel hands – the boric acid and methylated spirits bath, propane torch flame job and oil bath quenching all seems like something out of a wizard’s workshop.

We’ve covered [Chris]’ build before, and we encourage everyone to tune in and watch what it means to be a craftsman. We only hope that when he finally finishes this clock he starts another project right away.

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.

We like clocks here at Hackaday, and over the years we have featured a lot of them. Looking at light clocks, we’ve featured this Berlin clock and this Fibonacci sequence clock, but closer to the spirit of this project are the many ring clocks that have made these pages. There was this 200 LED ring clock, this huge circular LED clock with an interlocking PCB, and closer still to [Vance]’s clock, another ESP8266 ring clock design.

[via rLab – Reading Hackspace]

[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.

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.

[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.

The issue with an Arduino, of course, is that the time base isn’t always good enough to keep time over long periods. To fix that problem [Rjeuch] used a ChronoDot which is a real-time clock that uses temperature compensation and claims to be accurate to a minute a year.

Of course, no plan goes off without a hitch. Owing to bad stepper mode specs, the original version of the clock was gaining time overnight. Although the stepper claimed to have a 1:64 reduction gear, the actual ratio wasn’t that precise ([Rjeuch] estimates it as 1:63.876. The steps he took to fix this are worth a read.

You can see a video of the clock below. We’ve seen lots of other clocks, of course. Some of them even make this one looks simple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HURoEW2KiY8

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.

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!]

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.

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?

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.

[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.

Now usually we feature clocks that are built by CNC machines, so it’s refreshing that here the CNC is the clock.

Thanks [Kevin] for the tip!

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.

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.

In total, 28 Flip Flops were assembled on individual boards. Most of them went into the counters for hours, minutes and seconds. The counters are orchestrated by reset boards that know how far each counter shall count and reset them when necessary while incrementing the next counter — a transistor-based overflow interrupt. The output of the counters feeds into a multiplexer (3 boards), clocked by a 300 Hz timing circuit based on a 555 timer, also implemented from discrete components. Eventually, a 7 segment decoder (2 boards) sends the numbers to the displays.

Fine tuning the clock speed may require a quick call to the electricity provider isn’t even necessary due to the long term stability of the mains frequency maintained in large parts of the world (Thanks Tom!). The end result is a beautifully crafted, modular transistor logic clock!

This is good news for those of you who have been coveting the MOnSter6502 project. Practice your SMD transistor PCB layout with this project before you try to recreate that monster of a board layout project.

Thanks to [BB] for the tip!

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]

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.

The clock is driven by the ubiquitous 28BYJ-48 stepper motors that can be found on eBay for a few bucks. They don’t have much torque, but all they have to do here is turn a cardboard disk. It’s the perfect match.

There is one caveat with these motors, though: they don’t have an integral number of steps per turn. If you have the “1:64” geared version, it’s actually geared 8910:567424. The upshot? Instead of 2,048 steps per turn, you need 2,037.8864. Get this wrong and you’re losing 14 minutes per day with a 12-hour wheel.

So between just driving the motors, and the low torque and the non-integral gearing, there’s more to learn here than you’d think. You can add a real-time-clock circuit if you want it precise. With all this room to expand, you can get it built and running in a weekend for a few bucks. And that makes it the perfect “hello world”.