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.
It’s hard to beat a vintage clock for something that you can hack, and that your significant other might actually let you display in your home. It’s practical and it’s art all at the same time! But, finding that perfect vintage clock for restoration can be a bit tricky. A crowd favorite is to choose something with intricate mechanisms and gears — the motion of a mechanical display is just so fascinating.
[Gavin] managed to find a clock that is every bit as interesting without any moving parts. The clock uses a unique system of bulbs and screen masks to project each digit of the time onto glass, which creates a pretty cool look you’re not likely to see on other devices. As cheap as LCD and 7-segment displays are these days, it’s hard to imagine a time when an intricate solution like this — using 72 light bulbs — was considered practical.
Of course, what isn’t practical is replacing 72 incandescent bulbs, just to have them start the process of burning out all over again. [Gavin’s] solution to this problem was to replace the incandescent bulbs with LEDs. After getting the color temperature right (to replicate the vintage warm glow), he was able to use a jig system to get the LEDs positioned correctly to project the digits properly.
This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen a unique clock design, but there is something intriguing about seeing a design like this that never quite caught on. It’s a little bit of technological history that even your significant other will think is cool.
Nixie tubes, electromagnets, levitation, and microcontrollers — this project has “Hackaday” written all over it!
Time Flies: Levitating Nixie Clock comes from [Tony Adams], and uses a lot of technology we’ve seen before, but in a new and interesting way. A nixie tube clock is nothing new, but using electromagnets to levitate it above a base certainly paired with inductive coupling to transmit power using no wires make this floating nixie build a real treat.
In order to achieve this feat, [Tony] used coils to wireless transmit power from the base to the floating platform that the tubes are mounted to. That alone is a pretty cool idea that would have drawn our attention, but he goes one step further and transmits the time and settings signal wirelessly from the base to the levitating clock as well. That is accomplished with an IR transmitter on the base sending a signal to an IR receiver on the clock.
It’s a pretty ingenious solution, and it’s no surprise that we’ve seen [Tony’s] work before. Back in 2012, we featured another of his projects that uses a lot of the same techniques: a nixie tube chess set. With top-notch craftsmanship and clever ideas like this, we’re definitely looking forward to seeing what else he can come up with!
We’re not sure if [Derek Lieber] is messing with us or proving a point. Why are you doing this [Derek]? We know there’s technically enough information to build the clock. You even included the code. Couldn’t you have at least thrown in a couple of words? Do we have to skip straight to mediaglyphics?
Anyway, if we follow the equation. The equation… If you take a gps module, a 7 segment display with an HT16K33 backpack, a digital potentiometer, a piezo, and a boarduino we suppose we could grudgingly admit that these would all fit together to make a clock. We still don’t like it though, but we’ll admit that the nice handmade case was a nice touch, and that the pictures do give us enough details to do it ourselves.
It was also pretty cool when you added the Zelda theme song as an alarm sound. Also pretty neat that, being GPS corrected, there’s no need to ever set the time. We may also like the simplicity of the only inputs being the potentiometer, which is used to set the alarm time. It’s just. Dangit [Derek]. Nice clock build, we like it.
Like many of us, [Lee] wakes up every morning grumpy and tired. Once he decided to try to do something about it, he settled on making a sunrise alarm clock using NeoPixels. Over the course of thirty minutes the clock illuminates 60 NeoPixels one by one in blue mode to simulate a sunrise.
The clock has three modes: 30-minute sunrise, analog time display, and a seconds counter that uses the full RGB range of the LEDs to light up one for each passing second. It runs on an Arduino Pro Mini knockoff and an RTC module for the sake of simplicity. [Lee] chained NeoPixel strips together in five rows of eight, which allowed him to use a 3×5 font to display the time. The only other electronics are passives to protect the LEDs.
NeoPixels are great, but powering them becomes an issue pretty quickly. [Lee] did the math and figured that he would need 3.4 A to drive everything. He found a 3-outlet USB power adapter that delivers 3.4 A total while shopping at IKEA for an enclosure. [Lee] took his first Instructable from beginner to intermediate level by cracking the adapter open and using two of the USB ports wired in parallel to provide 5 V at 3.4 A. [Lee] has the code available along with detailed instructions for replicating this build. Be sure to check out the demo after the break.
There’s no shortage of clock projects, but [niq_ro] has his own take using a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD), and Arduino, and a pair of MAX6921 ICs. Those chips are made to drive a VFD, and the use of two of the ICs required a bit of work. The Arduino is not a great time keeper, so the clock also uses a DS3231 clock module and a humidity and temperature sensor.
The clock is in Romanian, although there are some options for different text. You can find the code on GitHub and can see the result in the video below.
VFDs are often used in places where a display is meant to be read outdoors. It uses cathodoluminescence to actually generate light. The process is similar to a CRT, but at lower voltages. The tubes have a phosphor-coated anode and the cathode bombards it with electrons, making the phosphor glow. VFDs are available in different colors.
Sometimes a simple modification is all it takes to get something just the way you want it. The Ikea LÖTTORP clock/thermometer/timer caught [Mansour Behabadi’s] eye. The LÖTTORP has four functions based on its orientation. [Mansour] loved the orientation feature, but hated the clock’s shrill beeping alert. Visual beeps or alarms can be handy when working with headphones or in a loud environment. With this in mind [Mansour] decided to crack his LÖTTORP open and rewire it to produce a visual beep for the timer function.
The clock is backlit, so [Behabadi] decided to use the backlight for his visual beep. Once the inside was exposed, [Behabadi] noticed that the buzzer’s positive terminal was wired to the red LED anode — a clever design choice, since the red LED is only used with the clock function. Simply removing the buzzer and soldering its terminal to the noticeable green LED provided the desired effect.
We meant it when we said he cracked it open. The screws were hidden behind the front plate, so the handyman’s secret weapon helped in reassembling the clock after this quick hack.
We’ve featured plenty of classy, unique, and ingenious clocks on Hackaday, so this modification is in good company.
If you haven’t jumped on the ESP8266 bandwagon yet, it might be a good time to get started. If you can program an Arduino you have pretty much all of the skills you’ll need to get an ESP8266 up and running. And, if you need a good idea for a project to build with one of these WiFi miracle chips, look no further than [Ben Buxton]’s dated, but awesome, NTP clock.
While the ESP8266 started out as an inexpensive, reliable way to get WiFi capability on essentially anything (and paving the way for a plethora of Internet of Things projects), it was quickly hacked to become a fully programmable development board that can stand on its own. To that end, [Ben] has recognized its capability to run a very minimalistic NTP clock. The standard C++/Arduino environment is available, so he didn’t have to learn any new skills. The parts list is stripped down as well: besides the ESP8266, there’s little more than the four-part seven-segment display. There’s even an Arudino library for these chips that [Ben] made great use of. From there, it’s just a matter of wiring it all up and syncing it with an NTP server.
While it’s not the most involved hack ever, it’s good to be reminded that these chips are cheap and readily available for literally anything that you could imagine. If you haven’t started yet, there’s no reason not to. You can use them to control something like an irrigation system, or if you’re even more adventurous, they can run a 3D printer, too.
Who among you has difficulty rising in the mornings? Sunrise clocks that simulate a — well, sunrise, are a gentle means of returning to the waking world. [FlorianH], grappling with this very issue, has built his own impressive sunrise clock he has named Circadia. Some sunrise clocks mate an LED with a dev board and call it a day. This work of hardware art will never be confused for something rudimentary.
Standing at 187cm tall, the 8mm thick PCB frame contains three main sections that plug into each other “like Lego”: the top houses a cleverly designed (and virtually silent) propeller clock and a speaker with a 3D-printed, omni-directional reflector. The midsection is reinforced with an MDF column, around which is wrapped 16 strips of 18 RGB LEDs with a heat-molded sheet of acrylic to diffuse the light, while the bottom section has the mid-woofer, the Raspberry Pi 2 brain, most of the electronics, and three switched power supplies.
Built over two years, the primary feature is a variety of themes — with more being added all the time — ranging from rain forest, to arctic, to the warp core of a starship that will rouse you over the course of a half hour. Circadia can also function as a visualizer during a party, or even a Tetris display (a theme that was designed and tested in an afternoon!). Seeing it in action is a treat:
For a different take on a sunrise clock, check out this one that requires you to move the pieces on the clock face to set the time!
[Cameron Meredith] starts the Hackaday.io page for one of his projects by quoting a Hackaday write-up: “A timepiece is rather a rite of passage in the world of hardware hacking“. We stand by that assertion, but we’d say most of the clocks we feature aren’t as capable as his project. He’s made a real-time-clock module controlled by a rubidium frequency standard, and since it also includes a GPS clock he can track local time dilation effects by comparing the two.
Surplus rubidium standards are readily available, but each description of one seems to feature a lot of old-fashioned hardware hacking simply to get it working. This one is no exception, an unusual connector had to be replaced and an extra power supply module attached. Once those modifications had been made and a suitable heatsink had been attached, he was able to bring the rubidium standard, an RTC module, and GPS module together with an ATMega32U4 miniature Arduino-compatible board and an LCD display. The firmware is functional, but he admits it is not finished.
All the project’s files can be found on the Hackaday.io page linked above. Future plans include also monitoring the NIST WWVB radio time signal from Fort Collins, Colorado, for an extra time dilation comparison.
We’ve featured innumerable clocks over the years here at Hackaday, but among them have been a few based upon atomic standards. More than one has been used as a lab reference standard, but most similar to this build is [Max Carters] experiments to check the accuracy of an atomic standard, also using the WWVB transmissions.
[Luc] wanted to make a clock like no other. He knows that the territory is well-trod, especially in the area of minimalist design. Undeterred, [Luc] came up with a fresh design that uses the resistor color code to display the time. He’s calling it the Nerd’s Ultimate Watch.
It doesn’t get much more minimalist than four RGB LEDs. Each one illuminates in the color that represents the digit in the current time. For instance, I’m typing this sentence at 1:37PM. The clock uses 24-hour time, so let’s call it 13:37. Using resistor color code time, that’s 1, 3, 3, 7, or brown, orange, orange, violet.
In the interest of using the smallest possible microcontroller, [Luc]’s clock only displays the hour and minute. He was able to use a ‘Tiny85 to control the four RGB LEDs plus two buttons for setting the time. Three AAA batteries give him around eight hours of power. [Luc] would like to use a LiPo so it can be scaled down a bit. The code and the STL files for the case are available at his site.
Even though [Stefan] sent in this link with the heading “Another Sunrise Alarm Clock“, it’s anything but plain. Sure, from the outside it looks like a simple and refined design, but the story of getting there is hardly straightforward.
Take that nice-looking luminous dial. [Stefan] made it himself, using the same techniques that he’s used for making his own watch faces. (Amazingly, he prints them out on a color ink-jet.) This is a sunrise wake-up clock, but if the bright LEDs don’t wake him up, there’s also a vintage DIY synthesizer project stuffed in the box in place of a cheap piezo buzzer. Even the wooden case shows attention to detail — it has nice edging done on a router table.
So yeah, we’ve all seen clocks before. But this one is very personal, melding together a few of [Stefan]’s hobbies into one useful, and good-looking, device.
[Dr.Duino] recently completed the latest piece of what he calls “Interactive Furniture” – the GoonieBox. It took over 800 hours of design and assembly work and the result is fascinating. Part clock and part puzzle box, it’s loaded with symbols, moving parts, lights, riddles, sounds, switches, and locked compartments. It practically begs visitors to take a closer look.
The concept of Interactive Furniture led [Dr.Duino] to want to create a unique piece of decor that visitors could interact with. That alone wasn’t enough — he wanted something that wouldn’t require any explanation of how it worked; something that intrinsically invited attention, inspection, and exploration. This quest led to creating The GoonieBox, named for its twin inspirations of the 1985 film The Gooniesas well as puzzles from the game “The Room“.
Embedded below are two short videos: the first demonstrates the functions of the box, and the second covers the build process. There’s laser-cut wood, plenty of 3D printed parts, and a whole lot of careful planning and testing.
Puzzle boxes let people show off their creativity over a wide range of different executions, like these simpler laser-cut puzzle boxes and on the other end of the spectrum is this timed, multi-stage puzzle rigged to blow. Not only is this build one of the more complex ones we’ve seen, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen a puzzle box so carefully designed to also serve as a functional piece of decor. Great work!
Making a clock with a common microcontroller like an Arduino isn’t very difficult. However, if you’ve tried it, you probably discovered that keeping track of wall time is difficult without some external hardware. [Barzok] has a very minimal clock build. It takes a handful of LED arrays with an integrated driver, an Arduino Nano, a real-time clock module, and a voltage regulator.
The software uses a custom 6×9 font and handles addressing the LEDs as one single display. Because the real time clock module is so accurate, there’s no provision for setting the time. [Barzok] says that twice a year he just hooks the Arduino up and reflashes the program with a new start time and that seems to be sufficient.
It wouldn’t be too hard, though, to add a few buttons to allow for setting the time or accepting other user input. Then again, this is a minimal build. It would be a good starter project for someone looking to get into building microcontroller projects.
Designing a unique clock to flex your technical skills can be a rewarding experience and result in an admirable showpiece for your home. [Andres Robam] saw an opportunity to make a laser-pointer clock that draws the current time onto a glow-in-the-dark sticker.
A pair of stepper motors tilt and pan the laser’s mount — designed in SolidWorks and 3D printed. There was an issue with the motor’s shaft having some slack in it — enough to affect the accuracy of the laser. [Andres] cleverly solved the issue by using a pen’s spring to generate enough tension in the system, correcting it. A NODEmcu v2 is the brains of the clock — chosen because of its built-in WiFi capacity and compatibility with the Arduino IDE — and a 5mW laser sketches the time onto the sticker.
The time is pulled from a web server that [Andres] coded and posted to GitHub if you think you want to build something like this for yourself. Or, you can opt for a clock that floats instead of one with a laser.
Most hardware hackers have a clock project or two under their belt. A pretty common modification to a generic clock is to add lights to it, and if the clock has an alarm feature, it’s not too big of a stretch to try to get those lights to simulate a sunrise for a natural, peaceful morning alarm. The problem that a lot of us run across, though, is wiring up enough LEDs with enough diffusion to make the effect work properly and actually get us out of bed without an annoying buzzer.
Luckily for all of us, [jarek319] came up with an elegant and simple solution that should revolutionize all future sunrise alarm clock builds. He found a cheap OLED display and drove it with an LM317 voltage regulator. By driving the ADJ pin on the regulator, he was able to effectively drive the OLED with a makeshift PWM signal. This allows the OLED’s brightness to be controlled. [jarek319] threw some NTP code up on an ESP12E and did a little bit of programming for the alarm, and the problem is solved.
While an OLED is pretty much the perfect solution for a sunrise alarm clock, if you have a problem sourcing one or are just looking for an excuse to use up a strip of addressable LEDs, you can build a sunrise alarm clock out of almost any other light source.
What does it take to make a really big digital clock? If [Ivan Miranda]’s creation is any gauge, it takes a really big 3D printer, an armful of Neopixel strips, and a ton of hot melt glue.
It looks like [Ivan]’s plus-size clock is mainly an exercise for his recently completed large-bed custom 3D printer, in itself a project worth checking out. But it’s a pretty ambitious project, and one that has some possibilities for enhancements. Each of the four seven-segment displays was printed separately, with a black background, translucent white for the segments, and recesses for five RGB LEDs each. The four digits and colon spacer are mated together into one display, and an ESP8266 fetches the time from a NIST server and drives the segments. What’s really interesting about [Ivan]’s projects is that he constrains himself to finishing them each in a week. That explains the copious amount of hot glue he uses, and leaves room for improvements. We’d love to see this display built into a nice walnut case with a giant red diffusing lens. Even as it stands it certainly makes a statement.
[Victor-Chew] is tired of setting clocks. After all, here we are in the 21st century, why do we have to adjust clocks (something we just did for daylight savings time)? That’s why [Victor] came up with ESPClock.
Based on a $2 Ikea analog clock, [Victor] had a few design goals for the project:
Automatically set the time from the network
Automatically adjust for daylight savings time
Not cost much more than a regular clock
Run for a year on batteries
The last goal is the only one that remains unmet. Even with a large battery pack, [Victor’s] clock runs out of juice in a week or so. You can see some videos of the clock syncing with network time, below.
It is easy to armchair quarterback, but we think [Victor] should investigate putting the processor in a deep sleep mode for most of the time. That probably means you’d need a button to wake it up for configuration and there might be some other modifications required.
If you want to waste a few more ESP modules, you could try this clock instead.
There are few things to which we pay as much attention as the passage of time. We don’t want to be late for work, or a date. Even more importantly, we don’t want to age and die. Good time keeping is an all important human activity, and we started to worry about it as soon as we abandoned our hunter-gatherer lifestyle and agriculture and commerce emerged.
A candle clock
Measuring time needs two things: a repetitive process to mark equal increments of time, and a way of tracking and displaying the result. The first timekeeping devices relied of course on the movement of the sun. Ancient Egyptians, around 3500 BC, built obelisks that, by casting a shadow on the ground at different positions, gave an approximate idea of the time. Next came the use of some medium that was consumed at a regular pace: candle, incense, water and sand clocks are examples. A great advancement came with the advent of the mechanical clock, and here is where the escapement mechanism appears.
Anchor escape mechanism.Earliest known escapement in a Greek washstand automaton.
A clock needs energy to work. Think of the escapement as a way to release that energy in small quantities at constant intervals. In the animation at the right, the wheel is connected to the source of energy: a spring or weight. By itself, the wheel will rotate continuously as fast as it can until the energy stored in the spring is exhausted. But if we add the anchor shaped piece, the wheel rotates a few degrees at a time, in constant time intervals, just what we need for time measurement.
The earliest known escapement was described by the Greek engineer Philo of Byzantium in the 3rd century BC. From the Wikipedia entry: A counter weighted spoon, supplied by a water tank, tips over in a basin when full, releasing a spherical piece of pumice in the process. Once the spoon has emptied, it is pulled up again by the counterweight, closing the door on the pumice by the tightening string.
Escapement mechanism of Su Song’s clock uses buckets on a water wheel
Another early escapement was built by famous Chinese inventor Su Song in 1094. It used a large water wheel to keep time. The wheel is stopped by a mechanism that will only release once the weight in the currently filling bucket reaches a certain level. As long as the water flows at a constant rate, the wheel rotates at constant time intervals too. It is known as an Astronomical Clock Tower and was very large. Although lost to antiquity, this animated rendering of the structure, originally shown on the History Channel’s Ancient Discoveries, gives a good feel for what the structure was like and how it worked.
The first all-mechanical clocks were made possible thanks to the Verge escapement. It appeared in 14th century mechanical clocks found in large towers along Europe, and its origin is unknown. Perhaps the accuracy was not much better than that of the water clocks, but at least they did not freeze in winter. The verge escapement remained the king of time-keeping for four centuries, until the invention of the pendulum and balance spring in 1657, which increased the accuracy from hours a day, to minutes a day.
Verge Escapement
After pendulum clocks were invented, a large number (more than 300!) of escapement designs were developed. Of course only a few of them remained in use. Some of the most important types are:
An extremely interesting design is the grasshooper escapement, developed in 1722 by John Harrison. It has a very unusual, almost hypnotic movement. Its main advantage is that it is a mechanism of very low friction.
Grasshopper escapement.
Mechanical clock development continued, with great advances in both accuracy and miniaturization, and the escapement was a central part of every clock. But the advent of the electric clock replaced the escapement mechanism with electric means of producing the regular pulses needed in a clock: solenoids, synchronous motors and tuning fork oscillations. Eventually, we ended up with clocks with no clockwork parts at all.
In 1927, the first quartz clock was built in Bell Telephone Laboratories. These clocks use the regular oscillations of the quartz crystal to measure the time intervals. Seiko introduced the first quartz clock, the Astron, in 1969. A decade later, the market was dominated by quartz. The combination of low cost and accuracy of the quartz clock led the “quartz crisis“, where mechanical watches almost disappeared from the market.
The final refinement came with atomic clocks, which use the electronic transition frequency of atoms to measure time. This has resulted in unparalleled timekeeping accuracy. They are found in satellites used in the GPS network and any device that syncs with them will benefit from this high-precision timekeeping. In the near future, you will probably have one in your wristwatch, as they have been miniaturized to chip scale.
This beautiful watch incorporates the constant escapement, developed by Girard Perregaux in 2008.
Today, mechanical watches that use an escapement mechanism are still manufactured. Of course, we don’t need them. After all, now that we all have cell phones, even the quartz wristwatch becomes redundant. However, there is an inherent beauty in that miniature mechanism. They represent the triumph of craftsmanship over precision.
Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary. Each one is a miniature world unto itself, a tiny functioning mechanism, a congeries of minute and mysterious moving parts. Moving parts! And consequently these watches are, in a sense, alive. They have heartbeats. They seem to respond, Tamagotchi-like, to “love,” in the form, usually, of the expensive ministrations of specialist technicians. Like ancient steam-tractors or Vincent motorcycles, they can be painstakingly restored from virtually any stage of ruin.
Modern mechanical watches are some of the most complex and beautiful pieces of mechanical art in existence. They can reach prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and of course, are collectible items. Even today, horological engineers continue to work on the development of the escapement, looking to increase accuracy and reliability.
We’ve been following the Heathkit reboot for a while now, and it looks like the storied brand is finally getting a little closer to its glory days. I was thumbing through the new issue of QST magazine while I was listening in on a teleconference for the day job – hey, a guy can multitask, can’t he? – when I spied an ad for the Heathkit GC-1006 digital clock, which they brand the “Most Reliable Clock”. As soon as the meeting was over, I headed over to the Heathkit website to check out this latest offering.
I had cautiously high hopes. After the ridiculous, feature-poor, no-solder AM radio kit (although they sensibly followed up with a solder version of that kit) and an overpriced 2-meter ham antenna, I figured there was nowhere for Heathkit to go but up. And the fact that the new kit was a clock was encouraging. I have fond memories of Heathkit clocks from the 80s when I worked in a public service dispatch center; Heathkit clocks were about the only clocks you could get that would display 24-hour time. Could this actually be a kit worth building?
Alas, the advertisement was another one of those wall-of-text things that the new Heathkit seems so enamored of. And like the previous two kits offered, the ad copy is full of superlatives and cutesy little phrases that really turn me off. Then again, most advertising turns me off, so I’m probably not a good gauge of such things. Nor am I sure I’m in the target demographic for this product – in fact, I’m not even sure to whom this product is being marketed. Is it the younger crowd of the maker movement? Or is it the old-timers who want to relive the glory days of Heathkit builds? Given the $100 price, I’d have to say the nostalgia market is the most likely buyer of this one.
To be fair, $100 might not be that much to spend on a decent clock. I’m a bit of a clock snob, and I’ve gotten to the point where I can almost tell which chip is in a clock just by looking at the controls. The feature set of a modern digital clock has converged to a point where every clock has almost exactly the same deficiencies. The GC-1006 claims to address a few of my hot button issues, like not being able to set the time to the exact second – I hate that! An auto-dimming display is nice, as is a 12- or 24-hour display, a 10-minute timer (nice for hams, who are required to ID their station every 10 minutes), and a battery backup that claims to last for 4 weeks.
Is this worth buying? At this point, I’m on the fence. Looking at an unboxing video, it appears to be a high-quality kit, and it would be fun to build. But spending $100 on a clock might be a tough sell to my loan officer.
Still, I think I might take one for the team here so we have a first-hand report of what the new Heathkit is all about. And it would be nice to build another Heathkit product. I’ll let you know how it goes.
