The Weatherclock is more than just a clock sporting Nixie tubes and neon lamps. There is even more to it than the wonderful workmanship and the big, beautiful pictures in the build log. [Bradley]’s Weatherclock is not only internet-connected, it automatically looks up local weather and sets the backlights of the numbers to reflect current weather conditions. For example, green for roughly room temperature, blue for cold, red for warm, flashing blue for rain, flashing white for lightning, scrolling white for fog and ice, and so on.

The enclosure is custom-made and the sockets for the tubes are seated in a laser-cut plastic frame. While seating the sockets, [Bradley] noticed that an Adafruit Neopixel RGB LED breakout board fit perfectly between the tube leads. By seating one Neopixel behind each Nixie indicator, each number could have a programmable backlight that just happened to look fabulous.

With an Electric Imp board used for WiFi the capabilities of the Weatherclock were rounded out on the inside. On the outside, a custom enclosure ties it all together. [Bradley] says his family had gotten so used to having the Weatherclock show them the outside conditions that they really missed it when it was down for maintenance or work – which shouldn’t happen much anymore as the project is pretty much complete.

It’s interesting to see new features in Nixie clocks. Nixie tubes have such enduring appeal that using them alone has its own charm, and at least one dedicated craftsman actually makes new ones from scratch.

Our wonderfully creative community has a penchant for clocks. We have seen so many timepieces over the years that one might suppose that there would be nothing new, no instrument of horology that would not elicit a yawn as we are presented with something we’ve seen many times before.

Every once in a while though along comes a project that is different. A clock that takes the basic idea of a timepiece and manages to present something new, proving that this particular well of projects has not yet quite run dry.

Such a project is the circular word clock made by [Roald Hendriks]. Take a conventional circular wall clock and remove the hands and mechanism, then place LEDs behind the numbers. Add the words for “Quarter”, “Half”, etc. in an inner ring, and place LEDs behind them. Hook all these LEDs up to a microcontroller with a real-time clock, and away you go with a refreshingly novel timepiece.

[Roald]’s clock has the wording in Dutch, and the brain behind it is an Arduino Uno with the relevant driver ICs. He’s provided a video which we’ve put below the break, showing the clock in operation with its various demo modes.

We’ve seen so many word clocks over the years it’s best to give you a stream of them through our word clock tag. It’s good of this one to come along and refresh the genre.

We recently went through our twice yearly period of communal venting called adjusting for daylight saving time (DST), or British Summer Time (BST) as it’s called in the UK. But why are we changing the time? Seriously, who caused all this? Does it do any good? Do we still need it? And what can we do about it? As it turns out, most of us want it, as you’ll see below.

We Live In Good Times

Fallacies of Daylight Saving Time

A common misconception is that DST is for helping farmers. However, farmers have actually opposed it. Farmers have to do much of their farming based on when the sun is up. Setting the clock back in the fall, which is harvest time, means less time to get crop to market. Cows also don’t adapt well to the change in milking schedule, but hired workers work according to the clock.

Another misconception is that Benjamin Franklin invented daylight saving time. In an anonymous letter, Franklin suggested only that his fellow countrymen work during daylight hours and sleep when it was dark. This was to save on the expense of candles during the early morning. However, he didn’t mention adjusting the clocks.

The first modern proposals for saving daylight came from New Zealand entomologist George Hudson in 1895 and independently, William Willett, a builder and outdoorsman in England in 1905. Both were fond of time spent in daylight outdoors in the evening. Hudson proposed advancing the clock by two hours on October 1st and back again March 1st. Willett, interestingly, proposed moving the clock by 80 minutes in increments of four 20 minute weekly steps. Neither succeeded in getting the changes to occur.

Going to War and Saving Time

Wide adoption of the time change had to wait for World War I. In April, 1916 the German Empire and Austria-Hungary both were the first countries to adjust the clock forward in order to conserve coal. By 1918 many other countries had followed suit. However, with some exceptions, including Canada, the UK, France and Ireland, the practice was abandoned after the war. Over the years that followed various countries occasionally adopted and dropped it again, including during World War II.

In the US, from 1945 to 1966 there was no federal law regarding daylight saving time and so it was up to localities to decide if they wanted to keep using it. But in 1962, the transportation industry was finding the patchwork of different times problematic and pushed for federal legislation, resulting in the Uniform Time Act of 1966. As of 1967, standard time was mandated with time changes on the last Sunday of April and the last Sunday in October, though states could opt out.

The Uniform Time Act was amended in 1986 to have the daylight saving time last longer by having the change occur in the first Sunday in April instead of the last. Among the biggest lobbyists for the 1986 change were the barbecue grill and charcoal industries as well as the golf industry, all of whom would benefit from the extra outdoor evening activity.

Then in 2005 another month was added to DST in the US, this time by moving it to the 2nd Sunday in March and first Sunday in November. Lobbyists for the change included the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) and, interestingly, the National Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation Fighting Blindness (retinitis pigmentosa’s symptoms include decreased night vision). The NACS serves both convenience stores and the fuel retailing industry, the implication again being that having more leisure time in the evenings with daylight would cause more people to venture outdoors and away from home doing outdoor activities, benefiting those industries.

So in summary, why do we have daylight saving time? Initially it was to save energy resources during wartime. In the US it was later spurred on to clean up a patchwork of different times and more recently to benefit industries that make money from outdoor evening activities.

Do We Still Need It?

Some may say that with increasing technological and urban society, we may not need it anymore and that farming is becoming ever more automated. However, as we’ve pointed out above, the reasons for introducing daylight saving time have had to do with energy savings and encouraging evening outdoor activity, and not with farming.

Does it really result in an energy savings? In response to the 2005 change in the US, extending it by a month, a study was done by the Department of Energy for Congress looking at the effect 2007 had compared to prior years without extended daylight saving time. From analyzing data of the output of 35 utilities, statistical analysis showed an electricity savings of 0.03% of the total national electricity consumption of 3,900 TWh in 2007, amounting to 0.46% to 0.48% for each day of extended daylight. Comparing the regions, the North saved 0.51% and the South 0.42% daily. So though there are regional differences in savings, overall the savings is small.

The study also found through statistical analysis that there was no measurable impact on passenger vehicle gasoline consumption or traffic volume in 2007.

As for evening outdoor activity, one way to measure it is by TV viewership. Every year TV viewing in the early evening drops in lock-step with the clock going forward. This is measured with TV ratings in the US. Most telling is that this happens even for News shows, which have a fairly constant subject matter. In March 2015 it was reported that ABC, CBS and NBC evening news programs collectively lost three and a half million viewers compared to the previous, pre-DST week. Clearly people do take advantage of the extra hours of daylight.

If the numbers from convenience stores that sell gas are to be relied on, the 2005 change resulted in an added $1 billion in gasoline sales. Similarly, the barbecue grill and charcoal industries say they earn an extra $200 million.

So rather than say we still need daylight saving time, it looks more like we still want it, no matter how much we groan about adjusting the clock. We use it to go to sporting events, golf, or visit friends for a grilled steak. At least that’s what the data indicates.

Health, Happiness, and Even Crime

But that’s all to do with the latitudes of the US. At more northern latitudes such as those in Canada, England and even further north, Scotland, the winter hours become more of a focus. The shortest day in Edinburgh, Scotland, December 21st, is just six hours and 57 minutes long. People go to work in darkness and return home in darkness. In that case the argument could be made for keeping daylight saving time, called British Summer Time (BST) in the UK, all year round.

Daylight saving does appear to have an effect on crime. A 2012 study from Stanford University about the effect of the spring time change on crime found that robberies decreased by 40% when comparing the period with more evening daylight to that with less.

There are also studies that show it can have a negative medical effect. A study in Denmark of depression cases in psychiatric hospitals of cases from 1995 to 2012 found an 11% increase in severe depression during the period immediately after the change when the clock is moved back and darkness comes earlier at the end of the day, with a gradual decrease after 10 weeks. There’s also a study by the University of Alabama that found a 10% increase in the risk of a heart attack on the Monday and Tuesday following setting the clock ahead in the spring, some attributing it to sleep deprivation.

There are also multiple studies showing increased injuries in the workplace on the Monday following the switch to daylight saving time. One study by doctoral students at Michigan State University, analyzing injuries reported to the Mine Safety and Health Administration, found that on average 3.6 more injuries occurred on the Monday and 2,649 more days were lost as a result, a 68% increase.

And what about the rest of the world? Some of us are so caught up in our obsession with these twice-yearly changes that we don’t realize that much of the world doesn’t make them, as the following map shows. The blue and orange are the areas that do make them (the different colors are for the different hemispheres), the light grey areas don’t anymore but did at one time, and the dark grey areas never have.

The Hacker Opportunity

And so it appears there’s an opportunity here. We want daylight saving time for spending time outdoors in the evening but we don’t like adjusting our clocks. Who better is there to modify all those clocks to be self-adjusting than the Hackaday community?

Searching Hackaday brings up surprisingly little on this though. There’s a fix for a Heathkit clock that forces you to cycle forward only, fixing what would otherwise be a cumbersome adjustment. And then there’s our own fearless leader [Mike Szczys]’s automatic daylight compensation for his delightful Ping Pong Clock, and that’s about it! Where’s the robot arm that playfully reaches out from inside the cuckoo clock to give the minute hand an extra rotation? Or how about a master clock to rule all your other clocks so that there’s only the one adjustment to be made?

Conclusion

To end on a personal note, I like fooling myself in the fall by waking up without having adjusted the clock back, and then adjusting it back and being silly with delight at having gained an extra hour for the day. Conversely, I don’t like setting it forward in the spring — groan, lost an hour in my day. But I take advantage of the extra time cycling or reading outside in the evening. As I write this, however, it’s winter, 4:30 PM and it’s dark outside, and to keep active outdoors in the evening, I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not night. There clearly are both whys and why nots to this issue.

[Robin Bussell]’s NixieBot is a mash up of new age electronics and retro vintage components and he’s got a bunch of hacks crammed in there. It’s a Nixie tube clock which displays tweets, takes pictures of the display when it encounters tweets with a #NixieBotShowMe hash tag, and then posts requested pictures back to twitter. If a word is eight characters, it takes a snapshot. If it’s a longer message, NixieBot takes a series of pictures of each word, converts it to an animated GIF, and then posts the tweet. In between, it displays random tweets every twenty seconds. You can see the camera setup in the image below and you should check out the @nixiebot twitter feed to see some of the action.

For the display, he’s using eight big vintage Burroughs B7971 Nixie Tubes. These aren’t easy to source, and current prices hover around $100 each if you can find them. The 170V DC needed to run each tube comes from a set of six 12V to 170V converter boards specifically designed to drive these tubes. Each board can drive at least a couple of nixies, so [Robin]’s able to use just four boards for the eight tubes. Each nixie is driven by its own “B7971 SmartSocket“, a dedicated PIC16F690 micro-controller board custom designed for the purpose. A serial protocol makes it easy to daisy-chain the SmartSockets to build multi character displays.

The rest of the build is pretty straight forward. A Raspberry-Pi running Twython for Twitter communications, GrafixMagick for GIF creation, Picamera for taking pictures and GPIO libraries for controlling the display. The software to run all of this is hosted on his GitHub repository with some basic instructions on how to put it together.

A more detailed reference is available on the NixieBot blog. He’s designed a Pi shield board to house the high voltage modules, a 5V DC-DC converter and the Pi GPIO header. He’s probably got a few more to spare, so with a bit of luck in finding the elusive Nixie tubes, and some deep pockets, it ought to be relatively easy to build your version of the NixieBot.

And if the NixieBot has got your interest piqued, check out “The Art of making a Nixie Tube” featuring the work of [Dalibor Farnby].

There’s something about clocks — sooner or later, every hacker wants to build one. And we end up seeing all kinds of display techniques being used to show time. For the simplest of builds, 7-segment display modules usually get dug up from the parts bin. If you have a bunch of “smart” LED’s (WS2812’s, APA102’s), then building your own custom 7-segment modules isn’t too difficult either. [rhoalt] had neither, but he did have several 8 LED Neopixel rings lying around. So he thought of experimenting with those, and built a ‘Binoctular’ LED clock which uses the Neopixel rings as 7 segment displays.

Each digit is made using one pair of Neopixel rings, stacked to form a figure of eight. All the digits are composed of arcs, so readability isn’t the best but it’s not hard either. [rhoalt] does mention that the display is easier to read via blurred camera images rather than visually, which isn’t surprising. We’re long used to seeing numbers composed of straight line segments, so arc segmented digits do look weird. But we wouldn’t have known this if [rhoalt] hadn’t shown us, right ? Maybe a thicker diffuser with separator baffles may improve the readability.

The rest of the build is pretty plain vanilla — an Arduino Nano clone, a DS3231 RTC, a Lithium battery, and some buttons, all housed together in a laser cut enclosure which follows the figure of eight design brief. And as usual, once you’ve built one, it’s time to improve and make a better version.

Humans historically have worked well with decimal numbering systems. This is probably due to the fact most of us have ten fingers, which make counting in base ten easy. Yet humanity seems to doggedly stick to the odd duodecimal/sexagesimal time system. [Danjovic] is bringing a bit of sanity into the mix with a decimal clock he calls DC-10. He’s entered his clock into our 1 kB Challenge.

DC-10 builds upon C10, the decimal time display system created by [KnivD] on Hackaday.io.

In [KnivDHere how it works:

• 1 year = 365.25 days (we can’t change this anyway)
• 1 day = 100 intervals (the equivalent of ‘hours’)
• 1 interval = 100 centivals (equivalent of ‘minutes’)
• 1 centival = 100 ticks (equivalent of ‘seconds’)
• 1 tick = 0.0864 current seconds.

[Danjovic’s] implantation displays intervals and centivals, exactly what you would need to know the current time of day. He used a Microchip PIC16F628 running from a 4 MHz clock. time is displayed on seven segment LEDs. The PIC is programmed in C, using the classic version of Microchip’s own IDE: MPLAB 8.92. The code uses 297 program words. Since the ‘628 uses 14-bit instructions, that equates to just under 520 bytes. Perfect for the 1 kB challenge!

If you have a cool project in mind, there is still plenty of time to enter the 1 kB Challenge! Deadline is January 5, so check it out and fire up your assemblers!

Hour glasses have long been a way to indicate time with sand, but the one-hour resolution isn’t the best. [Erich] decided he would be do better and made a clock that actually wrote the time in the sand. We’ve seen this before with writing time on a dry erase board with an arm that first erases the previous time and then uses a dry erase marker to write the next time. [Erich]’s also uses an arm to write the time, using the tip of a sea shell, but he erases the time by vibrating the sandbox, something that took much experimentation to get right.

To do the actual vibrating he used a Seeed Studio vibration motor which has a permanent magnet coreless DC motor. Interestingly he first tried with a rectangular sandbox but that resulted in hills and valleys, so he switched to a round one instead. Different frequencies shifted the sand around in different ways, some moving it to the sides and even out of the sandbox, but trial and error uncovered the right frequency, duration, and granular medium. He experimented with different sands, including litter for small animals, and found that a powder sand with small, round grains works best.

Four white LEDs not only add to the nice ambience but make the writing more visible by creating shadows. The shells also cleverly serve double duty, both for appearance and for hiding things. Shells cause the arms to be practically invisible until they move (well worth viewing the video below), but the power switch and two hooks for lifting the clock out of the box are also covered by shells. And best of all, the tip that writes in the sand is a shell. There’s plenty more to admire about the cleverness and workmanship of this one.

We also have to wonder at what other dioramas are possible with this setup. How about a Halloween setting with a skeleton emerging from the sand? Perhaps white sand would make good snow for a Christmas setting?

Here’s the sandclock at an earlier testing stage but where you can better see the workings in action.

[via Adafruit]

It took as long to make as it takes to gestate a human, but the Clickspring open-frame mechanical clock is finally complete. And the results are spectacular.

If you have even a passing interest in machining, you owe it to yourself to watch the entire 23 episode playlist. The level of craftsmanship that [Chris] displays in every episode, both in terms of the clock build and the production values of his videos is truly something to behold. The clock started as CAD prints glued to brass plates as templates for the scroll saw work that roughed out the frames and gears. Bar stock was turned, parts were threaded and knurled, and gear teeth were cut. Every screw in the clock was custom made and heat-treated to a rich blue that contrasts beautifully with the mirror polish on the brass parts. Each episode has some little tidbit of precision machining that would make the episode worth watching even if you have no interest in clocks. For our money, the best moment comes in episode 10 when the bezel and chapter ring come together with a satisfying click.

We feature a lot of timekeeping projects here, but none can compare to the Clickspring clock. If you’re still not convinced, take a look at some of our earlier coverage, like when we first noticed [Chris]’ channel, or when he fabricated and blued the clock’s hands. We can’t wait for the next Clickspring project, and we know what we’re watching tonight.

In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 — the neurotic computer — had a birthday in 1992 (for some reason, in the book it is 1997). In the late 1960s, that date sounded impossibly far away, but now it seems like a distant memory. The only thing is, we are only now starting to get computers with voice I/O that are practical and even they are a far cry from HAL.

[GeraldF6] built an Arduino-based clock. That’s nothing new but thanks to a MOVI board (ok, shield), this clock has voice input and output as you can see in the video below. Unlike most modern speech-enabled devices, the MOVI board (and, thus, the clock) does not use an external server in the cloud or any remote processing at all. On the other hand, the speech quality isn’t what you might expect from any of the modern smartphone assistants that talk. We estimate it might be about 1/9 the power of the HAL 9000.

You might wonder what you have to say to a clock. You’ll see in the video you can do things like set and query timers. Unlike HAL, the device works like a Star Trek computer. You address it as Arduino. Then it beeps and you can speak a command. There’s also a real-time clock module.

Setting up the MOVI is simple:

 recognizer.init(); // Initialize MOVI (waits for it to boot)
 recognizer.callSign("Arduino"); // Train callsign Arduino (may take 20 seconds)
 recognizer.addSentence(F("What time is it ?")); // Add sentence 1
 recognizer.addSentence(F("What is the time ?")); // Add sentence 2
 recognizer.addSentence(F("What is the date ?")); // Add sentence 3
...

Then a call to recognizer.poll will return a numeric code for anything it hears. Here is a snippet:

// Get result from MOVI, 0 denotes nothing happened, negative values denote events (see docs)

 signed int res = recognizer.poll(); 

// Tell current time
 if (res==1 | res==2) { // Sentence 1 & 2
 if ( now.hour() > 12) 
 recognizer.say("It's " + String(now.hour()-12) + " " + ( now.minute() < 10 ? "O" : "" ) +
     String(now.minute()) + "P M" ); // Speak the time
...

Fairly easy.

HAL being a NASA project (USSC, not NASA, and HAL was a product of a lab at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign – ed.) probably cost millions, but the MOVI board is $70-$90. It also isn’t likely to go crazy and try to kill you, so that’s another bonus. Maybe we’ll build one in a different casing. We recently talked about neural networks improving speech recognition and synthesis. This is a long way from that.

There’s no shortage of Arduino-based clocks around. [Mr_fid’s] clock, though, gets a second look because it is very unique looking. Then it gets a third look because it would be very difficult to read for the uninitiated.

The clock uses three Xs made of LEDs. There is one X for the hours (this is a 24-hour clock), another for the minutes, and one for the seconds. The left side of each X represents the tens’ digit of the number, while the right-side is the units.

But wait… even with two segments on each side of the X, that only allows for numbers from 0 to 3 in binary, right? [Mr_fid] uses another dimension–color–to get around that limitation. Although he calls this a binary clock, it is more accurately a binary-coded-decimal (BCD) clock. Red LEDs represent the numbers one to three. Green LEDs are four to six. Two blue segments represent seven to nine. It sounds complicated, but if you watch the video, below, it will make sense.

This isn’t [Mr_fid’s] first clock. He is using a DS1307 real time clock module to make up for the Arduino’s tendency to drift. Even if you aren’t interested in the clock, the mounting of the LEDs with plastic–and the issues he had isolating them from each other–might come in handy in other displays.

We’ve seen a lot of Arduino clocks over the years, including some that talk. We’ve even seen some that qualify as interactive furniture, whatever that is.

Yup, another clock project. But here, [Jan] builds something that would be more at home in a modern art museum than in the dark recesses of a hacker cave. It’s not hard to read the time at all, it’s accurate, and it’s beautiful. It’s a linear RGB LED wall clock.

You won’t have to learn the resistor color codes or bizarre binary encodings to tell what time it is. There are no glitzy graphics here, or modified classic timepieces. This project is minimal, clean, and elegant. Twelve LEDs display the hours, six and nine LEDs take care of the minutes in add-em-up-coded decimal. (It’s 3:12 in the banner image.)

The technical details are straightforward: WS2812 LEDs, an Arduino, three buttons, and a RTC. You could figure that out by yourself. But go look through the log about building the nice diffusing plexi and a very clean wall-mounting solution. It’s the details that separate this build from what’s hanging on our office wall. Nice job, [Jan].

Metropolis is a classic, silent film produced in 1927 and was one of the very first full length feature films of the science fiction genre, and very influential. (C-3PO was inspired by Maria, the “Machine human” in Metropolis.) Within the first couple of minutes in the film, we get to see two clocks — one with a 24-hour dial and another larger one with a 10-hour dial. The human overlords of Metropolis lived a utopian 24 hour day, while the worker scum who were forced to live and work underground, were subjected to work in two ten-hour shifts during the same period.

[Aaron]’s client was setting up a Metropolis themed man-cave and commissioned him to build a Metropolis Oscilloclock which would not only show the 24 hour and 10 hour clocks from the film, but also accurately reproduce the clock movements and its fonts. [Aaron]’s Oscilloclock is his latest project in the series of bespoke CRT clocks which he has been building since he was a teen.

The clock is built around a Toshiba ST-1248D vintage oscilloscope that has been beautifully restored. There are some modern additions – such as LED glow indicators for the various valves and an external X-Y input to allow rendering Lissajous figures on the CRT. He’s also added some animations derived from the original poster of the film. Doing a project of this magnitude is not trivial and its taken him almost eight months to bring it from concept to reality. We recommend looking through some of his other blog posts too, where he describes how oscilloclocks work, how he builds the HV power supplies needed to drive the CRT’s, and how he ensures vibration and noise damping for the cooling fans used for the HV power supplies. It’s this attention to detail which results in such well-built clocks. Check out some of [Aaron]’s other awesome Oscilloclock builds that we have featured over the years.

The film itself has undergone several restoration attempts, with most of it being recovered from prints which were discovered in old archives. If you wish to go down that rabbit hole, check out Wikipedia for more details and then head over to YouTube where several versions appear to be hosted.

It’s time for everyone’s favorite game: speculative engineering! An anonymous reader wrote to our tips line asking how the levitation system of the STORY clock is accomplished. We took a look and can tell you right now… that’s a really good question!

STORY: The Levitating Timepiece has more than a month left on its crowdfunding campaign but it’s reached more than 6x its $80k goal. The wooden disk has a digital time display in the center which is simply an LED matrix just below the wood’s surface. We know how that’s done: wooden veneer with a grid of holes behind to contain the LED light in a perfect circle.

The part that has everyone so excited is a levitating orb that makes a circuit around the face of the clock. It would be easy to guess how it works if this was simply sitting flat on a table (which it can do). But it’s further complicated because it still works when hung on a wall. Most of the DIY levitation rigs we’ve looked at use gravity as an integral aspect of their functionality. A coil is suspended above the object being levitated while a hall-effect sensor tunes the magnetic field to hold the object in place (neither touching the coil, nor falling away from it).

So how is this one doing it? Perhaps there are multiple coils responsible for the levitation, each with their own hall effect sensor. In this scenario, tilting the base to hang on a wall would put different requirements on the coils above and below the magnetic orb. That’s our speculation, what is yours? Does this reasoning hold water magnet? Is there a motorized mechanism inside or does a grid of coils address the movement of the magnetic orb? Let us know in the comments below.

If you’re looking to play with this phenomenon in your own projects, it seems you can buy a magnetic levitation device which exhibits similar properties. The video of this, found in the comments of the STORY Kickstarter page, is embedded below. If you do order one of these, we want to see a teardown!

For the less than highly-driven individuals out there — and even some that are — sometimes, waking up is hard to do, and the temptation to smash the snooze button is difficult to resist. If you want to force your mind to immediately focus on waking up, this Nerf target alarm clock might get you up on time.

Not content to make a simple target, [Christopher Guichet] built an entire clock for the project. The crux of the sensor is a piezoelectric crystal which registers the dart impacts, and [Guichet]’s informative style explains how the sensor works with the help of an oscilloscope. A ring of 60 LEDs with the piezoelectric sensor form the clock face, all housed in a 3D printed enclosure. A rotary encoder is used to control the clock via an Arduino Uno, though a forthcoming video will delve into the code side of things; [Guichet] has hinted that he’ll share the files once the code has been tidied up a bit.

Even though there are commercial options out there for crazy alarm clocks, that should not stop you from putting together your own custom version that will get you up in the future.

[Thanks for the tip, Itay!]

We’ve seen many clocks here over the years. Some of them are conventional, some esoteric. So it’s not often that we see something novel in the world of timekeeping.

Strictly speaking, [Giulio Pons]’s clock project isn’t new at all. He’s taken a broken multimeter from the 1950s, and with the help of an Arduino Nano and an ESP8266 module, converted it into a clock that indicates the time on the multimeter’s moving-coil meter. He’s wired the multimeter’s front panel controls to the Arduino to operate the thing, and given it a speaker to play alarm sounds. A PIR motion detector activates the clock. In the hours of darkness, a photoresistor brings up a light. Time setting is automatic via the internet. [Giulio] previously experimented with an RTC module but found the network connection made changing time settings easier.

It’s by no means the perfect timepiece. For instance, [Giulio] found that driving the meter from a PWM pin gave different readings depending on the PSU load from other parts such as the light. But the clock does work, and has breathed new life into what might otherwise have remained a piece of junk.

Those of you with long memories might remember a similar project from a few years ago that used unmodified multimeters to display time as voltage. And of course, there are always frequency counter clocks.

Conway’s life has to be the most enduring zero-player computer game in history. Four simple cellular automaton rules have been used to create amazing simulations since the 1970’s. The latest is an entire digital clock implemented in life. StackExchange user [dim] created this simulation in response to a challenge from [Joe Z]. We have to admit that we didn’t believe it at first, but you can run it yourself by importing [dim’s] gist to the online Javascript Conway’s Life Simulator. To say this is impressive would be an understatement. We don’t know exactly how long it took [dim] to build this clock, but the challenge has been around since August of 2016.

[Dim] does a pretty good job of describing exactly how the clock works. The timebase is at the top. Below it is clock distribution and counters. After that come counters, latches, and lookup tables. Data moves around the clock in the form of gliders. P30 (aka Queen Bee) gliders to be exact. It might make things simpler to think of the glider paths as circuit traces, and the gliders themselves as clock pulses.

We couldn’t get over all the little details in this design. If you zoom way in, you can see all the lookup table patterns have been annotated, much in the way a schematic would be. For [Dim’s] next feat, we hope he takes on [Joe Z’s] Tetris challenge!

Conway’s life is like honey for hackers. We’ve seen it running on our own Hackaday Badge. We’ve even seen clocks that run the game on their display. Someone needs to implement a clock that runs the game that runs this clock. Clockception, anyone?

If you’re building a smart watch these days (yawn!), you’ve got to have some special sauce to impress the jaded Hackaday community. [Dominic]’s NeoPixel SmartWatch delivers, with his own take on what’s important to have on your wrist, and just as importantly, what isn’t.

There’s no fancy screen. Instead, the watch gets by with a ring of NeoPixels for all its notification needs. But notification is what it does right. It tells [Dominic] when he’s got an incoming call of course, but also has different flashing color modes for SMS, Snapchat, and e-mail. Oh yeah, and it tells time and even has a flashlight mode. Great functionality for a minimalistic display.

But that’s not all! It’s also got a light sensor that works from the UV all the way down to IR. At the moment, it’s being used to automatically adjust the LED brightness and to display current UV levels. (We imagine turning this into a sunburn alarm mode.) Also planned is a TV-B-Gone style IR transmitter.

The hardware is the tough part of this build, and [Dominic] ended up using a custom PCB to help in cramming so many off-the-shelf modules into a tiny space. Making it look good is icing on the cake.

Thanks [Marcello] for the tip!

We love seeing new takes on existing ideas, and [Danny] certainly took the word clock concept in an unusual direction with his Wordsearch Clock. Instead of lighting up words to spell out the time, [Danny] decided to embrace the fact that the apparent jumble of letters on the clock face resembles a word search puzzle.

In a word search puzzle, words can be found spelled forward or backward with letters lined up horizontally, diagonally, or vertically. All that matters is that the correct letters are in a line and sequentially adjacent to one another. [Danny]’s clock lights up the correct letters and words one after the other, just as if it were solving a word search puzzle for words that just happen to tell the correct time. You can see it in action in the video, embedded below.

[Danny] went the extra mile in the planning phase. After using a word search puzzle generator tool to assist in designing the layout, he wrote a Processing sketch to simulate the clock’s operation. Visually simulating the clock allowed him to make tweaks to the layout, identify edge cases to address, and gain insight into the whole process. If you’re interested in making your own, there is a GitHub repository for the project.

Word Clocks are a great place to see innovation; you can go small like this micro word clock, you can push the concept for all it’s worth by adding heaps of weather data, or just go the extra mile on presentation like this walnut-finish clock.

We have no idea if the background story is true or not, but we’re not going to let something like “truth” get in the way of a good story. The way [Kwan3217] tells it, first there were hours on sundials. Then when these were divided into sixty minute sections, they were called “minutes”. “Seconds” comes from a second division by sixty, into “second minutes”. The “third” division into sixty would give a time unit that lasts a sixtieth of a second.

[Kwan3217] built a clock that displays these third minutes. Weighing in at just a tiny bit over 16.6666 milliseconds each, the thirds’ hand is going to be spinning pretty fast, so he used LEDs. And if you’re going to display thirds, you’ve got to get them right, so he backs the clock up with GPS. There’s a full video playlist about it, and phenomenal detail in the project logs.

We really liked the implementation of the state machine that reads the GPS strings. [Kwan3217] leans heavily on a crash state that waits for the next dollar sign — marking the beginning of a GPS NMEA data block. Almost all of his functions that parse the GPS data stream know what kind of data they’re expecting next, and if they don’t get it, they crash out. So while it probably doesn’t really matter if his wall clock misses a GPS message, at least it’ll get back in line with the exact time soon after. Check the code out if you find yourself parsing GPS strings.

And did we mention the circular traces on the PCB? Or the lightpipes?

We’ve run a lot of posts about clocks, and none of them have displayed the thirds. With a GPS-disciplined microcontroller, getting even single milliseconds spot on is no problem. The issue is displaying them. So it’s no surprise that a lot of folks go the opposite direction, telling the time either approximately like the word clocks, artistically like this Berlin set-theory clock, or inscrutably like all the resistor-color clocks or bizarro binary clocks out there.

Clocks that read time via received radio signals have several advantages over their Internet-connected, NTP-synchronised brethren. The radio signal is ubiquitous and available over a fairly large footprint extending to thousands of kilometres from the transmitting antennae. This allows such clocks to work reliably in areas where there is no Internet service. And compared to GPS clocks, their front-end electronics and antenna requirements are much simpler. [Erik de Ruiter]’s DCF77 Analyzer/Clock is synchronised to the German DCF77 radio signal, which is derived from the atomic clocks at PTB headquarters. It features a ton of bells and whistles, while still being simple to build. It’s a slick piece of German hacker engineering that leaves us amazed.

Among the clock functions, it shows time, day of the week, date, CET/CEST modes, leap year indications and week numbers. The last is not part of the DCF77 protocol but is calculated via software. The DCF77 analyzer part has all of the useful information gleaned from the radio signals. There are displays for time period, pulse width, a bit counter, bit value indicator (0/1) and an error counter. There are two rings of 59 LEDs each that provide additional information about the DCF77 signal. A PIR sensor on the front panel helps put the clock in power save mode. Finally, there is a whole bunch of indicator LEDs and a bank of switches to control the various functions. On the rear panel, there are RJ45 sockets for the DCF77 receiver antenna board, temperature sensor and FTDI serial, a bunch of audio sound board controls, reset switches and a mode control switch.

His build starts with the design and layout of the enclosure. The front panel layout had to go through a couple of iterations before he was satisfied with the result. The final version was made from aluminium-coated sandwich-panel. He used an online service to photo-etch the markings, and then a milling machine to carve out the various windows and mounting holes. The rear panel is a tinted acrylic with laser engraving, which makes the neatly laid out innards visible for viewers to appreciate. The wooden frame is made from 40-year-old Mahogany, sourced from an old family heirloom desk. All of this hard work results in a really professional looking product.

The electronics are mostly off the shelf modules, except for the custom built LED driver boards. The heart of the device is an Arduino Mega because of the large number of outputs it provides. There are seven LED driver boards based around the Maxim 7221 (PDF) serial interface LED drivers – two to drive the inner and outer ring LEDs, and the others for the various seven-segment displays. The numerous annunciator LEDs are driven directly from the Arduino Mega. His build really comes together by incorporating a noise resilient DCF77 decoder library by [Udo Klein] which is running on a separate Arduino Uno. All of his design source files are posted on his GitHub repository and he hopes to publish an Instructable soon for those who would like to build one of their own.

In the first video below, he walks through the various functions of the clock, and in the second one, gives us a peek in to its inside. Watch, and be amazed.

Thanks for the tip, [Nick]