A Talking Clock For The 21st Century
The Talking Clock service is disappearing, and it’s quite possible that few of you will be aware of its passing. One of the staples of twentieth-century technology, the Talking Clock service was the...
View ArticleThe Noisiest Seven-Segment Display Ever
Few mechanical clocks are silent, and many find the sounds they make pleasant. But the stately ticking of an old grandfather clock or the soothing sound of a wind-up alarm clock on the nightstand are...
View ArticleSmell That? It’s time.
Steampunk is beautiful. There is something about the exposed metal and primitive looking artifacts that visually appeal to the brain of a maker and engineer alike. Makers have been busy the last decade...
View ArticleNot Your Typical POV Clock
Persistence of vision displays are fun, and a natural for clocks, but they’re getting a little Nixie-ish, aren’t they? There are only so many ways to rotate LEDs and light them up, after all. But...
View ArticleMechanical Clocks that Never Need Winding
What is it about mechanical clocks? Maybe it’s the gears, or the soft tick-tocking that they make? Or maybe it’s the pursuit of implausible mechanical perfection. Combine mechanical clocks with “free”...
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Hacking a 30-year-old Russian VFD
Reddit user [InThePartsBin] found some VFDs (Vacuum Fluorescent Displays) on an old PCB on eBay. The Russian boards date from 1987 and have a bunch of through-hole resistors, transistors and a some...
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Neon Lamps Make For The Coolest Of Nixie Clocks
Revisiting old projects is always fun and this Nixie Clock by [pa3fwm] is just a classic. Instead of using transistors or microcontrollers, it uses neon lamps to clock and drive the Nixie Displays. The...
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It’s a Nixie! It’s a VFD! No, It’s a Custom LED Display in a Tube
Like the look of Nixies but they just seem a little overdone? Or perhaps you just don’t want the hassles of a high-voltage power supply? Then maybe these faux-Nixie LED “tube” displays will find a way...
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Multi-Coloured LEDs Make For A Beautiful Colour Clock
This project is so pretty in its own right, it doesn’t need a case! Clocks are a recurring feature among the projects we feature here on Hackaday, with several common themes emerging among them. We see...
View ArticlePersistence of Phosphorescence Clock Displays YouTube Stats Too
Looking for an eye-catching and unique way to display the time and date? Want the flexibility to add other critical information, like the number of YouTube subs you’ve got? Care to be able to read it...
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Marquee Display Uses Six Dozen Surplus VFD Tubes to Great Effect
The quest to repurpose surplus parts into new and interesting displays never ends, it seems. And the bigger the display, the better, with extra points for using some really obscure part, like these...
View ArticleGuerillaClock Could Save This City Thousands
They say necessity is the mother of invention. But if the thing you need has already been invented but is extremely expensive, another mother of invention might be budget overruns. That was the case...
View ArticleSimple Home-built Projection Clock Projects Time
There are plenty of cheap projection clocks available, but as [Thomas Pototschnig] points out in this project, where’s the fun in just buying something? He set out to build a cheap projection clock...
View ArticleHawkeye, the 3D-Printed Tourbillon Movement
As if building tiny mechanisms with dozens of moving parts that all need to mesh together perfectly to work weren’t enough, some clock and watchmakers like to put their horology on hard mode with...
View ArticleLinear Clock is a Different Way to Look at Time
There are usually two broad user interfaces for clocks. On the one hand you’ve got the dial clock, the default display for centuries, with its numbered face and spinning hands. The other mode is some...
View ArticleWatch the Honeycomb Clock Gently Track Time
We love clocks here at Hackaday, and so does [John Whittington]. Last year he created this hexagonal honey clock (or “Honock”) by combining some RGB LEDs with a laser-cut frame to create a smooth time...
View ArticleTricking A Vintage Clock Chip Into Working On 50-Hz Power
Thanks to microcontrollers, RTC modules, and a plethora of cheap and interesting display options, digital clock projects have become pretty easy. Choose to base a clock build around a chip sporting a...
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A Crash Course In Reliable Communication
It’s probably fair to say that anyone reading these words understands conceptually how physically connected devices communicate with each other. In the most basic configuration, one wire establishes a...
View ArticleWatch The World Spin With The Earth Clock
With the June solstice right around the corner, it’s a perfect time to witness first hand the effects of Earth’s axial tilt on the day’s length above and beyond 60 degrees latitude. But if you can’t...
View ArticleClock This! A 3D-Printed Escapement Mechanism
Traditional mechanical clockmaking is an art that despite being almost the archetype of precision engineering skill, appears rarely in our world of hardware hackers. That’s because making a clock...
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