You never know when inspiration is going to strike, and for [Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi], it struck while he was playing with one of his daughter’s hair ties. The result is a clock called “Bezicron” and it’s a fascinating study in mechanical ingenuity. The hair ties in question are simple objects, just a loose polymer coil […]
Imagine a clock where the colors aren’t from LEDs but a physics phenomenon – polarization. That’s just what [Mosivers], a physicist and electronics enthusiast, has done with the Polarizer Clock. It’s not a perfect build, but the concept is intriguing: using polarized light and stress-induced birefringence to generate colors without resorting to RGB LEDs. The […]
When [Rodrigo Feliciano] realized that the reason his seven-segment LED wall clock wasn’t working was because the original TG1508D5V5 controller was fried, he had a decision to make. He could either chuck the whole thing, or put in the effort to reverse engineer how the displays were driven and replace the dead controller with something […]
Sometimes, all it takes is looking at an existing piece of tech in a new way to come up with something unique. That’s the whole idea behind FallingWater, a gorgeous Art Deco inspired clock created by [Mark Wilson] — while the vertical LCD might look like some wild custom component, it’s simply a common DM8BA10 […]
When you think of making something using a lathe, you usually think of turning a screw, a table leg, or a toothpick. [Uri Tuchman] had a different idea. He wanted to make a clock out of the gears used in the lathe. Can he do it? Of course, as you can see in the video […]
It’s really never too early (or too late) to learn time management. All joking aside, carefully managing one’s time can result in some really wondrous achievements. So it’s best to learn early, when most of your time is spent generally having fun. Let’s say you’ve just heard you have five minutes left to play, but […]
[Lonyelon] wanted to build an anniversary gift for his girlfriend. He decided to say it with e-Paper, a wise choice given its persistence and longevity. The project is an anniversary calendar. It displays a counter of the total time the couple has been together, measured in years, months, days, and hours—so it’s remarkably precise. [Lonyelon] […]
There are plenty of hard jobs out there, like founding your country’s nuclear program, or changing the timing chain on a BMW diesel. Making your own mechanical watch from scratch falls under that umbrella, too. And yet, [John Raffaelli] did just that, and prevailed! That’s a lot of work. Only a handful of components were […]
Here’s a design for a split-flap clock that doesn’t do it the usual way. Instead of the flaps showing numbers , Klapklok has a bit more in common with flip-dot displays. Klapklok updates every 2.5 minutes. It’s an art piece that uses custom-made split-flaps which flutter away to update the display as time passes. An […]
Since their invention more than a century ago, crystal oscillators have been foundational to electronic design. They allow for precise timekeeping for the clocks in computers as well as on our wrists, and can do it extremely accurately and inexpensively to boot. They aren’t without their downsides though; a quartz watch might lose or gain […]