As the timebase for a clock, almost anything with a periodic oscillation can be used. Traditionally, that meant a pendulum, but in our time, we’ve seen plenty of others. Perhaps none as unusual as [Tim]’s candle flicker clock, though. Candles are known for their flickering, a property of the wick and the fuel supply that […]
At this point, atomic clocks are old news. They’ve been quietly keeping our world on schedule for decades now, and have been through several iterations with each generation gaining more accuracy. They generally all work under the same physical principle though — a radio signal stimulates a gas at a specific frequency, and the response […]
The Becquerel (Bq) is an SI unit of radioactivity: one becquerel is equivalent to one radioactive decay per second. That absolutely does not make it equivalent to one hertz — the random nature of radioactive decay means you’ll never get one pulse every second — but it does make it interesting. [mihai.cuciuc] certainly thought so, […]
You can use a microcontroller to build a clock. After all, a clock is just something that counts the passage of time. The only problem is that microcontrollers can’t track time very accurately. They need some kind of external timing source that doesn’t drift as much as the microcontroller’s primary clock oscillator. To that end, [Josh] […]
There are plenty of conventional timepieces out there in the world; we’ve also featured a great many that are aesthetically beautiful while being unreadably esoteric. This neat “shadow clock” from [Smart Solutions for Home] is not conventional, but it’s still a clock you could use every day. The display is made of four seven-segment digits, […]
For those living in the continental US who, for whatever reason, don’t have access to an NTP server or a GPS device, the next best way to make sure the correct time is known is with the WWVB radio signal. Transmitting out of Colorado, the 60-bit 1 Hz signal reaches all 48 states in the […]
Let’s say you want to build a Nixie clock. You could go out and find some tubes, source a good power supply design, start whipping up a PCB, and working on a custom enclosure. Or, you could skip all that, and just follow [Simon]’s example instead. The trick to building a Nixie clock fast is […]
Ferrofluid is fun. You’ve probably seen all kinds of demos with it bouncing around in response to magnetic fields, or dancing near a speaker. [beastie417] decided to turn the entertaining fluid into a display. The basic concept of the ferrofluid display. Note the header image of this article shows the electromagnet array without the ferrofluid […]
If you were at OpenSauce, you may have seen new Youtuber [Sahko] waltzing about with a retrofuturistic peice of jewelery that revealed itself as a very cool watch. If you weren’t, he’s his very first video on YouTube detailing the design and construction of this piece. We’ve embedded it below, and it’s worth a watch. […]