[Martijn] is showing off his new clock which he calls a Light Spectrum Clock. We like to look of it, using RGB LEDs in five squares that remind us of some of those LED coffee table builds. From left to right this shows the week, day, hour, minute, and second. Simple, right? We had to [...]

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Every once in a while, the Hack a Day tip line gets a submission that is cool, but screams to be built in a few hours, possibly while consuming adult beverages. When [Shay] and [Ben] sent in their Manifold Clock Kickstarter, I knew what I had to do. To make a long story short, there’s [...]

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So your hard drive quit working.  Don’t despair, with a “little” work your disk can be repurposed into a clock like the one seen above. I made this clock after several iterations of various success, including the first revision, which was simply the platter with a clock kit from a hobby store screwed into the [...]

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We see people driving around the night before trash collection and reclaiming items doomed to the land fill (or on their way to recycling… who knows). We’re beginning to think we need to join those ranks. Case in point is this vintage oscilloscope which [Bob Alexander] plucked from the curb in the nick of time. [...]

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Hack A Day’s own [Jack Buffington] finally finished the solar clock he built for the buildlounge.com laser cutter giveaway. [Jack] has been putting up the build log on his blog, and now the project is finally complete. The clock operates entirely on solar power. Instead of fancy-smanchy electronics, this clock puts a new spin on [...]

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If you’re like [Richard], you’ve got a few really rare components lying around. Maybe it’s a very weird micro or a really tiny CRT, but eventually you’ve got to build something with these parts. When [Richard] decided to put some ITS1A neon display tubes to use, he fell back to the old standby – a [...]

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Hack a Day’s very own [Jack Buffington] is throwing his hat into the ring for the Buildlounge laser cutter giveaway with his solar clock that isn’t a sundial. The theory behind [Jack]‘s clock is pretty simple. The light from the sun will be captured by a camera obscura/pinhole camera. The sun’s rays shine on dozens of optical [...]

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[Matt Evans] achieves a total win with his Nixie clock. Not only does he have the benefit of the retro display hardware, but he really catches our eye with the enclosure he built for it. The project had its genesis when he came across a set of the Nixie Tubes in a surplus store. This [...]

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[linux-dude] always wanted to have a binary clock, but he didn’t want to pay someone else to make it for him. Additionally, he was looking for a compact alarm clock he could take on the road, rather than relying on the one in his hotel room. Inspired by other binary clock projects he has seen [...]

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Here’s an interesting take on a Lego clock, it uses rotating squares to change the orientation of the black and white tiles to display the needed number. As we see one of the digits cycling to the next number in the video after the break, a couple of different things pop into mind. This seems [...]

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Surprisingly, up until a year ago, [Jimmy] hadn’t seen a Nixie tube. Awful we know, but he has come around to the beauty of glowing numbers in a tube. He recently found an old millivolt meter in a junk pile that used Nixie tubes. The wondrous orange glow beckoned him, so [Jimmy] decided to build [...]

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The weekend is almost here and if you’re looking for an afternoon project consider building your own binary wall clock. [Emihackr97] built the one you see above using parts on hand, but even if you put in an order for everything, it won’t cost you much. He used a cardboard box as the housing for [...]

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Sometimes we need more psy ops in our life. Being an eminent fan of the Discworld series, Reddit user [rdmiller3] decided he needed to build Lord Vetinari’s clock. This fictional clock was placed in the waiting room for Lord Vetinari in several of the Discworld books. Although the clock keeps accurate time overall, it sometimes [...]

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For most of the working world, the onset of autumn and winter in the Northern hemisphere means one thing – waking up well before the sun rises to get a start on the daily grind. [Brent] from Freeside Atlanta knows that routine well and decided to build himself a sunrise alarm clock in an attempt [...]

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The answer, of course, is a word clock. This is actually [Eric's] second version of a word clock. Like the first one, it uses 114 LEDs to back light the words on the display. In his first iteration he used an Arduino to drive a Charlieplex array of lights. It was an 11 by 10 [...]

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Not content with only knowing the time, [trandi] decided his Vacuum Fluorescent Display clock would be much better if it displayed the weather and a Twitter feed. [trandi] received a Lady Ada Ice Tube clock last month. The kit went together almost too easily. Now he had to, “make it connect to other ‘stuff’ and [...]

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[Nav] is working on a scratch-built wristwatch. Although it is based on an MSP430 microcontroller, it’s not the ready-to-hack ezCronos that you might be thinking of. Instead, [Nav] started with a different TI development tool that we’ve looked at before, the ez430-F2013. The breakout board for the F2013 is small enough to meet his needs, but [...]

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We’re no strangers to POV time pieces around here, but something about them never gets old. Whether they use a ring of LEDs to draw clock hands, or an intricately cut HDD platter to replicate LCD segments, we love seeing them. [David] sent in this hard drive POV clock built by a fellow named [Kly], [...]

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Here’s a couple of clocks that use Arduino boards to control inexpensive clockworks. The concept is quite simple, and perhaps best outlined by [Matt Mets'] article on the subject. As it turns out, these clockworks are driven by a coil, forming a device that is quite similar to a stepper motor. If you solder a [...]

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[alanamon] had an old pinball machine in his basement, and thought it would be cool to rig it up to serve as a clock as well. He didn’t want it to be just any clock however, he wanted the pinball machine to be the most accurate clock in his house. Other than telling time using [...]

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[Corbin] hates fumbling around in the dark with his alarm blaring, looking for the off switch. He was so annoyed with regular alarm clocks that he decided to build his own simpler timepiece. The FlipClock resides in a simple black plastic case lacking any buttons whatsoever. When the alarm goes off, all one needs to [...]

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[Brian] from Louisville’s LVL1 hackerspace sent in this laser cut gear clock that’s almost unlike any other clock we’ve seen before. [Brian] also put up a wonderful Instructable for his build. Since LVL1 got a better laser cutter a lot of neat projects have been piling up. [Brian] based his clock around two cheap stepper [...]

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This Dippy Bird clock display is simple to build and it’s just waiting to be scaled up for use as a full clock. As shown there are only enough birds in this rendition to read out the hours. More tiers can be added for minutes and you could even add your own temperature readout function [...]

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[Doug Paradis] found a simple way to use dials instead of hands on a clock. Actually, that’s pretty much the entire hack… use dials instead of hands. He grabbed a battery-operated clock movement from the hobby store, then printed out one dial for hours, another for minutes, robert’s your mother’s brother, and you’ve got a [...]

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[Thomas] wrote in to tell us about his latest project, the “AlarmTock”. Like many hacks, this was inspired by some outdated hardware, a radio alarm clock from 1992. After finally getting fed up with his old alarm clock, [Thomas'] wife purchased him a new one for around $10 from a local retail store. Although most [...]

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[Frank] sent in a link to this fantastic wooden clock. The design was dreamed up by [Clayton Boyer] and he’s got full-sized templates for sale on his site. We’ve marveled at his creations in the past, having featured his useless machine that was made from wooden gears. This “Bird of Paradise” clock steps up the [...]

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A few years ago, Tube Clock forum member[Sine1040] bought a set of four brand new aircraft indicator units that were built some time in the early 70’s. He had no idea what the units were actually used for, but he did know that he could repurpose them into some pretty slick looking clocks. He disassembled [...]

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After seeing the TIX clock for the first time, [Gweedo Steevens] really wanted one, but wasn’t interested in paying the seemingly high asking price over at ThinkGeek. He figured it wouldn’t be too incredibly hard to build his own, so he decided to give it a shot. The clock relies on 27 LEDs to display [...]

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Hackaday reader [svofski] sent in a fantastic looking hard drive-based POV clock (Google Translation) created by a maker in the Sichuan province of China. The clock, like the one [svofski] built, relies on LEDs placed behind the spinning platter to create the POV effect. Quite a few carefully placed cuts have been made to the platter, [...]

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So you hear that someone is building a clock that will run for 10,000 years and you think ‘oh, that’s neat’. Then you start looking into it and realize that it’s being built on a mountain-sized scale in a remote part of the US and things start to get a bit strange. As much as [...]

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