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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[Giorgos Lazaridis] just finished building a simple clock on a breadboard. It uses a common real time clock chip, the DS1307. This is less expensive that its full-featured older brother, the DS3232. The difference between the two is that the 1307 requires an external 32.768 kHz crystal and it is not temperature compensated. This means [...]

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[Mure] wrote in to let us know he has put the finishing touches on the second iteration of his Warm Tube Nixie clock. We featured his original creation here last year, and while many things remain the same, he has still found a few things that he was able to improve on. The first notable [...]

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Like many electronics hobbyists, [Pete] found that he had an overwhelming desire to build a clock for himself. He didn’t want to stick a discrete real time clock IC into a box and call it a day, so he opted to construct his own around a microcontroller instead. After researching the specs on a few [...]

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[Alex] has reduced the resolution of his timepiece as a trade-off for speedy-readability. At least that’s what he claims when describing his color-changing clock. It uses a ShiftBrite to slowly alter the hue of the clock based on the current time. The concept is interesting: 12:00 starts off at white and slowly fades to green [...]

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If you don’t have a 9-to-5 type of job you might find yourself constantly resetting your alarm clock as your calendar commitments change. [Lucas] finally got fed up with the nightly ritual and decided to build his own alarm clock which has unique settings for each day of the week (translated). The display itself is an [...]

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The image you see above is the result of a simple analog projection clock. It shows the time on the ceiling. We have one in our bedroom but it’s a red digital display which we don’t think is nearly as fun as this clever hack. Grab a cheap analog clock, a mirror, and a white [...]

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As a project for an embedded systems class, [Alan] recently built himself a sunrise-simulating alarm clock. You are probably familiar with these sorts of timepieces – they gradually light up the room to awaken the sleeping individual rather than jarring them awake with a buzzer or the radio. Since many commercial units with this feature [...]

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Easter is over and with some plastic eggs still on hand, [Franspaco] was looking for something to do with them. He decided to use an egg as an enclosure for a digital clock. You can see that the finished project uses just one 7 segment LED display to show the time. A scrolling number method [...]

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If there is one thing hackers return to time and time again, it is clock/watch hacking. There are always creative ways to tell time, and with several “hackable” wristwatches on the market, there is bound to be no shortage of neat timepiece hacks. [hudson] from NYC Resistor has decided to take on a fun challenge [...]

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One afternoon, [Sam] was a bit bored and decided he would build a clock. Not wanting to spend any money on the project, he set off to construct his clock using only the components he had on hand – this meant no micro controllers would be used whatsoever. Built on a set of four breadboards, [...]

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That’s exactly what [Kenneth Finnegan] figured out with his original investigation into low powered MSP430-based circuits. He was able to keep a count-up timer running off of 20F worth of capacitors for over 10 weeks. Although quite impressive by its own merit, many people left comments that questioned whether similar results would be seen in [...]

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[Jarek Lupinski] is at it again, this time building a clock using 15 Nixie tubes. Just look at the time…. wait, how do you read this now? It’s not seconds since the epoch, but an homage to a very expensive New York City art piece. [Jarek] took his inspiration from the Metronome art installation in [...]

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