Crazy Clock

All those different novelty options, yet you didn't implement metric time. For shame.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

I'm assuming you need to unplug the battery to set the "true" time? Else you might be adjusting the "I'm in my +10 minutes phase" (for early clock, f.ex), turning it into late clock. (?)

What a cool idea. It's like the sun from Super Mario.

That’s excellent! Do you have a video? I would love to see it in action.

is the source code for this on the web?

So is that the “Weeping Angel” clock?

Sounds super cool! I’m also interested in how exactly you did it

Where does someone completely new to Arduino/electronics get started with a project like this? How do you know what signals to send?

Finally, a clock that matches our actual perception of time!

or the reverse, "Opps, 5 minutes of class left, where does the time go. Well everyone can pack up, while i finish up some 'emails'.

Oh, I love that design. I didn’t get one for the same reason you didn’t — it doesn’t seem to be a high-quality watch. How ironic.

I have one. It is a pleasure to own and excellent quality, at least on the newest revisions (mine is 2019).

The link to such a classic piece of industrial design is very pleasing. Confirmed rumour has it that entrance to a popular design museum in a prominent world city is free to anyone visibly wearing one.

The movement is electronically adjustable to precisely align the second hand and minute hand positions to exactly the right spot.

German railways use the same system as the Swiss ones, so be sure to wear it if you travel to the continent.

According to the video, it's 58 seconds on, 2 seconds off. Not a big difference, but in the video it makes the pause stand out even more.

I prefer the actual SBB clock in that its second hand sweeps smoothly, where as the second hand on the Mondain watch ticks. It's the combination of the smooth sweep and the stop that make the railway clock. Each revolution is a reminder of the elegant idea of making a clock from an imprecise electric motor and and accurate stall mechanism.

There was an intro to digital logic class for first year students at Caltech in the '80s that included doing a project to design and build something. The traditional thing people built was a digital clock.

One friend of mine took the class as a senior.

At Caltech then there were two math classes, AMa 95 and Ma 108, that were generally taken in your junior year, and were either prerequisites to or had to be taken simultaneously with nearly every junior and senior class in your major. AMa 95 for engineering and physical science majors, Ma 108 for math majors. These were both a noticeable step up in difficulty compared to the two prior years of math, and if you saw a junior who was tired and in a daze it was probably due to 95 or 108.

My friend took Ma 108.

108 had a way of then haunting you even after you got through it. You'd start noticing that number all over the place. You'd need to go to some office, and it would be room 108. You look at your watch after a leisurely lunch to see if it is time to get back to work, and it is 1:08 pm.

My friend had had enough of that, so when she built her digital clock she made it so it held 1:07 for two minutes and then went straight to 1:09.

These kind of clocks are used in many European Rail networks - the basic idea being that they get their time information by radio (usually DCF77 in central Europe), which beeps each second, but sends extra information bits such as date, hour and minute in the 59th second... which also is why when they have lost electricity, it takes up to one minute to reset to the actual time.

Oh that is delightful. The clocks on the dutch railways use the same sort of clock. It's a shame the watch ticks rather than sweeps though, it would have completed the effect.

oh. That's a bit disappointing.

I was envisioning a clock where the second hand dragged the others every time it passed over. So the minute hand would only move when swept over by the minute hand, for as far as it needed to revolve. Similarly, the hour hand.

I would be nice if the minute hand moved the hour hand, but that would be noticeably inaccurate.

get a watchy https://watchy.sqfmi.com/

In an age of ubiquitous accurate time, an intentionally misbehaving clock points out the folly of watching a clock

I think the main technically interesting thing is that it adds custom functionality to cheap, mass-produced hardware. If you wanted to build a clock completely from scratch, it would be a significant amount of work to design something that works as well as a $10 wall clock from Walmart. If you just figure out the right way to interface with that hardware, you can do interesting stuff a lot more easily.

It's a little bit reminiscent of how people figured out that you could use cheap USB TV tuners as software-defined radios, although obviously this project is a lot simpler than that.

Clocks are amazing pieces of hardware. They're surprisingly simple, but deterministic, also very monotonous because of the work they do.

An arhythmic clock which looks like broken, but keeping the time correct is interesting in many fronts. First, it looks broken, but it's not. Second, if the movement is a bit noisy, monotonous tick-rocks will become irregular, hence interesting for our brain.

In other ways, it's delightfully non-conventional, but working as intended at the end. As a result of this, it's kinda delicious as it's interesting. That's a good combination.

Lastly, all of this is packaged as a de-facto standard wall/desk clock movement. Consider if you change your meeting room's big wall clock to this. Lazy, Whacky or Tuney would be fun. Very fun.

With zero knowledge of electronics or hardware, the product description seems to outline why it's interesting pretty clearly (and quickly; the lede is not buried).

TL;DR:

> Novelty clocks:

>

> Whacky clock - ticks once a second, but on a random tenth-of-a-second, so it's arhythmic.

> Wavy clock - tick frequency is proportional to a sine wave. Sort of looks like it's "surging."

> Lazy clock - picks a random interval and then ticks that number of seconds very quickly and then just stops.

> Crazy clock - runs at three different speeds - slow, normal or fast. Much more subtle than it sounds.

> Vetinari clock - runs slightly slow, but adds a periodic "stutter" tick to make up for it.

> Warpy clock - runs 10% fast for 12 hours, then 10% slow for 12 hours. Makes the days just fly by.

> Early clock - keeps time anywhere between 0 and 10 minutes fast. For those who like to set their watch ahead to avoid being late. This clock keeps you from trying to "compensate," because you never know how early it is at the moment.

> Tuney clock - ticks normally most of the time, but occasionally will tick out "songs," like shave-and-a-haircut, or SOS in morse...

I think it's more about the whimsy and fun-ness of the hack while still keeping proper time.

I love these kinds of playful projects - feels like the core of 'hacker spirit'.

It subverts your expectations about clocks.

Click "product description", it is collapsed by default for some strange reason

What is it? I can only see a broken page with “ Klockit.com is currently unavailable in most European countries.” (why can’t we even look at it? Looks like GDPR fear)

Anyone know how the battery life compares to a ticking clock movement?

Those are almost the exact same thing - Lavet stepper clock movements. The difference is that they're geared for the coil to be driven at 8 Hz instead of 1 Hz. That gives them the appearance of being smoother. Of course, the battery will be used up 8 times as fast (though they last a long time already).

You have very limited opportunities to "crazy up" those style of movements, as the coil can only be stepped so quickly.

One does what one can. :D

Alas, there are 3 rules of (ordinary) Lavet stepper clock movements:

1. You can't make it go the opposite direction. 2. You can't change the gearing ratio between the hands. 3. You can't know where the hands are actually pointing.

What you're left with is the ability to alter the timing of the second hand and everything else falls out from that.

That is what I'm looking for. There are clocks that synchronizes to radio signals (for example DCF77 in Germany), but my problem is that the signal is too weak inside my house, and there is no information given when the clock has lost the synchronization. Maybe I look into this and build my own :)

You could totally make this in the early 2000s. Back then PIC, Atmel (pre-arduino), 8051, and Z80 chips were super cheap and accessible. Everything, including the MCUs, were standard through-hole components. Perfboard was regularly used for quick prototyping, and etching hand drawn circuit boards was accessible (IIRC one of the first articles I remember reading in the then new Make magazine back then was about DIY circuit board etching). There was a Radioshack on almost every street corner and you could get most of the parts to build this right there.

FWIW I also sell a GPS clock. It's accurate to within 200 microseconds and has a 100 ms display granularity (that is, it has a 10th of a second digit).

I'll just add that there are also non-novelty firmwares available - alternate timebase clocks. I have Martian, Sidereal, Tidal, Lunar, weekly, annual and quadrennial clocks.