I'm the guy behind the project, and I'd like to thank cbsks for posting it. If anyone has questions, please feel free to hit me up on Twitter (@nwsayer) or post on the hackaday.io project page (https://hackaday.io/project/5880-crazy-clock)
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. (?)
These mechanisms are super simple to control: just disconnect the board and use a Raspberry Pi or Arduino to send a pair of signals (+ and -) to make the second hand jump one second.
I did an art project back in 2016 with a $2 IKEA clock with a Raspberry Pi and a camera. I used OpenCV to detect when someone was looking at the clock, and when that happened the hands would stop moving, freezing. When the person looked away the clock would tick at a faster race, until it caught up with the right time. One of my favorite projects!
I'm thinking "teacher mode" that goes fast for the first 45 "mins" of the hour then slows incrementally so the last 5 "mins" takes 15 minutes to pass! Evil.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many office buildings had a network of slave clocks which were driven by one master clock.
In normal operation each clock is stepped forward by a DC pulse each minute, but in the last minute any slow clocks are driven by multiple rapid reverse polarity pulses, which align the hands to the 12:00 o'clock position.
This means that the hands of most clocks smoothly step forward, but any incorrect clocks will catch up by suddenly racing to the 12:00 o'clock position once each hour.
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.
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.
> 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.
I have been wanting this for years. Wish I could do it to my watch.
For those who don't know, the "Vetinari" clock is a reference to Lord Vetinari, patrician of Ankh-Morpork in the Diskworld books of Terry Pratchett. He had a mechanical clock that behaved like this in his waiting room so that people waiting to see him would be slowly driven crazy by the irregular tick.
I synthesize a little martian electrical grid: HP5071a atomic clock --10MHz--> HP3325a --58.394657765 Hz--> HP6827a bipolar amplifier --~100vac--> clock.
Plus side I can have as many sync motor mars clocks as I want and it's only using random gear I had laying around, downside is that it's not very energy efficient, perhaps about 150W. :P
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.
Now I'm wondering if times I couldn't sleep because of a ticking clock were due to arrhythmia in the clock - low batteries, extreme temperatures, dirt, spider mite sitting on pinion - that somehow prevented my brain from filtering out the sound.
Probably more likely a lack of sync in my brain (I have very little sense of rhythm).
Interesting point. I have a fairly loud ticking wall clock in my living room. When I have guests stay on the sofa I have to remove the battery, it drives them insane. I never notice it ticking at all, I just don't hear it, it's ticking right now because I'm thinking about it.
What I would love is a clock with a consistent sound, mine makes a slightly different tick for some odd positions and that bugs me.
Generally the movements come with a rubber gasket that you're supposed to put over the shaft before attaching it to the back of the face. The rubber cuts down on the ticking noise. Of course, if you buy a Crazy Clock that has novelty firmware, you probably _want_ to hear it.
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.
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...
Fantastic! I've been thinking about tinkering with clocks lately, Here's why: I recently saw this video [0] about controlling clocks and it made me want to do it too.
At one time I had a backwards clock [1]. It turns out it was the only analog clock in the house so after a while I got used to it. Then I would be jolted back to reality when going outside and seeing a "normal clock.
And how about these one-handed watches [2]. Ostensibly, they "fundamentally change the way you look at your watch and ... give you a much better consciousness about the progression of your day". True? After my experience with the backwards clock, I'd like to find out. But I don't want to buy an expensive watch, I'd rather make my own one-handed clock.
This is super neat. I identified a desire for the tolerance clock (*) many years ago, but never thought I'd see it implemented.
(*) The tolerance clock always displays time that is within some tolerance of true time, but that is all it guarantees. I never worked out formal specs, so either crazy clock or early clock would suffice I think.
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)
The ultra-quiet Quartex® Continuous Sweep Mini Clock Movement is a quartz clock movement that moves the second hand in a smooth, continuous motion. This continuous motion eliminates the ticking sound traditional clock motors make.
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.
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.
Interesting, thanks for the reply. I think an analog clock that could set the time using NTP over wifi would be a 'killer feature'. Radio clocks just don't work that well in many places.
Getting a reply from (presumably) the source is what I love about HN.
I thought that radio clocks were dead! The US government transmitters that make them work were supposed to be turned off in 2019, and I hadn't heard that the decision was reversed.
NIST's original 2019 budget proposal would've defunded and eliminated WWVB, but the final budget didn't-- likely a direct result of the public outcry about the closure.
The 3rd rule is the only one that would prevent NTP correction, & if we're augmenting network access anyway, adding extra features to overcome rule 3 seems like it would be feasible. Some kind of encoder perhaps?
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 :)
I'd say this is related to Amazon Prime sales with the Echo Wall Clock.
I was going to buy one for the ability to fast forward time as a trick (which is just how it sets itself, no tricks) the Echo Clock is so close to electronic junk, while also so close to useful.
But I did wonder if children would consider a clocks flow as immutable as older, pre cellphone generations.
This is a cool project. And it'll be interesting to see how future generations see time.
After a recent purge of Amazon spy devices in my home, I'm left with a non-functional Echo Wall clock. It seems rather sophisticated, since the time can be set remote (it does eat batteries though). I like the design a lot and would like to keep it around.
Has anyone been able to hack the firmware? Could the motor be 'hacked' with the Crazy Clock PCB?
For decades I've wanted to build a clock that would speed up and slow down at various times of the day. For example to give you a longer lunch by speeding up just before lunchtime and slowing down when it's time to get back to work. The firmware would be trivial, but putting together the whole project was too much for me to get started.
It's astonishing how the costs have come down in the maker electronics world. If you wanted a "clock with a custom tick pattern" twenty years ago you'd need to go and commission someone to build it for you. Today you can buy the board for $12.00
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.
For a different take on clocks (ultra-high precision), there are studio clocks (with lots of synchronization machinery to make sure all all synchronized). One such example is the evertz 1275T
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 found this project a while back when I was searching for information on how to drive lavet stepper motor[1] inside these kind of clocks[2].
My project is similar in a way that you have to manually drive this motor, idea is to convert existing 12-hour clock to 'week' 168-hour clock. Hour hand would make full rotation only each 168 hours, showing current day of the week and approximate part of the day.
Very cool project to tinker with electronics and gears, you have to figure out timing(30ms energize, 970ms rest, repeat in reverse polarity) and how to drive motor(use half-bridge circuit or motor driver)[3], you have to deal with inductive 'kick' flyback voltage spikes and protect IC from it[4], and figure out mechanical gears[5] (typical quartz mechanism[6])
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.
