
The Clock (2003) - incanus77
http://techno-logic-art.com/clock.htm
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IIAOPSW
I've had an idea that I've been pinning to build for a while. I call it "the
anachronism clock". The time piece is an old fashion pendulum. This is used to
generate regular electrical pulses via point contacts. This signal would go to
a series of electro-mechanical counters based on drums, motors, point
contacts, and regions of non-conductivity. The counters would be arranged to
output their position to mock nixie tubes built from LED's and plexiglass.
Once an hour a tape recorder would be activated which will play a recording of
the chimes of big ben.

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cr0sh
Definitely could be done; you'd also need an electromagnet to "pulse" the
pendulum (much like the magnetic "perpetual motion" toys out there).

Also - I would suggest using regular bulbs instead of LEDs. If you can deal
with the higher voltages involved, neon lamps would give it a great look.

Also, rather than a tape recorder, use one of those large doorbell "big ben"
chimes instead (if you can find a really old one - from the 1960s or so - some
of them used a similar motor/drum switched sequencer for the solenoid chime
playing system).

It sounds very intriguing, and probably would be cool to watch function...

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IIAOPSW
For the nixie tube I was going to copy this design
[https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:880429](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:880429)

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trixie_
He has another project - the tower, which looks amazing

[http://techno-logic-art.com/tower.htm](http://techno-logic-art.com/tower.htm)

Anyone know if there's a video of it in action?

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exrook
I found the creator's HN account, looks like he planned on making one at some
point:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Technologicart](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Technologicart)

Maybe he'll see this post and finish the video :)

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vespakoen
I really like the clocks made by Maarten Baas, it's basically a 24 hour long
video of a guy "updating the time" every minute.

He has made a couple different ones:

[http://maartenbaas.com/real-time](http://maartenbaas.com/real-time)

~~~
clort
That is really cool. I also liked "The Clock", a 24hr film montage with every
scene showing a clock with the correct time. I didn't see much of it but it
was mesmerising to watch.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_(2010_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_\(2010_film\))

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needle0
How can the clock utilize a 120V 60Hz AC signal when it's only taking power
from a 12V DC Adapter?

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jloughry
It could be a 12V _AC_ adapter. Not too common, but they do exist. Four of the
myriad diodes would be connected in a bridge rectifier to convert the AC to
DC. (I don't see any smoothing capacitors though....)

Depending on how creative you wanted to get, a clock might be designed to run
directly on a pulsating rectified DC supply. That would give you a sort of
baseband embedded clock signal at 120 Hz. Or use two half-wave rectifiers and
design the whole clock based on trinary logic, +12V/0/-12V.

Realistically, since the mains connection is hidden behind the frame, it would
be easy to tap off internally a connection to the 12V AC signal from the
secondary of the transformer, before it gets rectified and filtered to DC.

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antirez
Awesome, btw I did not think you would need so much discrete components to do
that, but probably the conversion of the counter to the digits segments is the
majority of it.

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cr0sh
It looks like DTL (diode-transistor logic) is being used; if implemented
properly, quite a few parts are needed for just a NAND gate, and a BCD decoder
uses a lot of them.

That said, counters aren't lightweight in that arena either...

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nine_k
That's a time piece I would call a piece of modern art, here "art" being used
in the most direct and non-ironic sense, as it was used in Renaissanse times.

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ncmncm
Makes me wonder, why not use decimal counters? If designed cleverly enough,
they could drive the segments directly.

Each digit would have 7 latches, one for each segment, and cycle through just
10 of the otherwise possible 128 states. It would be ironic to use clockless
logic, making simpler latches.

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Waterluvian
How long might one expect it to work before something fails?

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amelius
Does it respect daylight saving time, and leap seconds?

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augusto-moura
Does any clock implement it correctly?

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dfox
5071A does leap seconds
([http://leapsecond.com/notes/5071a-leapsecond.jpg](http://leapsecond.com/notes/5071a-leapsecond.jpg))
and IIRC even can do timezones and DST (although that seems like a feature of
somewhat questionable utility). Whether you want to call such an device a
"clock" is another issue ;)

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kwhitefoot
Why no video?

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ninjastar99
Is this for sale? Take my money!

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nwillson
beautiful.

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londons_explore
Why are there so many diodes? There totally seem to be more than necessary...
Are you biasing transistors with diodes? That doesn't sound like it's going to
work well as temperature changes...

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jonsen
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode–transistor_logic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode–transistor_logic)

