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Illusionary LED clock

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the persistence-of-vision dept.

Graah writes: "A pretty interesting clock which uses a spinning set of diodes to create an illusionary LCD clock. This page includes everything you need to build your own, except the hardware of course. =)" Note that one item on the list of things you'll need is "[a] programmer that will program a PIC16C84 or 16F84 microprocessor." Often you can find these inside broken VCRs.

15 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. This is INCREDIBLY old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    This is at least two years old. It's been around for a long while.

    PICs are great little microcontrollers. Get one from DigiKey for around $6. A good programmer for them you can build is called the NOPPP. It's easy and cheap to build.

    This guy built a better version of the propeller clock.

    Hope this helps.

  2. Mirror by redhotchil · · Score: 3

    Most of it is mirrored here.

  3. Re:A few questions by Emil+Brink · · Score: 3
    OK, I'll bite. I'm just a software dude playing around with electronics on the side, so... Anyway, here goes nothing:
    1. Probably something to deal with the fact that the board containing the LEDs for the clock is rotating, so transferring signals to them becomes kind of complicated.
    2. A kind thin board featuring strips of copper and lots of holes drilled on a standardized grid. Dead handy for building circuits without using real printed circuit boards
    3. No idea, sorry.
    4. Likewise.
    5. A PIC 16C84 is a wonderful microcontroller made by Microchip. It's a RISC design, and uses a Harvard architecture. Commonly clocked at 4 MHz, which lets it execute 1 million instructions per second. Very popular among us hobbyists because it stores its program in 1024 words of EEPROM, thus making it easily erasable and reprogrammable using just electricity--no UV light or anything like that.
    6. A DIP resistor, I would guess, is another name for a "resistor network", which is just a bunch (seven or eight seems common) of resistors mounted in a standard DIP (that's dual inline package) capsule. Very handy when you need lots of same-value resistors for e.g. LED current limiting.
    7. "16C84" is just a shorter form of "PIC16C84", of course. The word programmer in this context referes to a piece of specialized hardware which is used to transfer instructions into the EEPROM of the chip. The net is full of build instructions for those, and they're all pretty nice and simple.
    Um, again, please note that I'm just an electronics hobbyist, not a real expert (TM). Anyway, I hope that clears some of it up for you.
    --
    main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
  4. The Spinny Clock Club by fliplap · · Score: 3
    Wee...more spinny clocks:

    Dave Barrett's Clock

    The Original - Bob Blick's Clock

    Luberth Dijkman's Clock

    Andrew Jardine's Clock

    Ken Staton's Clock

    Victor Tihonov's Clock

    Don Zehnder's Clock

    Come one, build a clock, join the club!
    ---------------------------------------

  5. Also possible with no moving parts by HangHigh · · Score: 3
    Another interesting twist on this idea is to mount a bunch of LED's on a pole (one long single column). You then use the viewers motion to generate the desired message. Typically this would be timed such that a moving car would provide sufficient motion.

    So at night, a driver passing by in a car would see a message, yet if they stopped to see what the hell was that, they wouldn't see anything.

    What I describe has been done and is VERY OLD (> 20 years). Stiff fun stuff though.

  6. Re:Beowulf Cluster by BigBlockMopar · · Score: 3

    It allows all timezones to be displayed :-)

    You're a putz, Bob. I like you. I checked out your website, you build really cool stuff. Thanks for putting these neat little projects up on the 'Net!

    Uhhh... I design radar equipment for Litton; any chance of getting your microwave oven hack schematics, despite the danger warnings? (I've got *no* idea how you'd have handled the waveguide issues, or even how you built the antenna!)

    --
    Fire and Meat. Yummy.
  7. no; you have to build him yourself by Anne+Marie · · Score: 3

    From the article: If you don't have any way to put the program into a PIC 16C84 or 16F84 chip, you can build your own programmer.

    So if you don't already have a programmer, you'll have to build a programmer yourself. None of this weak "find a programmer in a box" crap -- do it yourself.

    --
    -- Anne Marie
  8. Another idea for a project by squiggleslash · · Score: 3
    This is probably ultimately off topic - mental thought process that got me here was "cool, an image generated by a mechanism moving some beams of light, hey, where have I seen that before?"

    John Logie Baird, a Scot, is supposedly the inventor of the television (but not anything we'd recognise today as a TV.) His device, which was experimented with by the BBC in the mid twenties[? I think - any geek historians out there?], was a large wheel with thirty lenses around the edge, all at a slight offset from one another. The transmitter was a light sensitive resistor on one side of the such a wheel. The receiver also had a wheel, and had a light bulb on one side, and a screen on the other. The different offsets for the lenses meant that when the wheel was spinned, the resister would automatically scan 30 lines; on the receiver, the light bulb would illuminate the same positions on the screen thanks to having a similar set of lenses.

    Needless to say, while it was first, it was also crap (30 lines for crying out loud), but it was capable of transmitting something that looked like a human face in real-time, and thus, for the twenties, was reckoned to be the coolest thing since the, well, coolest thing that had come before it. No doubt it was much discussed on Slashdot's predecessors at the time.

    Now we have tiny little leds with less persistance, and can bank them, and presumably are perfectly able to generate wheels with considerably more than 30 lenses, the question arises - is it possible to create a mechanical TV (camera and/or receiver) capable of producing/showing an NTSC or PAL signal?

    Or even have... *shudder* a mechanical VGA monitor?!

    Well I think it would be cool anyway. I'm guessing if we can use leds on a spinning drum to generate a clock from cheap off the shelf components, we ought to be able to out-Logie Baird right now.

    (No, I don't know what that meant either)
    --

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  9. *phew* by Aphelion · · Score: 4

    For a moment there, I thought the headline of this story was "Illusionary LSD clock".

    Makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?

  10. If you thought this was cool, check out the ROPOD! by egnor · · Score: 4

    The ROPOD (ROtating POlar Display) is a similar device, only the screen is a spinning disc rather than a rotating cylinder, making this one of the few displays to use a polar coordinate system. It's also capable of quite a bit more than telling time; the resolution is much higher, and the author has software that can decode a compressed animation format for video display. Follow the link for photos etc..

    The coolest thing about the ROPOD is that it's this huge, whirling, rickety contraption that makes bystanders fear for their lives...

  11. Another resource by SubtleNuance · · Score: 4

    If you find this project interesting, you may want to also see THIS link which has details/schemas on many other Mech.Scanned clocks. None as neat and clean as Blick's - but nice nonetheless. Has a few projects with pretty large units - different formats/methods ect.. have a look.

    Ive been putting off building a mechanically scanned clock like this for some time! I saw this page some time ago, Bob Blick's project is very neat and clean. I stumbled across it while researching about BEAM robotics. Meant to comment on the last story here on /. about the Home Robot. I dug up this link which is decidedly more hardcore an offering compared to the Pocket-Bot (scroll to very bottom of page) offered by Divent (though _Not_ the bot featured in the /. article - it is the other kit Divent apparently markets).



    Hey Americans: Big Biz has bought your Democracy, are using your gov' and military to enslave you. Wake up. Free yourselves. Do the world a favour; Tell your friends/relatives/neighbours to:

  12. Yeah right by Breace · · Score: 5

    Note that one item on the list of things you'll need is "[a] programmer that will program a PIC16C84 or 16F84 microprocessor." Often you can find these inside broken VCRs.

    I'm sure not the programmer but the PIC16C84 itself, right?

  13. Nope, it was right the first time. by NoWhere+Man · · Score: 5

    Mini Programmers save space and hardware. They feed off the dust inside VCRs and TVs. Unfortunately the heat eventually makes them pass out. Which is why electronics stop working for no reason and then start back up again after you shake them, you just woke him back up.

    --

    "Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
  14. I built a simpler one with a BASIC STAMP... by Speare · · Score: 5

    In 1995 or so, I built a simpler model using a Parallax, Inc. v1 BASIC Stamp circuit.

    (For those of you who haven't toyed with a BASIC Stamp, it's a 14 pin SIPP circuit board (1.4" x 0.5") with a 5-12V DC voltage regulator, clock, 8 programmable I/O pins, 256 bytes EEPROM memory, and TTL/RS232 control lines. You download programs that are tokenized BASIC, and the program is run whenever power is available.)

    My clock and silent-radio didn't have a spatial sync, but did drive five LEDs to scroll through a message. I trickle-charged a small 1 Farad capacitor to power the circuit for about ten minutes, and spun the whole apparatus around on the end of a pencil to read the display.

    I recommend the BASIC Stamps (v1 or the more capable v2s) for anyone who wants to play with digital programmable circuits for the first time.

    My other 1.0-Farad-powered project was a small sound-effects generator that rode inside a slotcar racer. It used four tilted mercury switches as a crude accelerometer, to provide screech and revving sounds for my racecar.

    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
  15. Alarm Clock? by pmcneill · · Score: 5

    Would definitely wake me up...

    /me reaches over

    *whap* *whap* *whap*

    /me awakens quickly