It’s at all times clock time at Hackaday, and this time we’ve got an fascinating hack of a clock by [danjovic]– the CIS4, a Cistercian digital clock.
The Cistertians, in case you weren’t paying shut consideration to European holy orders in the course of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries had been the group of monks you’d probably have discovered us in. They had been the hackers of the center ages, establishing monestaries throughout western Europe that had been chock stuffed with hacks– together with their very own numeral system. Cistercian numerals had been way more environment friendly (in areas and penstrokes) than the Roman numerals they changed, and even the “Arabic” numerals that changed them. A single glyph may file something from 1 to 9,999. (The Europeans hadn’t but cottoned on to zero.)
Relying the way you wished to depend time, a single glyph could possibly be used; it appears like [danjovic] is utilizing the 1000’s and a whole bunch parts of the glyph for hours and the tens and ones for minutes. That is all achieved with a 4×4 neopixel matrix, run by an Attiny85 Digispark with a DS3231 RTC module holding time. A slight simplification is required to scale back the glyphs to 4×4, however we don’t suppose the monks would thoughts. For these of us who don’t put on tonsures, a simple learn mode scrolls the time in Arabic numerals. (Which nonetheless aren’t tremendous simple,with solely 4×4 LEDs to show them. See the demo video embedded under and attempt to guess the time.)
One good high quality of life characteristic is an LDR for ambient gentle detection, to routinely alter the neopixels’ brightness. The hackiest half, which we thought was actually intelligent, is the enclosure: it’s an affordable LED ceiling gentle. This supplies a diffuser, housing and mounting {hardware} with first rate design for no effort. A 3D-printed masks sits between the diffuser and the LEDs and doubles as a PCB holder. All very elegant.
[danjovic] did embrace a buzzer within the design, however does say if its been programed to hold forth for matins, nones and vespers. In any case, at the least it’s simpler to learn than his binary-coded-octal clock that we featured a number of years again. This isn’t our first have a look at this quantity system,so evidently folks can learn them with apply.
Have you ever made or seen a cool clock? Ship us a tip. We at all times have time for clocks.
