My new heine clock

[rm.o]

I thought I'd post pictures of my most recent project, the Heine clock. It's my take on the binary clock, using 4 bits for the hour and 6 for the minute. It runs of the parallel port for simplicity and accuracy, and switches 10 sets of two christmas tree lights on and off using transistors, which lights up a small collection of heineken bottles.

In case you're wondering, it reads from left to right, i.e. the left most bottle is the 1 bit and the rightmost is 32 or 8.

Here's an overall shot of it, the time is 2:10, the camera captured the lights badly:

A closeup of the minutes display:

And a blurry picture of the transistor board:

It's a bit hard to read in during the day, but at night it's pretty cool lookin'.

I'll probably add some black poster board behind the bottles to hide the wiring and make it easier to read during the day.

 

[sanjay369]

Good work. I wish we could see the lights more effectively. Maybe using white LED's would show better than xmas lights?

 

[NleahciM]

what circuit did you use? Has anyone ever made one of these just using logic circuits? I've always thought that would be pretty killer if it could be done without a uc, up, or anything else that had to be programmed...

 

[Aristarchus]

Building one out of discrete IC's wouldn't be all that hard. I believe that 32.768KHz crystals are made for that purpose. If you wanted to be a masochist, and build it out of discrete AND & OR gates, it would be a bit more labor intensive, but still well within the realm of possibility.

 

[rm.o]

LED's are too expensive for my budget, I had a few laying around that I tried out, and it looked good, but the christmas lights were free.

Here's a circuit that runs off of AC power, I'll probably convert it to run of a PIC later, but it's a bit out of my reach at the moment, since I don't know pic assembly yet, but I'm working on it.

As for the circuit I used, I'd have to draw it up, but I just used the first 6 bits of the data out on the parallel port for the minutes, and all 4 bits of the control out for the hour, and ran those through transistors powered by the +5v from the computer it's hooked up to. You could probably get away without the transistors if you used LED's and wired them in parallel.

 

[Acceptable_Risk]

Me and a few other guys built a clock using a 2 MHz ocillator and just a bunch of NOR logic and shift registers. We ran the output through a PIC driving a few seven-segment displays to make it more readable. It took for-freaking-ever and I can't say it was worth it. But what else are you gonna do with boxes and boxes of circa-1970 DIP's?

 

[agent420]

Originally posted by Acceptable_Risk
But what else are you gonna do with boxes and boxes of circa-1970 DIP's?

This is what I did with some

[edit] Nice [H]eini clock btw.

 

[spugnor]

Originally posted by NleahciM
what circuit did you use? Has anyone ever made one of these just using logic circuits? I've always thought that would be pretty killer if it could be done without a uc, up, or anything else that had to be programmed...

Yeah. Was one of the projects in sequential logic circuits class in college. I loved that class! All done with flip flops and base logic gates. Took up most of a fairly large breadboard, but it was a fully functional 12/24 hour clock with alarm. The hardest part was the clock setting citcuitry.