A LED Strip Clock As Linear As Time

We love custom clocks here at Hackaday, and are always thrilled to see each inventive means of time-keeping. In a seldom-seen take on the familiar device, the [Bastel Brothers]’s LED Strip Clock’s sleek profile finds itself in good company.

The clock is a two-metre strip of 60 LEDs; every minute past the current hour corresponds to one lit LED, every fifth LED is turned to red in order to make reading minutes easier. So 3 red LEDs +3 green LEDs=18 minutes, with the hour marked by a third color. Sounds complex, but the [Brothers] are quick to say you get used to it quickly, especially when the 6 o’clock LED is centered at some noticeable object or feature.

A custom and home-etched PCB using an ATtiny4313 instead of an Arduino are the clock’s brains, a Maxim DS1307 for time-keeping, and a simple rotary encoder as the input for setting the time. The processor was seen as excessive at the time, but looking back the [Bastels] say it hasn’t left much room for upgrades or future tinkering, so it wasn’t really worth saving a few bucks in this case. The code is available here but, as the [Brothers] admit —  use it at your own risk since it’s a bit of a mess. Still, it works and looks damn good at the same time.

We recently featured a different kind of linear clock, but really, you could spend days browsing our archives of many magical and wondrous clocks.

Filed under: ATtiny Hacks, clock hacks