Gadget Master

Time goes by so slowly for electrical engineers without this very cool custom made Pong watch.

Back in the days of the Berlin Wall, these Nixie tubes were manufactured by a now long-forgotten company. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and Hans Summers found them stocked by an antique electronics part company.

Originally painted red, the coating from the 4-inch high tubes were painstakingly removed using a craft knife. Using a plain matrix board and wire connections, Hans built the circuit on three boards.

The first holds the rectifier, divide by 50 circuit, seconds counters and seconds driver transistors. The second and third boards hold the counters and drivers for the minutes and hours digit pairs. Now your tribute to East Germany is sure to get past Checkpoint Charlie.

You can read the full details of the project, including a data sheet for the Z568M and details of the construction, on Hans' website.

The Nixie tube

Hans used the Z568M, which is 4-inches high (100mm) and has a digit height of 2 inches (50mm). It is therefore truly a giant amongst nixie tubes, he says, presumably intended for railway clock applications and so on.

• Charlieplexing - Cylon-eyes and Holoclocks


• Hans' Nixie clock takes a step back in time


• Broken quartz clock hack produces Timebase generator

Long term readers of this blog know we have featured Nixie tube clocks a couple of times (see here and here), but this is the first one for a wrist watch. And worn by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, no less.

We've all been there. You wake in the middle of the night, it's still dark, but you are not sure how many precious hours you have before work (or minutes, even, in the winter).  

For some (not me) a clock will be clearly visible, but Gadget Master Nirav Patel needs glasses and the world can seem blurry without them....

Yes, he could stretch to put on his glasses and then clock the time (waking himself up in the process) or he could - as an ingenious inventor - create a device for displaying on the ceiling how much time remains for sleep, using a Lego-housed Arduino-based laser device.

(For more Arduino-based laser shows, see also - Build your own laser harp)

Wow. How cool is this? A spinning hard drive that displays the time.

LEDs positioned behind the disk will shine through the cut out numbers in the platter, with a custom controller circuit automatically coordinating the blinking LEDs. These will illuminate the appropriate number windows when they are lined up.

It takes time to warm up - patience, while watching - but when the platter hits the right speed, the time emerges... Magic.

How cool is this? It is an Arduino project dubbed The Worduino, from the excellent WyoInnovations blog.

Basically, it is a clock that tells the time in highlighted words rather than the traditional dial.

You can see some pictures of the big and little word clocks and there are full instructions for assembly, in PDF form.

Anool writes: