Planet Arduino

As a gift for friends that operate tours of Prince William Sound in Alaska, maker ‘rabbitcreek’ decided to make a humongous (4’ diameter) tide clock, controlled by dual Arduino Nanos. 

One Nano operates the adorable—though very large—otter on the clock’s face via a servo and gear reduction setup that holds a kayak paddle to indicate high and low tides. The other board handles the unit’s RGB LED lighting, which shines the appropriate color to indicate the vast swings in daylight time of that region.

An RTC module for each Nano provides accurate timekeeping—thus proper tide and daylight indications—and a small monitor is used for maintenance tasks. It’s a brilliant build that is certain to delight residents and tourists to the area alike!

If you want to know the tide in your area, you could look it up in the paper, on the Internet, or using an app, but this moon-shaped tide clock provides a unique way to see what’s going on at a glance.

The 3D-printed device uses an Arduino Nano for processing, along with an RTC module to keep accurate time—thus accurate tide predictions. A tiny OLED display provides three info screens, selected via a rocket shaped button taking off of the moon’s surface. 

As the clock is meant for education, the moon design will provide a nice reminder of what actually shifts the tides. Arduino code as well as 3D-print files are available on the project’s write-up.

Old fashioned tide clocks were an attempt to predict high tide by timing the rising and setting of the moon. When you looked at one you could see how many hours until the next high tide. [rabbitcreek] wanted to make his own version of the tide clock that does a better job of predicting the actual high tide than those old clocks, which were essentially glorified timers tuned to the moon’s phases.

[rabbitcreek] based his the tide prediction software off of [Luke Miller’s] Tide Clock, which applies location-specific adjustments to the standard lunar clock, taking into consideration such factors as the geographic features (basin depth, etc.) that modify the default timing. [Miller]’s Arduino code includes a library of common locations organized by NOAA station number.

[rabbitcreek]’s project consists of a Adafruit Feather board hooked up to a DS3231 RTC breakout and a HS-225BB servo, which turns the clock’s hand. It’s an 180-degree servo, attached to a hacked-down Actobotics gearbox gearing the servo down 2:1 to permit 360 degrees of movement.

He also wanted his creation to be left to operate unattended for years, theoretically — so solar power was a natch. The face of the clock consists of individual wavers of solar panel glued into a huge clock-like array. The solar cells feed into an Adafruit PowerBoost 500, a TPL5111 low power timer breakout, and a LiPo battery for when it’s dark out.

If you’re looking for more solar clocks check out this one that uses capacitors as hour markers.