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The periodic table is arguably the most popular symbol of nerd pride. Everyone knows what it is, but few people are familiar enough with it to make real use of it. There aren’t, for instance, many people that can tell you the atomic number of darmstadtium. If you’re one of the nerdy few who can, then Görkem Bozkurt’s Periodic Table Clock is perfect for you.

This clock displays the time by illuminating different elements on a translucent periodic table. The color blue corresponds to hours, green corresponds to minutes, and red corresponds to seconds. So if you see Calcium lit in blue, Indium lit in green, and Lanthanum lit in red, then the military time is 20:49:57 (8:49:57 in the evening). If two must share the same element, like when the time is 3:10:10, then it will mix the two colors (yellow in this case). If three share the same element, like 2:02:02, then it should be obvious because only a single element will be lit.

The frame and face plate are 3D-printable. There are various ink printing techniques to create the periodic table overlay, or the user can perform a filament-swap technique to 3D-print in two colors. Illumination comes from a strip of WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs controlled by an Arduino Nano board. It uses a DS1307 RTC module for accurate timekeeping. Three push buttons positioned on the frame let the user set the current time.

The post The Periodic Table Clock oozes nerdy charm appeared first on Arduino Blog.

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that here at Hackaday, we’re about as geeky as they come. Having said that, even we were surprised to hear that there are people out there who collect elements. Far be it from us to knock how anyone else wishes to fill their days, but telling somebody at a party that you collect chemical elements is like one step up from saying you’ve got a mold and fungus collection at home. Even then, at least a completed mold and fungus collection won’t be radioactive.

But if you’re going to spend your spare time working on a nerdy and potentially deadly collection, you might as well put it into an appropriate display case. You can’t just leave your Polonium sitting around on the kitchen counter. That’s the idea behind the interactive periodic table built by [Maclsk], and we’ve got to admit, if we get to put it in a case this awesome we might have to start our own collection.

A large portion of this project is building the wooden display case itself as, strangely enough, IKEA doesn’t currently stock a shelving unit that’s in the shape of the periodic table. The individual cells and edge molding are made of pine, the back panel is MDF, and the front of the display is faced off with thin strips of balsa to cover up all the joints. Holes were then drilled into the back of each cell for the LED wiring, and finally the entire frame was painted white.

Each cell contains an WS2812B RGB LED, which at maximum brightness draws 60mA. Given the 90 cells of the display case, [Maclsk] calculated a 5.4A power supply would be needed to keep everything lit up. However, he found a 4A power supply that made his budget happier, which he reasons will be fine as long as he doesn’t try to crank every cell up to maximum at the same time. Control for the display is provided by an Arduino Nano and HC05 Bluetooth module.

The final piece of the project was the Android application that allows the user to control the lighting. But it doesn’t just change colors and brightness, it’s actually a way to visualize information about the elements themselves. The user can do things like highlight certain groups of elements (say, only the radioactive ones), or light up individual cells in order of the year each element was discovered. Some of the information visualizations are demonstrated in the video below, and honestly, we’ve seen museum displays that weren’t this well done.

We last caught up with [Maclsk] when he created a very slick robotic wire cutting machine, which we can only assume was put to work for this particular project. Too bad he didn’t have a robot to handle the nearly 540 soldering joints it took to wire up all these LEDs.

[via /r/DIY]



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