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Retro tech is almost always ripe for the hacking — be it nostalgia, an educational teardown, or acknowledging and preserving the shoulders upon which we stand. Coming across an old West-German built flip clock, YouTuber [Aaron Christophel] retrofitted the device while retaining its original mechanical components!
No modern electronics are complete without LEDs of some kind, so he has included a strip in the base of the clock face for visibility and cool factor. He doesn’t speak to the state of the clock beforehand, but he was able to keep the moving bits of the clock working for its second shot at life.
Controlling the clock is an Arduino Mini Pro and a simple DS1307 RTC board housed within the clock itself. Originally, it had a conspicuous external box that housed the electronics and power supply that has now been rendered obsolete — or ready for re-purposing another day! Code for the Arduino is an efficient few lines using a pair of libraries. All it needs to do is flip the polarity of the electromagnet motor every minute to update the time.
We like an elegant hack once in a while and sometimes retro tech lends itself to exactly that.
