Planet Arduino

Although flip clocks may be extremely interesting electromechanical devices, with rolling flaps to show what time it is, they’re also fairly complicated if you want to build one yourself. Mark Wilson, however, took a different approach with his project, simulating the output on a 320×240 LCD display.

The clock is powered by an Arduino Uno and a DS3231 RTC module, allowing it to show the time, date, a blinking colon, and even the days until the trash/recycling needs to be put out. Alternate screens are available as well, including a Pong clock, triangle clock, and cube clock, which can be individually selected or set to randomly cycle if you so desire. 

For its housing, Wilson chose a minimal acrylic/standoff design that seems to suit it well, and you can see it in action in the short demo clip below.

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.