A 7-Phase Clock Constructed With No Digital Electronics

If you needed to construct a clock with a 7-segment show, there are all kinds of the way you would possibly go about it. You may seize some 74-series logic chips and create an entire bunch of counters and decoders to drive the show, or you would wire up a microcontroller with an RTC and have it do the onerous work. Or, as a Japanese firm as soon as did… you could create a “digital” looking clock with no digital electronics whatsoever.

[Mark Furneaux] set about tearing down a Lumitime clock, constructed by the Japanese firm Tamura. From the surface, it seems to be a quite fashionable digital clock, with a daring crimson 7-segment show lit with neons. And in some regards, it’s. Only, the key of this clock is that it doesn’t use digital electronics to do the job. There aren’t any counters inside, no real-time clock module, no transistor-based logic chips doing the counting with the output of a 32.768 KHz crystal. Instead, a motor drives a sequence of gears that flip metallic plates that transfer underneath sliding finger contacts. The gear prepare and the metallic plates are designed such that the contacts flip the varied phase neons on within the right sequence to show the present time. It’s like a participant piano, solely as an alternative of enjoying a tune, it’s switching the segments of a show on and off to show the precise numerals on the proper time.

It’s a neat method to do a “digital” clock from an period when correct digital electronics had been nonetheless very costly. We’ve seen all types of whacky 7-segment clocks earlier than, too, like this amusing water-based build. Video after the break.