Time Pieces

I have a little fascination with time pieces, not your regular clocks though, but interesting ways to display the time. Every now and then I think of a new idea (or find one on the net) that I think would be cool to have sitting on my desk.

The Nixie clock. I have a bunch of nixie tubes that i scavenged from a 1960's calculator. A nixie tube is what ws used for electronic displays before the 7-segment led came along. They are neon lights with cathodes in the shape of the numbers 0-9. When you apply ~200V between the cathode and annode the neon glows an awesome orange colour around the cathode. The difficulty with this project is the high voltages required.


The Binary Clock. Simply six columns of upto 4 led's that light up with binary numbers. Simple, but you have to be a bit of a geek to read and appreciate it.

Volumetric Display Clock. A 5x5x5 cube of RGB leds. Can display alot of cool patterns on it but also the time in a number of ways.
Multi-meter clock. And my latest idea, have a microcontroller generate three voltages that extend to three test points labeled Hours, minutes and seconds. By probing with a multimeter you can discover the time.