experimental horology

[gfish]

I apologize for not updating about projects recently. The one big one that I've finished (fireprop) isn't officially public until this weekend. I should get a post up about it next week.

So what have I been obsessing over otherwise? Well, this.

Comments

[memegarden]

Stunning concept!

You might consider Lexan or some other clear surface, to solve the "dots floating in midair" problem.

[anansi133]

Dang, I'm glad someone is doing this!

Last I took a whack at it, the 7 stroke display was made up of plexi rods in different lengths. Then a mirrored strip would illuminate one end of each rod, and be blacked out when the rod was supposed to be dim.

15 mirrored strips, and 15 masking schemes... easier to wait for someone else to do it!

[gustavolacerda]

yay!

Can't the floating bits of metal be attached via a transparent solid?
Do you have two layers of metal?

It would be interesting (from an AI perspective) to have the design problem solved by search / constraint satisfaction algorithms.

[orawnzva]

I was wondering if there's a way to do this that factors out the redundancy in the faster-changing digits, which must show the same digit at many different sun angles in a repeating pattern, and I think it can be done with a lot of mirrors, but it'd be an awful pain.