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Over the years, there have been a lot of cool clocks. There is the Dick Tracy radio watch, the Captain Hook crocodile clock, and the ever-popular beer o'clock timepiece. But they all take a backseat to this piece of geeky hardware from Ian Smith - the Hard Drive Clock.
This clock features a custom PCB from SparkFun subsidiary BatchPCB. Ian had to make sure the hard drive was perfectly balanced and ran smoothly before he could get this clock to work. He also used a hall effect sensor and a strip of flexible LEDs. The results are pretty stunning! Awesome work, Ian!
hey thanks for taking me back to 2008
I'm building an LED-based Analog Clock using a charlieplexed array of 128 size 0603 SMD LEDs driven by an ATmega644, on a custom BatchPCB board:
http://jcole.us/w/Electronics:LED_Analog_Clock
Some videos are here:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FF299459C58B273A
Bravo to the creator. This and the Nixie are the coolest clocks I've ever seen.
This is just the beginning too. I see a lot more projects spawning from this. 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 floppy clock anyone?
Coolest persistence LED hack I've seen to date!
If I remember correctly, there was a thread on the Sparkfun forum a while ago about a strobe clock, and there was heated debate over whether this sort of thing was possible...
Is it me or is that clock running backwards.
Pretty sweet, but a google search will turn up a bunch of these. Thanks for the article though, I have an old 60gb hard drive sitting around and I needed to think of something to use it for!
Now I know what to do with my hard drives when they are replaced with SSDs! lol & nice work
Amazing!
So. Cool. Brilliant theory and execution.
The only thing more I want from this is a VERY quiet case for it. :)
Wow, that's kewl!
sweet!