Ironic Sans has one of the coolest ideas for a clock ever: it’s a sundial! Well, OK, those have been around a while, but his idea is to have two light bulbs which circle the central post (called a gnomon). One goes around every hour, and the other goes around every minute. They are at different distances from the face of the clock, giving two different shadow lengths, and the shadows mimic the hands on a clock. Very cool.
in the comments, I added that using LEDs would make the shadows darker, and give you better shadows in a more lit room, and a cowling over the face would prevent other lights from interfering.
I seriously think this is a cool idea. I wish I could make things with tools without severing off fingers, because then I’d try it.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:06 am
Clever. Very clever.
I’d buy one. But did you describe it well? There’s three lights… The one that goes around every minute is the seconds, the one that goes around every hour is the minutes, and then there’s the one that goes around every 12 hours that is the hours.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:07 am
This lamp is way cooler
gravity lamp
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:10 am
I want one! I would buy this in a heartbeat, very cool!
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:18 am
But how does it compare to the digital sundial, which is now a full fledged product?
http://www.digitalsundial.com/
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:20 am
Sounds perfect for people with too much time on their hands.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:31 am
Hi Phil,
Careful what you wish for. It would be easy for you to get a grasp of simple and I mean “Simple” tools if you would consider how what you hold as a strength is viewed in a new perspective. IE. Physics/Astronomy -still with me?…I’m in my own words an “idiot physicist” a Blacksmith by any other definition. I have been able to watch peoples brains inflate in front of my eyes by heating up a bar of steel and showing them a few rudimentary (Yet not so obvious) steps to manipulating a seemingly immovable material. If one was so inclined and (apparently you appear to be)a class in Blacksmithing would enlighten you beyond you wildest dreams…..
Allthebest Winslow
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:32 am
Actually, it sounds perfect for the people at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:51 am
If it actually measured time, I would be interested.
I have enough rotation indicators.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:55 am
Looks like there’s the ‘Bad Astronomy effect’ (AKA The Slashdot Effect or the Screen Savers Effect). Both Evil Mad Scientist Labs and Ironic Sans are timing out when I try to open a tab to the sites.
J/P=?
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:57 am
Finally, proof that William Paley’s watchmaker thesis is complete and utter nonsense. A truly omnipotent and omniscient creator would obviously have come up with this design. Instead of all the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night malarkey, He‘d have put three luminous disks in orbit around us and a large pole in the middle of every heath.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:59 am
A suggestion… If you had one red light, one green light, and one blue light, then the shadows would also be colorized!
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:16 am
I want one!
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:23 am
I love unusual clocks and calendars. I’d not only buy one, I want to make one! I’ll have to browse about on Instructables.com for something similar.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:24 am
Uh, doesn’t the mechanism essentially require a clock to keep proper timing of the circling lights? Rube Goldberg, call your office.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:35 am
I don’t get how it works. Hi tech stuff goes over my head.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:36 am
Ummm… there’s a problem, isn’t there? At 2:40, say, the light from the hour lamp would light up the shadow from the minute lamp and vice verse.
In the picture it shows three perfect shadows. But in reality, they would all be washed out by two of the three lights. Would it be readable?
Maybe not with the colors PerryG suggests.
I like the idea though.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:49 am
Hi Phil,
If you worry about severing fingers, check out the SawStop!
Very cool, and the demo video has to be seen to be believed!
http://www.sawstop.com/how-it-works-videos.htm
-Mark
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:56 am
What’s up with using motors? Three circle mounts with timed led lamps on different heights would suffice.
Hmm, but it *is* a nice idea. For kicks I would try water for the central pin, perhaps pouring down to avoid reading difficulties. Perhaps the shadow/refraction effect would be ‘washed’ [sic] out, though.
Speaking of refraction, caustics could make one really visible and beautiful light dial.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:15 am
That’s a neat idea, but wouldn’t the lamps wash out each other’s shadows whenever they weren’t on the same side of the peg? Like, at 12:30 you’d have the minute lamp shining on the face where the hour shadow should be and vice versa so there’d be no shadows at all.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:54 am
But where do you put the cuckoo?
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Torbjorn beat me to it. Had the same idea when I looked at the bulbdial clock. The problem is that it would have to be in sort of a bowl. The advantage is no moving parts.
BTW, the Franklin Mint in Pennsylvania used to have a very nice sundial outside the visitor’s center with markings to keep the correct local time regardless of the month. A little tinkering and you could probably come up with markings to compensate for DST.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
The whole point about using motors is that you don’t need another clock. By using a ring of LEDs the idea behind the dial is corrupted and therefore detracts from the design. The problem of washing out the shadows when two lights are on opposite sides is trivially solved by having the light focussed well enough such that it does not illuminate the surface in front of the peg.
I would probably skip the second hand, since it is more likely to make quite a bit of noise. I would also add a dimmer, so you can use it at night in your bedroom.
In all, a really great idea!
PS. Joe Thomas, I hope you’re being ironic. It is so hard to tell these days…
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:25 pm
txjak, you can paint the cuckoo around the peg.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Cute, but impractical. The delay from the speed of light would make precise timekeeping impossible.
I’ll stick with my atomic clock, as difficult as it is to read at that size.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Cool. I think I’m going to build one for the November exhibition in Cologne. That’ll be the craziest model at the show…
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Cool idea. They could even make a wristwatch version and brand it with The Flintstones logo.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Very cool, but it seems like it would be a bit of an energy hog. Funny that a sun dial might not be very green.
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Was this first posted on April 1?
Neat concept though.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:38 pm
My suggestion for a name: The Nightdial.
Would be cool if it could be designed to operate as a normal sundial during the day, and then as the light fades to automatically switch on the nightdial mode.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Coloured lighting would only be practical where there were only two lights, i.e. for hours and minutes. With seconds added in, if the light sources were red, green and blue, the shadows would be cyan, magenta and yellow.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Who gives a rat’s butt ’bout such trivial noncents? We gots a much bigger “thingy” to thiink ’bout. I red where 20% of our poopuation (the USA, that is) believes the sun revolves around the earth. Us edukated folk heer in south Louisanna no it be around Jupiter. AFter all, it is bigger than earth, I think.
So, my humble advice is to git serious about such bad astonmie being taugh in the pooplic school sistem. I mean, who nose how to tell time anyway unitl the TV good stuff comes in . . . on such as reeality TV and the whether channal.
Git a life dudes and dudebts.
PS: Didn’t meen to use stuff like persentage, so 20%, for you les culltured folk, means 1 in 3.
Regards, form the state who be #51 in pooplic schol ratings.
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:58 pm
If grnwave71’s humor was any less funny, he’d be Dane Cook.
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Oh, d’uh!
Well, even if you use precision gears you would have to use some clock for rotational speed of the motor, if so the power net frequency. Even if you plan to use separate traveling mounts on tracks whereby you convert it to a velocity control problem you will still end up with a clock somewhere in the electronics.
OTOH, by nifty use of photo diodes on a circular mount I bet you can divide down the change in solar position to control which LED lamps should be on. (Or provide motor control of course.) Bad precision, but still.
Now I understand why artists gets paid - they have to invent all these purist rules.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Sorry, not divide down, you would have to control slave oscillators (which arguably would not be purists “clocks”) in a poor man’s substitute for multiplying up frequency.
The hour dial could be clock free though.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:44 pm
It’s one of those things where I like the idea, but I can’t really see it executed in a tasteful manner.
It will be something that you will find in a late night TV-shop program sold as an executive’s toy.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Using shadowing from a light source to tell the time?
Wow - what will they think of next?!
April 4th, 2008 at 2:05 am
Torbjörn, you are right: I forgot about that. The frequency of the power net works perfectly well for my alarm clock, and you don’t really need to be any more precise than that (another reason to lose the second hand).
Still, in terms of the design it is not elegant if a secondary clock is obviously needed, which is the case when you use multiple LEDs. It is not a purist rule, but rather a more sophisticated integration of form and function. I don’t mean this as a putdown, but it’s the sort of thing that you get tuned into when you visit a lot of musea and art galleries.
April 4th, 2008 at 4:08 am
Excuse me while I turn out the lights and shut the blinds so I can see what time it might be. Well, it’s no dumber than most of what passes for “cool.”
April 4th, 2008 at 5:41 am
Andhakari, look around you. Multiple light sources generally give multiple shadows. With three reasonably bright dedicated spot lights, the shadows will be quite visible in normal indoors daylight, and in the evening with the lights on. You would have a problem only in direct bright sunlight.
April 4th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Going the totally opposite direction (and something tells me this has probably already been done), why not use lasers for the hands? I mean have a laser line denote the hour, minute, second, rather than the shadows from an LED. I can already think of some practical problems, but it’s just another take on the question.
April 4th, 2008 at 8:42 am
That is an awesome idea.
April 4th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
[…] Vía Bad Astronomy Blog […]
April 4th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Pieter, I think I covered that earlier; AFAIK an artificial clock is only needed for dials that move faster than a shadow, and if you allow the power frequency for motors you can use it for LEDs.
I’m not sure how you define design “elegancy” as opposed to a purist view, because it is could be argued that it is more elegant from a design view to use a small amount of electronics instead of wearable and wasteful motors.
Maybe you mean visible elegance though, which is a no brainer win for the sketch above.
April 4th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Yes, I think we should differentiate between aestetic design and engineering design, although the two are clearly related.
April 4th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Yes, for sure.
I have a pendence to view axiomatic design as aesthetic as you can establish (enough) independence between design functions to make the design feasible or sturdy.
April 5th, 2008 at 6:05 am
I stopped wearing a watch (I’ve sinced coined the term “time-cuff” to descibe them as in hand cuffs because of the way one becomes a slave to the damned things) since 1986.
I realised that no matter how good a watch is it doesn’t get you to where you are going any faster, in fact, a strange side effect of a watch is to distort time in the worst possible way, e.g. making unpleasant things last longer. I’ve not worked out how this happens yet since the watch does not exhibit coherent distortion of space/time, but my observations have led me towards thinking that it has something to do with how hairy ones arms are because when my partner is shopping she doesn’t experience the same time as me.
A watch is also quite a dangerous thing to be wearing when one has ones hands inside high voltage equipment or computer cabinets (possibly the real reason why I stopped wearing them).
Since discarding it, I can say that time is really not that important outside of the experiments and measurements that require accuracy. We’ve been duped into thinking that we need to know the time, much like our “need” to know the weather in a continent half a planet away.
Neat idea though Phil although I’d favour laser pointers and getting rid of the central pillar.
How about a smelly-clock? Different smells could be activated by being exposed to the light at the various times, e.g. fry up breakfast at 8am, tea coffee and biscuits at 11am, canteen smells at 1pm, traffic fumes at 5pm, sweaty gym socks at 6pm, etc etc.
Just think of the excuses… “Sorry I’m late, someone in the office broke wind and I thought it was an hour earlier than it actually was”.
Gary made a point at the beginning that noone seemed to pick up on, quote: “Uh, doesn’t the mechanism essentially require a clock to keep proper timing of the circling lights?”
ROFL
April 7th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Why are people confused? Of course it requires a clock. Whether it is an electronic timing circuit or a motor and gear system, it requires a clock. Duh! Nowhere does it claim to not require a clock. The beauty isn’t the lack of a clock mechanism of some sort, it is the amusement of a “sundial” using artificial light. It’s a joke, a gimmick. Just because some people think it would be a fun gimmick to actually have rather than look at conceptual art of, doesn’t make it any less of a joke.