Binary clock: oh the l33tness!

Hey everybody!

I'm doing a project for my digital logic design class; I'm designing a binary clock. I'm aiming to be price-competitive with thinkgeek's binary clock as part of the challenge.

What features would you want in one? Would it be more of a novelty, or would you want alarm clock and other similar features? Battery-powered or plug into the wall? Any wild ideas?

If the project is a success and it turns out I can do it cheaper than thinkgeek, I'd consider selling them on the classifieds.

Curious to see what you guys come up with. Let's just try to stay away from watercooling, eh?

Battery powered. It should also be capable of doing alarms and stuff.

Good luck

battery powered sucks >< i hate when the battery dies and you dont know it, then the clock never wakes you up in the morning and you are late. Wall plug is a must. Maybe if you could switch out the LED colors? idk. Different face plates?

Talks to me.

"j0 f00! W4k3 th3 F*** UP!"

Yeah, that would be cool. That and psycadellic LED colors..... YUM!

Battery+Standard plug. Make the battery rechargeable, so if the power goes out...

YOU STILL GET BEEPED AT.

*nods*

Heck, I would buy it if it were hungarian if it did that!

My favorite Binary Clock. Analog/(digital) However, with a couple of Led mods...

its alarm beep should be "LEET LEET LEET....."

an option to switch the time format to hexadecimal so i know it's time to go to bed at A:30. that with shard's psychadelic colors (like rotating colors that are bright enough to light up your entire room with crazy effects) that would be pretty cool.

and it should also make my toast in the morning.

Hex, eh? Interesting idea... Tempts me to build a binary one, and then feed that output into an encoder and have it display in hex on a typical alarm clock digital display....

it should always beep at 13:37 because its the l33test time of the day!!!

OK, on a strictly practical side, it should have both batteries and AC power. However, look at what you can buy like that today and do things better.

As it stands, I can go to pretty much any department store and get a clock that plugs in and has a 9v battery. Not enough juice to illuminate the display but enough to beep once in the morning. To my mind this in simply not acceptable performance.

Today, you can got to the same department store and get NiMH AA batteries that are rated to outlast alkaline batteries by a substantial margin for something like this and which only cost slightly more than a set of Duracell's.

So my leet clock would have enough capacity on batteries to run for like 3 days with the display on (perhaps at reduced brightness if I have to compromise somewhere) and run the buzzer for several minutes. Said battery pack would be wired internally to function as a UPS with a small proc to manage the task of keeping the batteries well conditioned. Perhaps it could also rotate the batteries so that while some (perhaps 1/3 of the total) are in conditioning cycle, the others are good to go.

If you did move to commercial manufacturing, remember also that your cost for the batteries would drop when you buy them by the case.

Would that be leet enough for you?

ghettocomp said:

My favorite Binary Clock. Analog/(digital) However, with a couple of Led mods...

Click to expand...

oh man... i used to have one of those when i was younger! i forget what they are called though... i wish i knew where mine was it was always fun to watch it hehe i might try to find one online sometime and buy it...

heh nevermind, i found it

Time Machine Ball Bearing Clock
http://scientificsonline.com/product.asp?pn=3082445&sid=dansdata&eid=timemachine