The missing word can be formed by combining parts of two other words, so the clock still works, but it will be an eyesore for years to come. I dare you to look at the drawing a find the mistake. I only noticed more than a year later after the vinyl cutout had been manufactured. When I first laid out the grid of characters in Inkscape (just a black canvas with white text in the Droid Sans Mono fixed-width font), I forgot a word. The faceplate was designed in Inkscape early in the project.Īlso note the this is where I made my first horrible mistake (so that you don't have to). The diffuser is sandwiched in between the vinyl and the main body. The (mirrored) characters are are cut out of the vinyl.
The vinyl sticker covers the entire sheet of glass and is stuck to the back of it. It consists of three layers: a thin sheet of glass (2 mm), a black self-adhesive vinyl cutout and a diffuser (tracing paper).
The front (faceplate) is glued to the main body, which makes it hard to replace, but also makes it look good (no frame or screws or anything). In retrospect, it probably would have been fine without heat sinking, but better safe than sorry (and its nice that the back is closed to protect the electronics).
I also planned to close the back with a thin sheet of aluminium that could double as a heat sink for the voltage regulators and LED drivers. The main body of the clock would be routed out of an 18 mm (~3/4") thick sheet of MDF, with in the front 256 conical holes and in the back a cavity for the PCBAs with LEDs and driving electronics. I will talk about the details of the circuit in the next step, but on the drawing you can already see that I opted to use a chip specifically designed to drive an 8 by 8 LED matrix (well, I of course had to use four of those to drive a 16 x 16 matrix). This makes for a total of 256 LEDs, which I wanted to be able to control individually. I decided to build a fairly large clock: 50 cm x 50 cm (20" by 20") with a 16 by 16 grid of characters, with behind every character a bright white LED. Automatically adjust the brightness of the LEDs.Be compatible with Arduino: use an ATmega328 microcontroller, running the Arduino bootloader and use the Arduino IDE and libraries to program it.As thin a possible, no bulky frame around it.In this case some of the new skills I wanted to learn were designing a PCB (albeit a simple one) and preparing it of for manufacturing. Use a professionally made PCB Part of every project I do is to learn a new skill (or a few new skills).Keep the cost down (but a couple 100 euros was acceptable).Be able to control all LEDs individually, not only in groups per word, so that it can be used as a matrix to display text and numbers (e.g.It had to be professionally looking: glass front (no acrylic), white edges to blend into the white wall, ….Some of my requirements for the clock were: Start with a good design/plan to avoid surprises down the road! This step mainly involves some thinking and maybe some drawings. In summary: a lot of good content for many Instructables! When that gets old I would move on to some more advanced uses: engraving the anodized aluminium enclosure of one of my next projects (cannot tell you yet what it is, but it will be really cool!), cutting precise mechanical parts (gears a.o.), selectively removing paint from the back of a sheet of glass. What could I possibly do with a laser cutter? Oh boy, what couldn't I do? At first I would probably make some enclosures in wood and acrylic (well, boxes basically.). However, if you plan to build a clock of your own I encourage you to make some changes and add some twists.
#Dougs word clock ebay software
The entire device is open source hardware: all drawings, photographs, schematics, PCB designs and software are available. Along the way, I have tried to take many pictures and I have written a build report in the form of this Instructable. I have decided to build my own version, taking some queues from the sources in the above and making some changes (and adding some mistakes) of my own. None of these felt "good enough", but I have found one DIY project that really stands out: Elektronika.ba's wordclock, proving that it is possible to build your own wordclock that is as pretty as the original.Īlso, here is a video of the manufacturing process of the original: QLOCKTWO manufacturing Dougs Word Clocks (and his earlier attempts: one, two, three).The internet is riddled with DIY and commercial versions of this type of clock, but few are as stunningly beautiful as the original.
The original, however, somewhat exceeds my yearly clock budget, so I started looking for alternatives. Ever since first seeing QLOCKTWO by Biegert & Funk a couple of years ago, I have wanted a word clock on my living room wall.
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