I’ll just start out by saying this: I’m a sucker for cool digital clocks. And this one is a real doozy. UK designer Duncan Shotton’s Digimech clock may look like an LED or LCD timepiece on the surface, but it’s actual a complicated mechanical contraption that creates a 7-segment digital illusion.
A series of cryptic looking numeric black on white segments are printed on vertical sliders which gradually move into position within a black masking box to reveal the current time. As time passes, the sliders climb to the top, until the 9th digit on any given position hits. After that, the mechanism disengages and drops the slider all the way back to the zero position. Each slider is pushed and pulled through the device by a set of 3 servos driven by a PIC16F628 microcontroller.
Check out the video clip below to see this amazing clock movement in action:
Duncan – can I please have one of these in my living room?
