Fake news – a common keyword these days. Fortunately, Oscilloclocks do not display fake news. But wouldn’t it be handy to see quake news on an exotic scope clock? This is the challenge [Atif] gave me – and one year and many grey hairs later, here is the result: The AfterShock Clock!
This custom-crafted Oscilloclock Core Duo assembly is a unique first in several ways:
It’s the first scope clock ever that pulls in and displays real earthquake data!
It’s the first scope clock ever that puts a dual-beam CRT to good use – one beam for the clock display, and the other for the earthquake and map overlay!
Earthquake display
The AfterShock Clock’s WiFi module connects at regular intervals to two public APIs (servers) to collect the latest earthquake events. It then feeds earthquakes to the clock’s quake gun controller, rotating quakes every 30 seconds. Cool!
(Note: flickering is due to camera effects and is not visible to the human eye)
Of course, there is the usual wide variety of standard clock screens to cycle through! The quake map’s beam is automatically dimmed for most of the screens, giving a soft ‘watermark’ effect.
Dual-beam CRT
The E10-12GH CRT used in this clock is certainly not mundane!
Beautiful spiral PDA lets you really see inside the cavity!Nothing beats a dual-gun CRT for intricacy… (except a quad- or pentuple-gun CRT!)
Oscilloclock Core Duo
Atif wanted to create his own case, so he initially asked for an Oscilloclock Core. But currently a single Core set does not provide control, deflection, and blanking circuits to drive TWO electron guns… So he had two choices:
Wait an eternity for me to redesign the boards to fully support dual beams.
Get started now! Simply put two Core assemblies together, with some degree of inter-control and removing any redundant circuits.
Atif chose the latter – and the Oscilloclock Core Duo was born!
WiFi setup
Setting up the WiFi connection is easy – just connect a device to the clock’s administration SSID and pull up the admin page. (To foil any would-be hackers out there, the admin SSID is available only for the first 5 minutes after power is applied.)
Then, access the admin URL and configure the connection to your home router:
There are a million other advanced settings to tweak things such as quake polling interval, quake magnitude filters, maximum quake age before purge, and other geeky aspects…. See the Support page.
Oh, I forgot to mention – the clock also synchronizes time against an NTP server, eliminating the need for a GPS module.
Like what you see?
Do you go for electron guns? idolize intricate electrode assemblies? Have a filament fetish? Or just want some quake news? This kind of clock might fit the bill. Let me know!
With so many exciting projects to finish (and new ones on the slate to start), the Oscilloclock blog has suffered dreadfully during 2017. Just to start things moving again, let’s catch up by posting a brand new video – albeit of an older creation!
It’s the 1970’s. The cold war. The U.S. and Russia aim nuclear weapons at each other. How do you prepare for the worst? Why, you build a bunker, of course!
Today, [Ian] has done just that. Not a real nuclear fallout shelter, of course, but a period-themed bar called the Bunker Club. What better way to face disaster, than over drinks with the mates!
Ian decided to pepper his bar with vintage equipment that looked the part. But he wanted to make them truly functional, to entertain his retro-loving customers. So, he commissioned the Bunker Club VectorClock!
Now, regular followers of the blog will easily recognize the base unit here as a Tektronix 520A Vectorscope. So far a total of four of these delightfully-lighted machines have been converted to retro Oscilloclocks – see the Gallery for other examples.
But as always with any model, Ian wanted to make some cool customizations. Let’s look at two of them.
1. External XY Input
First introduced in the Metropolis Clock, this feature allows Ian to input two signals and visualize them in X-Y format on the screen. This is very, very useful for generating custom Lissajous figures externally – using either a cheap signal generator, or even an iPhone!
Cool Lissajous figures – even from a humble iPhone! (note, this picture is of the Metropolis Clock)
The external signals are rendered within a rectangular ‘window’, pre-configured to look nice alongside other standard parts of the Oscilloclock screens. For some screens, the window is drawn large but with a lower intensity, forming a kind of ‘watermark’. This is an awesome effect!
2. Custom Logos
Nearly all Oscilloclocks feature some kind of customized logo. Past examples include the customers’ business’ name, the name of the oscilloscope manufacturer, or even the name of the customer’s favourite film:
In Ian’s case, the obvious candidate was his new bar’s official logo – a very chunky-looking rocket blasting through the atmosphere!
Further enhancements … on the way
It seems Ian enjoyed his first clock so much, that he has commissioned a second, with a completely different physical look. Some further special effects and display animation are planned, to further enhance the nuclear theme and keep his customers happy. Stay tuned!
Like what you see?
Do you own a bar? Well, normally you wouldn’t want a clock in your premises, as it would help customers keep track of their time, which would be bad for business. But Oscilloclocks are so much more than timekeepers! Recent feature additions make them lots of fun to watch and fiddle with. If you have special ideas, let me know!
(Disclaimer: Oscilloclock.com hopes that no-one is offended by the deliberately light-hearted tone of this post, in referring to the decidedly serious topic of nuclear warfare.)
It’s been a long while since I wrote about the 3″ VGA Display assembly, which was used for an RWR indicator in a fighter cockpit simulator.
The customer came back and requested four more. But could I stack the boards to make the units more compact? Of course!!
This particular assembly is rather tall because the client requested an in-built mains supply board, sitting at the bottom. The normal configuration using an external power pack is half the height. (In which case it’s not quite a “cube”…)
With green filter and replica RWR escutcheon fabricated by the customer. How real is that!!
And if you aren’t into aircraft indicators, you could always have a bit of fun!
Is a VGA Cube right for you?
Maybe. Or maybe not! These units incorporate binary blanking – I.e. The beam is either on or off; no shades of grey. Hence any VGA image composed of thick line art like RWR will display well, but shaded or coloured displays such as an attitude / horizon indicator would not work so well.
Below is a Windows XP login screen… Not exactly a flattering image!!
VGA Board – better and better
The latest VGA Board rev 1.1x is small and cute, and is compatible with the standard Oscilloclock Deflection and Power Boards.
In keeping with tradition, the VGA Board employs entirely analogue techniques to generate the horizontal and vertical sweep, triggered by incoming sync pulses. A high-speed analogue comparator with adjustable levelling is used to convert analogue RGB into binary blanking. Naturally, inputs are ESD protected so you can’t easily blow the chips!
New VGA Board revision (left) – meaner and leaner!
Like what you see?
VGA Cubes are like any other Oscilloclock product – each unit is hand-crafted to order and fully tested so that I can optimise for the selected CRT and provide a decent satisfaction guarantee. To date I’ve made five – and always happy to discuss a sixth! If you have a passion for raster rendering, let me know!
In an earlier rambling, I introduced the Metropolis Oscilloclock, themed after the classic 1927 science fiction movie. The clock seems to have garnered some attention, and thanks to the kind folks over at Hackaday, I now have two additional facts to relate:
The “Maria” robot in Metropolis inspired the design for C-3PO in Star Wars!
Some folks have considered the Workers’ clock to be Decimal !
The first point stands without dispute, but let’s take a closer look at this “Decimal” aspect, as I’d never considered it before.
Decimal Time vs. Metropolis Time
Below is what got folks interested – the 10 hour clock face. The Masters used this to dupe the Workers into believing they were working short shifts, when in fact they were slaving away for a full 12 hours. Ingenious!
But this is not Decimal Time, where time is divided into units that are purely decimally related. Yes, there are 10 hours on the face, but there are 20 hours per day, and 60 minutes to the hour. And, if you bother to count the dots around the edge, you can see there are 72 seconds per minute. None of these are decimally related.
Speaking of decimal time, I fondly remember a Metric Clock article in the April 1987 edition of Electronics Australia. Being but a wee lad at the time, I was gullible enough to believe that true Decimal Time was going to be introduced in Australia imminently. I ‘convinced’ my father (he led me on) that it was really happening, and I was just about to purchase the kit to build my own Metric Clock… when in the following month’s edition, the magazine came clean that it was actually an April Fool’s joke!
But enough fooling around – let’s now take a closer look at the Oscilloclock implementation of Metropolis Time…
Metropolis Time vs. Regular Time
The two clocks in Metropolis differ only in one way: the length of an ‘hour’. This is easy to grasp, since there are 20 hours per day in one, versus 24 hours per day in the other.
But from here, Metropolis messes with your mind! Below are some revelations that [Andrew] and I battled over numerous e-mails to come to terms with:
The hour hands on the 10h face and the 12h face must always be exactly aligned (they must go around at the same speed).
Since an M-time hour is 20% longer, the minute hand must go around slower.
To make the M-time minute hand go around slower, the second hand must also go around slower.
Even if this makes sense so far, the crunch comes when you think about how to implement it. If it were a physical clock, the tick speed could be slowed and the gears could be modified to make the seconds and minutes go slower but the hour hand itself move at the same speed. Easy!
But it’s not a physical clock, and in the current Control Board design, the tick speed is NOT readily adjustable as it is derived from the MCU clock, which all the critical display routines are optimised around. So essentially, the length of a second cannot be changed.
Without changing the length of a second, how can we make the minute hand go around 20% slower? Well, there are only two options:
Have 72 seconds per minute, with 60 minutes per hour
Have 60 seconds per minute, with 72 minutes per hour
We decided on the first option, and you can see from the video below that the second hand indeed moves through 360 degrees in 72 steps (actually half that, since there is a half-tick).
The Metropolis 10-hour clock face!
An interesting tweak here is the shape of the hands. Note that they have triangular outlines, to more accurately mimic the hands in the film. But computing the angles and projecting these outlined hands using Circle Graphics was a true challenge – especially as the current Oscilloclock firmware is written 100% in PIC18F assembly code! Assembly is great for optimizing timing, but with no maths related processor instructions or functions to leverage, this feature was a huge effort…
Why assembly code? Just because I can!
Digital Metropolis Time
Everything was now all fine and dandy for the analogue 10h clock face, but what about all those nice digital faces that are stock standard in every Oscilloclock? Could I make Metropolis Time make sense in a digital format as well?
Of course! Except there was one hitch. Since we have 72 seconds per minute, the clock would show times like 09:16:65. This would look odd. Andrew wanted to keep the seconds in the range 0-59, like in a normal clock. Something would have to give… but what?
The answer was to simply ‘ignore’ one second in every six; i.e. the 5th second shows for 2 seconds before incrementing. This is easiest illustrated with another video (note what happens at the 10:57:55 mark):
But easiest of all is to see this in Excel. The duplicate second is highlighted:
Switching between Metropolis and Regular Time
Now, let’s face it: Metropolis time is really not very useful in day-to-day life; not for us Masters. Andrew wanted to be able to revert all faces at will to show Regular time instead of Metropolis time (except the 10h analogue clock face).
This was duly implemented during production of the 2nd Metropolis Oscilloclock – which will be presented in an upcoming post.
If, like me, you are hopeless at simple time zone conversions but you’ve actually managed to fully get your head around the above, Congratulations! Stay tuned for more posts in the Metropolis series.
