I have a thing for clocks, I don’t know why… Without restraint I’m sure I would end up like Doc Brown in the beginning of the movie Back to the Future, with dozens of clocks in my garage. But I’m happy to report that by exorcising considerable restraint, I’ve manged to keep this down to a very sane “only five” clocks that I’ve got ticking and blinking in my garage.
One of the most fun of these is the Ice Tube Clock, which I picked up as a kit from Adafruit, http://adafruit.com/products/194. As far as clock kits go, it was pricey at $85, but, OH MAN wast this fun to work with. Fun for a couple of reasons; first everything is deliberately open and hackable (as in “please hack our stuff”)… published schematics, commented design, clear instructions. Another reason it was so fun was that Lady Ada, the benevolent Dictatoritrix of this enterprise, is very accessible. I had some problems with bad solder joints “somewhere” in the build, and could not locate them. Through the Adafruit Forums she took a few days to walk me through, checking voltages, and targeting in on where the problem had to be. In the end, she directed me to check my solding in/around the socket for the crystal timing chip… and she was right. I cleaned them all up and was instantly in business.
The main tube is a vacuum fluorescent tube that is reminiscent to what you would have seen in a high end VCR… back when there were such things. The entire build is on a custom board, with everything clearly marked. As with most kits that are worth their price, there are places to pause every so often and test you work up to that point. The kit includes a custom cut acrylic enclosure, and the clock features features like alarm, snooze, date and other niceties. The benefit of an open and hackable design is that, via the forums, you can watch other builders modify their projects to include other functionality, like scrolling text, or my favorite, WWVB syncing.
Overall I’d give the project the seal of approval – but be sure that you go into it without deluding yourself. After spending $85 and a week or so building this, you will have an excellent $35 clock. Since this is about the entertainment value, and not the market value of the clock per se, I would definitely recommend.