Retro clock with giant pinball wheel displays

Every time Elektor offers a project using Nixie tubes or VFDs, it’s a success. For a bit of variation, we looked for and found something a bit more exotic. Like this original new project for a clock which uses, for the hour and date, pinball score wheel displays. Guaranteed spectacular! When you watch it, the soundtrack will not go unnoticed either.

Inspiring people, that is what we try to do here at Elektor. It doesn’t always work, but when it happens, and we hear about it, we feel that warm glow of happiness grow inside our bodies; a glow quite similar to the one that appears when drinking mulled wine (a.k.a glühwein) in December (or any other alcoholic beverage any time of the year). This week’s project combines inspiration & creativity, Raspberry Pi and mulled wine into an original Christmas decoration.

Elektor LABS proudly present a kit to help you assemble your VFD-tube Clock from the article published half a year ago. You’ll build it within about 4 hours, pre-cut acrylic sheet case included, using normal soldering tools and any computer with Arduino IDE. To keep the time synchronised our new VFD-tube clock employs an NTP server. Besides time, it also displays date and temperature in several display formats. Various sensors are supported. The RGB background lighting is user configurable (with a wireless Android app).

Many microcontrollers have application examples for the Digital Addressable Lighting Interface or DALI standard intended to make equipment from different manufacturers interoperate smoothly. However, DIY projects exploiting this lighting control protocol seem inexistent. The project highlighted this week is about DALI, but it is not complete, and maybe even abandoned. Can you help out?

If it happens to me, it probably happens to other people as well: once you think about it, it is too late. Xmas decoration is such a thing; you just can't start early enough with planning your Xmas decoration, especially when it involves complex lighting schemes requiring hours of programming time. Not this year however with a project that's sure to give you a head start.

Many people snore and many don't mind or seem to notice the noise. Sadly, another good part of humanity looses sleep as a result of snoring bed partners and/or roommates. Does your snoring roommate keep you awake at night? Then the Elektor Snore Shield might be what you need.

Did you ever wonder how fast your hamster can run? Or for how long? The distance it travels? With this project you can finally find out all the details about the furry critter's daily workouts. Keep statistics and graphs in a spreadsheet and see if it stays in shape or if it is getting old. Hamster races would be another application for this brilliant project.

Feature creep is the phenomenon of adding features to a product or a program that are not necessary for operating the product or program. Examples are colour pickers and font selection options in smartphone apps, and all sorts of other obscure configurable parameters. This little timer does not suffer from feature creep… or does it?

Do you like to know how cold it is outside before getting out of bed? Then this DIY clock is for you. An RPi running a home automation server, an ESP32 with a DHT22 sensor attached to it, and another ESP32 driving an LED display is all you need. Sounds complicated? Welcome to 2018.

These days it's common practice to replace incandescent light bulbs with LEDs, but what if you want to do the opposite? With this converter you can. Simply replace the LED by an optocoupler and let it switch the lamp.