Tag Archives: mechanical clock

Someone built a LEGO Flip Clock that actually tells the time and now I want one for my desk…

Posted on by

It’s flipping amazing!

Nothing embodies the spirit of design better than the LEGO Ideas forum. Most people look at a handful of LEGO bricks and see them as constraints (because of their blockish nature), but the LEGO Ideas forum is filled with hundreds of thousands of ideas for products, sculptures, and other incredible installations that JUST use LEGO bricks (we’ve covered our fair share of them too)! It’s the perfect embodiment of working within constraints to deliver great ideas and results! Mirroring that spirit is Sariel Bricks & Pets’ LEGO Flip Clock, which looks and functions exactly like old-timey mechanical flip clocks, and even uses the exact same gear design and mechanism to tell the time. The impressive part? Everything you see is made exclusively from LEGO bricks… barring the number stickers on the flip panels, of course!

Designer: Sariel Bricks & Pets

There’s something incredibly satisfying about Sariel’s intricately built LEGO MOC (My Own Creation). The panels, frame, gear systems, and even the motor are all LEGO products. Standing 44 cm wide and 15 cm tall (17.4″ by 5.9″), the LEGO Flip Clock features a 10:1 gear ratio for counting down the minutes, and a 12:1 gear ratio for the hours (allowing it to reset every 12 hours). The only visual flaw here (and this is purely subjective) is the fact that the minute numbers aren’t as close together as you’d expect, which means it’s easy to read the time as 08:5:3 rather than 08:53. As far as problems go, that one isn’t too big and once you get the hang of it, you can look past the visual gap rather easily. Setting/adjusting the time on this clock may present a bit of a challenge, however.

Look over at the back and you’ll see that the clock runs on a LEGO motor too. Master Builder Sariel chose the LEGO motor not just for its compatibility, but also for the fact that it’s quieter than other RC motors. This means all you really hear with the Flip Clock are the panels periodically flipping over, making a rather satisfying click sound.

Sariel’s functional mechanical LEGO Flip Clock currently has the support of 2,022 voters on the LEGO Ideas platform. If they reach the coveted mark of 10,000 votes, LEGO will turn the MOC into a box-set that people can buy, build, and own! If you want to help Sariel Bricks & Pets achieve their goal, click here to visit the project page and cast your vote for the MOC!

The post Someone built a LEGO Flip Clock that actually tells the time and now I want one for my desk… first appeared on Yanko Design.

This ‘Oddly Satisfying Clock’ has a steampunk gear mechanism that’s a bunch of fun to look at!

Posted on by

Designed and built by Redditor by the name of ‘ragusa12’, the Oddly Satisfying Clock is exactly that… oddly, and extremely satisfying! Inspired by a digital clock with a similar design, Ragusa12 decided to take that digital concept and turn it into a mechanical little timepiece. The rather aptly named Oddly Satisfying clock comes with a 3D-printed design, and is powered by stepper motors running on an Arduino processor. The contraption currently only displays the hours and minutes (because the seconds pass by too fast for the gears and components to actually keep up), and Ragusa12 says the clock’s still a work in progress because the stepper motors make about as much noise as “pushing a full glass of water over a table.”

The way the Oddly Satisfying Clock works is pretty simple, at least in principle. Think of how the odometer on your cars used to work, with printed numeric discs that rotated to show how many miles your car traveled. The Oddly Satisfying Clock simply switches those discs out for vertical columns with numbers on them, that travel up and down to reveal the time. Using a rack and pinion gear system, a set of motors inside the clock’s main body control the movement of the vertical columns, and lights inside the clock illuminate the numbers to tell you what time it is. What’s perhaps the most oddly satisfying bit is watching the clock go from the end of an hour to the next hour, with the minute columns sliding from 59 all the way down to 00! In fact, you can even see how an early iteration of the clock looked when it struck midnight from 23:59 in the GIF below!

If you want to build your own Oddly Satisfying Clock, Ragusa12 has made the 3D files and the underlying Arduino packages available to download for free.

Designer: Ragusa12 (Reddit)