Show HN: Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash

For those who like long form journalism and want to know more about watch collecting and Glasshütte: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/confessions-of...

A good analogy for German engineering.

This is like the perfect clock demo opposite of the classic Bartosz Ciechandowski blog post on mechanical clock movements: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ (I love both, just opposite in the color vs dryness, jank vs precision, "build first, principles later" approach).

As art projects go, this one has a lot of charm for me. Plenty of room for allegories (although apparently not the paperclips, haha). Timekeeping in general is a subject with depth across many domains-- particularly in software as we all know. So many different ways to do the 'same thing'.

This is really cool. Thanks for explaining this process so well.

Note the paperclips in the margins of the page, as you scroll to the bottom.

And how they interact with your mouse cursor.

Ingenious!

Thank you Roy. You made my day! :)

Speaking of clocks, recently we have started streaming live clocks on Youtube. There could be 100s of way of showing beautifull clocks on screen. This one is mine. Coding for fun! A bandwidth hog to be honest. ;)

https://www.youtube.com/@TheClockStack/streams

An interesting project, that buries the lede to another interesting thing: abolishment of the leap second.

> In November 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures decided to abolish the leap second by 2035

I think the story goes that when the leap second was standardized in 1987, the wold was much less connected, there were fewer systems, and hence it was practical to keep astronomical time and civil time coordinated.

But this causes so many bugs and difficulties in practice that companies like Google don't perform leap seconds, they do leap second "smearing". But even smearing has issues, since there are multiple algorithms.

Even worse, the Earth sometimes accelerates, and there was a prospect that we might need a negative leap second, which has never been put into practice.

And as daylight savings makes everyone painfully aware, the public can tolerate even hours of misalignment between civil time and astronomical time, and even an hour adjustment.

So if we decide that we can tolerate a whole minute of skew, we need no leap minute for 50-100 years. And if we could tolerate an hour of skew, we'd not need a leap hour for millennia.

Of course, this is all can-kicking. If a leap second is difficult in practice, a leap hour in UTC (not a flip between a daylight savings and standard time zone) would be even more difficult. I feel the eventual solution would be to very slightly adjust the civil second to be shorter, so that the error begins to reduce.

Oh so GTC isn't GMT mixed with UTC, it's just whatever time it is on the trash clock

Some more cool clocks, including gravity based clocks (not hourglasses):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywD5kngMuYM — British Museum - Curious Clocks and Watches through time with Oliver Cooke

There is also a museum there which is well worth visiting.

This is a really cool idea.

Reminds me of some pendulum clock fun I had making a clock for the Apple 2 that used my grandparent's old clock and an inductive proximity sensor as an oscillator.

https://github.com/wkjagt/apple2_pendulum_clock/blob/main/RE...

What a cool project

Please submit this for the 40c3 call for papers, i think this would make a superb talk

The NOW/NEVER wheel firing just before the weight hits the floor made me laugh. And 0.4% error from cardboard and paperclips is absurdly good.

I think he has slightly misunderstood, or at least misstated, the physics:

> a pendulum oscillates is only determined by its length (and the strength of gravity), while the weight at the end of the pendulum’s rod (which clockmakers call a bob) doesn’t really matter.

This not correct. The period is determined by the distance from the fulcrum to the centre of mass. The position of the bob does matter. On my grandfather clock there is a small screw that adjusts the position of the bob and hence the length of the pendulum so that you can regulate the clock.

Very cool project :)

I would love to know more about those GDR technical books

the paperclip escapement is genius. how long did it take to get the pendulum period right with cardboard? I'd expect humidity alone to mess with it.

Knowing Glashütte traditions I have to say that's pretty cool!

I am fascinated by this clock. While synthesizers are themselves complex clocks that manifest in air -- I love them and I design them myself -- I find any music, even the enjoyable synth music chosen here, to dramatically distract from the clock. I want to hear the mundane sounds of your device, not some fantasy. A much better aesthetic would be to use ASMR techniques and amplify the sounds the clock actually makes. Let us celebrate your clock. We don't need to fantasize that it is something other than what it is.