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I had great fun working on a cool Multimeter Clock project which got picked up by Design News for their Gadget Freak series. I thought it would be cool to have a clock that looks like an old Simpson 260 multimeter. The clock consists of three multimeters, the first meter displays hours, the second displays minutes and the last displays seconds. A 16F628A PIC microcontroller keeps track of time and outputs a calculated current to each meter to display the current time. The process to get it published took a bit of time and one of the most interesting aspects was going for the project photo shoot, the picture above is one of the outtakes. I will be publishing tons of build details on my project site shortly, sign up for the mailing list to be alerted when the full project is up. UPDATE: The full project page is now complete. The kit is also now available.
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June 23rd, 2010
Excellent project Alan. Working with phone companies, I used to use the Simpson meter to test phone lines. This would be a nice bench top clock and reminder of days gone by.
June 23rd, 2010
[...] Multimeter Clock – Styled after the Simpson 260 Multimeter [...]
June 23rd, 2010
Very nice project! Love the classic Simpson meter look.
June 24th, 2010
[...] pouvez retrouver toutes les indications pour réaliser ce montage sur le site d’Alan Parekh : hackedgadgets.com [...]
June 24th, 2010
Love your Clock. You may be interested in this group I belong to. Its a professional site but We do weird projects like this too.
http://cr4.globalspec.com/
June 24th, 2010
Awesome work, love it!
June 25th, 2010
Very, very, very cool. It looks great, and such a creative idea.
It reminds me that I don’t need a lot of money to do something cool, just a good idea.
June 26th, 2010
Nice!!! As a retired USN radioman I am very familiar with the Simpson 260. I think your clock would be
even better if you used actual Simpson 260s for the H:M:S displays. I think the ones used really take away from the whole idea. Yeah, I know, picky picky picky. GGGG
July 2nd, 2010
[...] This clock consists of three multimeters, the first meter displays hours, the second displays minutes and the last displays seconds. A 16F628A PIC microcontroller keeps track of time and outputs a calculated current to each meter to display the current time. [via] [...]
July 8th, 2010
[...] Meter Clock which is based on the Atmel AT89C2051 microcontroller. The design is similar to the Multimeter Clock that I created. Len provides the code and schematic on his site so you can make your [...]
July 10th, 2010
Congratulations, Alan, on being accepted as Gadget Freak for Design News Magazine!
For those who don’t know, Design News has been the premier engineering news magazine of this planet for over half a century.
Gadget Freak is a part of Design News where folks submit interesting, and often humorous, inventions to be published.
July 10th, 2010
Hey Rick,
Good to hear from you and thanks. Your feature picture for the magazine looked way cooler than mine did though.
July 10th, 2010
Hehe, which one? I’ve had more Gadget Freak projects published than anyone else, and I lose track! Each one has been a total blast doing the photo shoot…although I scared a photographer or two with my inventions, haha! (See GF case # 122 for example, where the photo guy was lying on the ground taking the picture with legs apart, and I accidentally hit the air valve and revved up my magnetic turbine skil-saw blade…um, twice!! oops
Your video was first-rate quality and very detailed, and I notice your project site has great pictures and text. Since you already have the hard work done, I thought you might like to publish at Instructables.com, and leave an even more permanent record for the world to see. (www.Instructables.com is the world’s biggest online how-to, and they reach a quarter million folks in their weekly newsletters that feature fun new Instructables.)
I highly recommend that folks who like to tinker also consider submitting a Gadget Freak idea and/or writing an Instructable.
July 10th, 2010
Hi Rick,
I didn’t realize that you had more than one done. Congrats! I will be doing an Instructable and also getting it up on my project site soon.
http://alan-parekh.com/
There are just not enough hours in the day…
July 21st, 2010
This is a beauty, Alan! Great work, very inspiring.
July 21st, 2010
Thanks John!
July 22nd, 2010
[...] the Multimeter Clock article last month? I just got the full build log up. Lots of people wanted the CNC files so that they [...]