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Comment by damjanstankovic | Hacker News Reader

author here, i will be glad to answer any questions you guys have

I couldn't find anywhere in the video where it was changing the time in real time....it either shows it while staying at a certain time, or shows it in fast motion. Am I looking in the wrong place?

I was also desperate to see this. And rightly so, here's what looks like a prototype link from above - and it's beautiful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-drmRYsvUaM

You can really appreciate the difference between the gentle movement induced with mechanically actuated magnets, and the nasty instantaneous movement which would happen with electro.

Yeah it was the biggest challenge, how to gently move liquid and not "expose" the mechanism behind it so it looks that liquid is moving on its own. I have a lot more videos, feel free to send me an email stankovicdamjan@gmail.com i will share. My plan is to publish the making of presentation by the end of this week

Does your clock require frequent refilling?

Hi Henk,

At the moment its working but its not perfect. The biggest challenge i had was to make this really look like fluid and kill the ferrofluid spikes. I simply wanted to animate the fluid not make it obvious that its a ferrofluid. So i had to thin the ferrofluid with all kinds of different things, some work better some work worse, still testing.

That's true! It's not viscous at all, which makes it all the more mesmerizing.

I was wondering about the spikes. What did you do that worked / didn't work to fix that?

What is the 'thickness'? I'm guessing only several millimeters??

actually this was the hardest part, how to make numbers look thick and REAL, and connected. Here is a GIF that shows this nicely:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/066c8502j2zwlwo/rheiani.gif?dl=0

Thats the reason why i had to work with ferrofluid and change its structure and composition, i wanted to have thicker numbers. Whole screen is 10mm thick inside, and numbers sometimes go up to 8mm of thickness. They are especially nice from the angle because the seem like they float and not simply stuck to the wall. I will make better photos definitely.

You've done that quite well. I'm surprised its that thick, but it looks like it give the numbers an awesome rounded look.

Really adds to the organic look and feel.

Well done!

Yeah, when there is no number it turns to big blobs of liquid that actually touch walls of the screen on both sides, so i guess its bigger than 10mm in that case

How long did the process of making the video take? Since this is mostly an art project, was filming done gradually over the year along with R&D, or only after the clock was finished?

Was this funded by a grant, or is it a personal investment in hopes of selling completed versions of the clock?

Hi Vortico,

Shooting took around 7 days because we were on a very tight schedule, trying to make it for the public announcement of the red dot results http://www.red-dot.sg/en/online-exhibition/rhei/

The good news is that i do have all the process over the year documented, if you want i can upload some photos but i am writing a making of presentation that i will place on behance and medium. I think it will be a really useful story for an industrial design student or someone who has good ideas but still not sure if he should start prototyping or not.

This was funded solely by me, which made it so much harder. I had to do freelance by day and work on this by night. Its difficult especially because prototyping means you have to make the same thing many times over and over again and its really time and money consuming.

Is that Adagio in D minor in the video? Who made this version?

Guys that made video know what the song is, its a bought from audiojungle. I will find out whats the name or url

Absolutely fantastic idea and execution. Props to the video producer(s) as well.

One question: what sort of power consumption is required to maintain the digit positions inside of the enclosure?

I'm guessing none. Looks like a servo is moved, which moves permanent magnets closet or farther from the fluid. Once the servo moves the magnets to the desired position, no further power would be required. So looks like just a burst of power every minute to move the servos and nothing more.

It could get away with none, however i wanted it to constantly move even while numbers are changed - otherwise i asked myself why build it out of liquid if its not moving.

On the other hand, you are right, it only draws power when it moves and it moves every other segment every few seconds which is enough to constantly animate the numbers, because the fluid needs time to readjust.

The motors are actually stepper motors, which made it all harder, because its not as easy to move them as it is to move servos, and steppers have no idea where they are which required an initial calibration sequence. The good news is that steppers are not loosing any steps, i guess the mechanics work very well.

Is the display fast enough to include seconds?

It could, currently for animation i use 5 second interval, because its much more nice to look at because liquid slowly transforms. I will include new videos an GIF to show this.

However seconds would be doable but it would result in animation being constant since it needs about a second to transform, so i finally decided to go with HH:MM

Here is another video of this little thingy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoOMQ8TaTyE

you can see that the liquid is quite different, it was long time ago, but it basically acts the same but looks more blobby

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