Clocks are amazing pieces of hardware. They're surprisingly simple, but deterministic, also very monotonous because of the work they do.

An arhythmic clock which looks like broken, but keeping the time correct is interesting in many fronts. First, it looks broken, but it's not. Second, if the movement is a bit noisy, monotonous tick-rocks will become irregular, hence interesting for our brain.

In other ways, it's delightfully non-conventional, but working as intended at the end. As a result of this, it's kinda delicious as it's interesting. That's a good combination.

Lastly, all of this is packaged as a de-facto standard wall/desk clock movement. Consider if you change your meeting room's big wall clock to this. Lazy, Whacky or Tuney would be fun. Very fun.

I think the main technically interesting thing is that it adds custom functionality to cheap, mass-produced hardware. If you wanted to build a clock completely from scratch, it would be a significant amount of work to design something that works as well as a $10 wall clock from Walmart. If you just figure out the right way to interface with that hardware, you can do interesting stuff a lot more easily.

It's a little bit reminiscent of how people figured out that you could use cheap USB TV tuners as software-defined radios, although obviously this project is a lot simpler than that.

I think it's more about the whimsy and fun-ness of the hack while still keeping proper time.

I love these kinds of playful projects - feels like the core of 'hacker spirit'.

With zero knowledge of electronics or hardware, the product description seems to outline why it's interesting pretty clearly (and quickly; the lede is not buried).

TL;DR:

> Novelty clocks:

>

> Whacky clock - ticks once a second, but on a random tenth-of-a-second, so it's arhythmic.

> Wavy clock - tick frequency is proportional to a sine wave. Sort of looks like it's "surging."

> Lazy clock - picks a random interval and then ticks that number of seconds very quickly and then just stops.

> Crazy clock - runs at three different speeds - slow, normal or fast. Much more subtle than it sounds.

> Vetinari clock - runs slightly slow, but adds a periodic "stutter" tick to make up for it.

> Warpy clock - runs 10% fast for 12 hours, then 10% slow for 12 hours. Makes the days just fly by.

> Early clock - keeps time anywhere between 0 and 10 minutes fast. For those who like to set their watch ahead to avoid being late. This clock keeps you from trying to "compensate," because you never know how early it is at the moment.

> Tuney clock - ticks normally most of the time, but occasionally will tick out "songs," like shave-and-a-haircut, or SOS in morse...

In an age of ubiquitous accurate time, an intentionally misbehaving clock points out the folly of watching a clock

Click "product description", it is collapsed by default for some strange reason

It subverts your expectations about clocks.