Wobbly clock | Hacker News Reader

Wobbly clock

somethingorotherwhatever.com

882 pointsColinWright198 comments

Made me think about the Swiss Railways clock that has the second hand completing the circle in 58.5 seconds; all the clocks on the network then wait for the sync signal from the “master clock".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock

The clocks in my elementary, middle, and high schools would do something similar. Not every minute, but every hour. At the top of the hour, when there was 15 seconds left, the second hand would make 3 second jumps until it hit the top, and then hold until the next hour started.

I always thought that was a brilliant way to keep mechanical clocks in sync. And the system had been there since the 1970s, so it was well before digital clocks were feasible for a school.

The clocks in my schools would take 80 minutes to complete each hour. No wait. Maybe it only seemed like that.

Thanks for that. We had those as well. But third-grade me never really thought about the purpose. So it's fun to think about it now.

In contrast, I'll sometimes now walk into a lobby or reception area of a business where they will have like five different analog clocks on the wall representing NY, Paris, London, etc, (trying to look "international" I guess) and the minute hands are out of sync. Kind of sad in 2023. :-)

My gym has about 15 different clocks on the walls, and they all tell a different time, some of them egregiously so. Every few months (often after I mention it), someone will go around and fix the worst ones.

Reminds me of the old saying, "A person who has a watch always knows what time it is. A person who has two watches is never quite sure."

And this is why I don’t like digital Vernier callipers. :P

That's one good thing about daylight savings time, I suppose: It's a good opportunity to correct any non-synchronized clocks.

Or to haphazardly ruin any synced ones.

I raise my glass, half empty, to you! you and me, we're the optimists, things can only get better from here!

My first job was at a Network Operations Center, and it was just like in the movies, with a big projection monitor, two network operators at terminals below, and above us were four analog clocks depicting the four main time zones of these United States. They were electric, and I guess they were battery-powered because of the lack of cords going everywhere.

When Daylight Savings Time began, I sauntered in about 9am and my coworkers were filtering in too. The morning guy, "Matt" had been there since about 6am and he had changed the clocks. So my other coworker, "Jason" congratulated Matt for setting all the clocks correctly and then he asked him, "so did you do it by setting all four clocks ahead one hour, or did you move them all to the left and then move the Pacific clock to the Eastern position?" Facepalm!

That might be a good job interview question, or it would have been if manual, analog clocks were still a thing.

It'd be a fun project to make a dial wall clock that uses GPS time.

GPS would be tricky to receive in a typical hotel or office lobby (i.e. far away from any windows at the ground floor, possibly in an urban canyon).

In Germany (and in neighboring countries), radio-controlled clocks are quite common for this purpose, listening to DCF77 near Frankfurt [1].

Long wave seems to work a bit better than the L-band for indoor propagation, and it probably also helps that the transmit power is three orders of magnitude higher.

I'm not sure if the US has an analogous service – there's WWV and WWVH, but they are shortwave transmitters, and I don't know if wall clock or even wristwatch size receivers are possible for that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCF77

WWVB is running at 60kHz, and powers at least a few of the small desk clocks in my home :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB

> I'm not sure if the US has an analogous service – there's WWV and WWVH, but they are shortwave transmitters, and I don't know if wall clock or even wristwatch size receivers are possible for that.

It does. Small WWVB clocks that self set are quite common.

Yes, works for small clocks and watches, but they have mostly moved to gps these days, at least for auto sync watches.

I think you can still buy NTP reference devices for your network that use GPS. So, the lobby of the hotel doesn't have to be within view of the sky, as long as their reference device is.

Meinberg is just one of several companies I've seen that sell clocks that are NTP clients.

It makes sense that a company might make those, if they also make the NTP servers that those clients might be connected to.

Good stuff. I'm planning on buying some for the house.

Our elementary school clocks (70s) made a variety of nearly imperceptile sounds as they got near the top of the hour, or turned it over. We were like dogs when they hear the about-to-eat sounds start.

Pavlov was sitting in a bar when the last order bell rang. "Oh shoot! I need to feed the dogs" he thought.

How did they know when the next hour started without digital communication?

In the Standard Electric Time Company slave clocks that I've got, the master sends about a 12ms pulse once a minute, which pulls in a solenoid and allows a lever to ratchet one tooth on the minute wheel and advance the movement. Then once every twelve hours, the master sends a longer pulse, which pulls in a stronger second solenoid that allows the wheel to turn freely. There's a weight on the hour wheel which will pull the wheel around until the weight is on the bottom because of gravity, which corresponds with 12 o'clock. So no matter where the clock is, it will fall back to twelve with the longer pulse, and then begin the ratcheting again with the once a minute shorter pulses.

(Sorry for the deprecated master/slave terminology, it's unfortunately what they used at the time)

The details depended on the system. The most common arrangements were either polarity (hour pulse opposite polarity of minute pulse) or a separate wire for hour pulse. Later systems introduced serial digital communications but were never as widely installed as the minute and hour pulse systems in schools.

They had digital communication just not cheap ICs. I don't know how it worked but I imagine it was something like a mechanical switch that held the minute hand until it got a signal from the main office to start moving again.

The clocks could even be set for Daylight time centrally, so I assume it had a way to send a signal that triggered a motor to move the hour hand faster.

Since it's a school I wonder if they could just hold them back 1 or 11 hours on the weekend for DST changes. This would eliminate the need for an additional signal and circuitry on each follower clock.

I love those clocks! But from memory, the second hand gets "stuck" at 12 and then when it moves again, the minute hand advances at the same time. On this one, the minute hand jumps forward at the same time that the second hand goes to 12.

The animated example in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock#/media/Fil... seems to have the first behavior you mention, it get stuck at 12, minute hand increments and then the second hand starts moving again after the minute hand movement.

The second hand is supposed to go round the clock in 58.5 seconds, and then 'wait' for a synchronisation signal before starting off for the next minute.

Both systems could be found. Early to mid 20th-century master clock systems were pretty much all designed around a common theme but there were many variations. Some secondary clocks even used fully free-running second hands that weren't synchronized at all and so had no relation to the minute hand advancement.

All clocks from Deutsche Bahn stations are also like this. It's always very amusing.

They are available as desk and wristwatches too (https://mondaine.com)

Why 58.5 seconds?

To deal with any inconsistencies in the speed at which they complete the 58.5 seconds. If a particular defective clock takes 59.9 seconds instead of 58.5 it'll be just fine, as it will start going again when it gets the next minute pulse from the central system.

Because then any slow clocks have 1.5 seconds to receive additional pulses from the master clock to bring them into sync.

There are no additional pulses. Only minute pulses. It's a motor driving the second hand. The motor starts by the minute pulse and stops itself when reaching the top.

This is great, would love it on my wrist! I think digitally making analog clocks is a really fun exercise in design. Basically asking "how far can I stretch this concept without breaking it?" I've made a small CodePen collection of such experiments: https://codepen.io/collection/AQawkJ

Those are some enjoyable experiments!

I've always found the clock faces more fascinating than the mechanisms driving the hands around. I'm easily distracted. My CodePen kaleidoscope clock's here: https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/full/vYLaOxK

This clock is great for teaching kids how to tell time! When learning to read a "circle clock", they have a heck of a time understanding what it means when the hour hand is almost but not quite pointing at a number. So when it's 3:45 they will say 4:45 because they know the big hand on 9 means "45" but they get confused because the little hand is almost pointing at 4.

This clock solves that problem.

Anyone know if I can get this as an Apple Watch face?

> Anyone know if I can get this as an Apple Watch face?

Currently, 3rd parties can't create custom Apple Watch faces.

What's the point of a smart watch if you can't change the dial and face however you want? It's like when carriers wouldn't let you load your own ring tones on to your phone, because they didn't want to cannibalize their own ring tone sales.

>What's the point [..] if you can't change

It seems to be part of Apple's strategy, to focus on Out Of The Box experience, not on user configuration. And to the greater point? To make profit. The perfect product is not the point, nor is the perfectly satisfied customer.

There's so much more to a smart watch than a fully-customizable watch face.

While I fully believe that Apple should open up to third-party faces, I am quite content with the customization options that they offer now.

Is there so much more? Unless using it for sports, it's basically an extension of your phone to serve notifications and that's it.

Any color, so long as it's black. Henry Ford, Steve Jobs.

There may be more, but it includes that functionality at the very least. That would be the absolute base line functionality of a watch that has a bit-mapped display.

I think they should give us the option to create watch faces, but don't care about it much. It's very far down my priority list of what I want from Apple Watch.

As for the reasons why they don't, my speculation is the following (I'm not defending them): They are worried about custom watch faces that might perform poorly or draw too much battery. Watch is a challenging platform to develop for as watchOS is very protective of its resources and won't hesitate to kill your app. But Apple probably doesn't want to kill the watch face and at the same time doesn't trust the developers to develop their watch faces to Apple's standard.

Yup, one of my favorite parts of having my last smart watch was making it look like a Fallout pip-boy. It would be required for me.

I'd argue that the success of the Apple Watch proves that you're incorrect.

Success?

I've never seen one worn in real life.

Personally, they're a less cool version of an 80s swatch.

I see more of them worn than regular wrist watches. Considering they sold more watches than the Swiss watch industry (2019), it's not surprising.

It's the most popular watch in the world.

even stranger since apple doesn't sell faces (with the exception of the Hermes faces which come with purchase of their obscenely expensive watch bands). seems like something they'd just shoot down in review if something got too close to an Hermes face.

> What's the point of

The point of a smart phone is not ringtones. The point of a smart phone is not even being a phone anymore. It's everything else you do with it.

The point of a smart watch is not cool watch faces.

You want skins/customization, which is fair. But you have to admit it's not core functionality.

My guess is that this is likely because of the availability of an always on display. Apple has likely programmed each of the watch faces into the microcontroller that manages that low power mode. The other option would be to wake up the main cpu every time you need to refresh the 3rd party watch face, but that would have a power cost.

> This clock solves that problem.

In English! In Dutch this would actually create a problem, as when it is 3:45 we say it is "15 before 4". I noticed that I actually struggled to interpret the wobbly clock when it was close to changing the hour.

We do this on English too. 3:45 is "a quarter to four."

I always think that the prevelance of saying "three forty-five" is a result of digital watches.

My kids hate the "quarter to four" construction because, in their words, it makes them do math in order to tell time. Which, of course makes me prefer it just to force them to get comfortable with it. I've even pointed out how 60 is nicely divisible by a lot of numbers, so we can say "a twelfth to 4" just to be a pain in the butt. :)

I really think it simply depends on whether you're used to analog or digital. I actually learned to tell time by someone telling me that one side of the clock if the "past" side and the other is the "to" side (a little hand-wavey around 30-40 past). This made sense to me. What was important was the closest hour, and how many minutes (or fractions) past or to it was.

I taught my kids similarly. Starting with the hours, and then "half past" and then "quarter to" and "quarter past."

Only after all that was second-nature did I even explain to them the idea of 60 minutes.

Well not just that. In England at least we generally say "20 to 4", "10 to 4", etc . if we're using a 12-hour clock. If I'm using 24hour we generally just say 1545, etc.

In German and Dutch you also say "half four" which means "half to four" (e.g.: half past three).

Haha! In New Zealand, "half four" would be half past four: 4:30

In western Germany we say "quarter to four" and in eastern Germany we say "three quarters (of) four".

"three quarter four" is also common in austria, but worse (for visitors) is "quarter four" which is a quarter past three.

If my presumption that analog watchfaces are dying and only used for "classical" looks (as evidenced by all those trendy "artistic" watchfaces that frequently don't even have marks), then I suspect it'll be another lie of a generation, just like I've been told to learn how to do math in my head because "there won't be any calculators around".

I mean, analog watchfaces are bad at telling precise time - it's just that there wasn't anything better until quite recently (and people are typically fine with 5-minute precision). They're great for conceptualizing time intervals (easy to mentally picture a pie chart), but I strongly suspect most people when asked "when is the next meeting?" are reading time then doing the arithmetic rather than reading the interval directly.

I could be wrong, of course.

Analogue clocks are helpful in low visibility situations. I have one in my bathroom because when I first wake up my vision is too blurry to see the clock, but I can see where the hands are and know what time it is. They are also handy when the clock needs to be far away, like outside in the yard. You can read an analog clock from much farther away than a digital clock because you just need to make out the general positions of the hands.

Also, it's a great way to teach kids multiples of five and fractions. :)

And multiples of 12, don't forget that!

The Babylonians were masters of division-based math, when the purpose was to divide things up into equal parts.

Started to fade from fashion when economics became about making things grow (increase the pie) rather than divide what they had (slice the pie).

> (as evidenced by all those trendy "artistic" watchfaces that frequently don't even have marks)

If you grew up reading analog time, these aren't at all hard to read, even to the minute. Really, it's not an affectation, I would find a mark-less analog watch faster to grok than a digital watch. Most people who grew up on analog watches will similar have no problem with them.

The only kinds of watches that are more about "rough" time are ones without marks and without a minute hand. Those I can only read to about 15 minutes.

While analog watches aren't as precise, they are faster. It takes most people less time to process, as humans (apparently)[1] can interpret an image faster than numbers.

For example, 189/304 vs [####__]; the latter is probably faster to process.

Also, not related to clocks, but analog gauges in particular: a number lacks an important vector of information: rate of change.

[1] https://books.google.nl/books?id=nrtUgKzFhJ4C&pg=SA7-PA16&lp...

Honestly, I have a contradicting personal experience. For me, it takes me an order of magnitude longer to process an analog watchface into a numerical reading, than just glance over a digital watchface directly (over a second versus a few hundred milliseconds).

For the progress bars (or, say, tank level gauges) it totally makes sense - I like them the same way you've presented, it's easier to ingest [####__] (or, better, [####__]62%, so it can be also spelled out if someone's asking) than 189/304.

Linked book doesn't open for me, but I agree that this also applies to various instruments, especially in aviation, where IFR is of extreme importance. Though for a car I've picked mine specifically based on having a clear large digital speedometer (because unlike on an aircraft, cars 101% rely on seeing outside) and I'm always interested in speedometer reading for answering "how fast I'm going, exactly?" (speed limit comparison is a no-brainer, and with a precise reading I can maintain speed at +/-1mph of the desired target, which is impossible with an analog speedometer) rather than "am I slowing down or speeding up?" (I see this already).

But watches - when using for telling time - aren't really gauges, are they? Analog watchfaces can be (and are, by some) used as a gauge when measuring time intervals ("how long had passed", "how much time left"?), but again, like I wrote, I suspect that most people read the time then do the arithmetic rather than imagining a pie chart.

> , I suspect that most people read the time then do the arithmetic rather than imagining a pie chart.

depends how the person was trained, my friend.

Of course, yes. And I merely "suspect" rather than have some concrete statistics to back this up.

I have this suspicion based on a few anecdotal data points plus the fact that digital watchfaces are becoming more and more common (phones and computers specifically), and people love to do things in an uniform manner.

But I'm very biased here (and thus could be wrong), because I strongly dislike classic analog watchfaces. I'm certainly for novel approaches - I do like Apple Watch's "Solar" watchface (the digital version), as it has a digital reading centered in essentially a gauge that shows the Sun's motion, allowing to see the time relative to the daylight. Similarly, I enjoy calendar and weather widgets that show the day as a timeline, so I can see how events or weather conditions approach. But I'm always asking myself "what time is it now?" first (and "ok, how long until...?" only comes after, even if it was the original intent) - it was my mental model for as long as I remember myself - so I strongly prefer digital 24-hour displays.

> For example, 189/304 vs [####__]; the latter is probably faster to process.

That’s an excellent analogy. If digital were as quick to process, we would simply have data tables everywhere and no need for data charts.

I do like it for the hour hand. The bend in the hand shows both that it is still the previous hour and that it is nearing a change.

However the minute hand only moving every 5min isn't great.

The real solution is they should say “a quarter to four”. ;)

When it's 2:00 and someone asks me what time it is, I say it's a quarter of 8:00.

A lot of engineering students make that mistake when learning to read log graph paper, I guess we never grow out of that kind of thinking.

It solves the problem of the child getting the wrong answer until they have to read a real mechanical clock.

I saw somewhere on the internet a clock where the hand of the seconds moves at random irregular intervals, but averages out to 60 moves a minute. Extremely frustrating to watch.

Edit: here's a video of it running (somehow the seconds hand runs backwards)

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1XSp5FmXBo

> This clock is inspired by a post by ILAMtitan on the 43oh.com forums, which was in turn inspired by Vetinari's clock from the Discworld series of novels. Although the movement of the second hand is quite erratic, it ticks exactly 32 times in 32 seconds, and so keeps quite accurate time overall. The clock started life as a cheap $3 clock from KMart. It's mechanism was kept, but the driver circuit was removed and replaced with an MSP430 microcontroller. ILAMtitan's code is designed to ensure that every 32 seconds it will tick 32 times, but the exact timing of those 32 ticks is variable. There can be as little as 1/4 second between ticks or as much as 24 seconds. Overall though it will keep quite accurate time.

Both this and the clock above are quite, quite mad, and quite brilliant.

I will have to buy some cheap clocks and start tinkering.

The second hand isn't running backwards, the numbers run the wrong way.

Neat! We built clocks with CAD and a laser cutter in my high school engineering class, and I remember cheekily making mine unqiue by numbering it backwards and/or without noon at the top

Keen eye, I did not realise at first glance.

Reminds me of a wall clock in my high school physics class that would struggle to pass 5 o'clock and ticked backwards and forwards a few times on its rotation through each minute, despite keeping good time. Its struggle through each minute reflected my own struggle through each minute in that class, however.

Now found a new home that should better cope with the load:

https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/wobble-clock/

I just had to check whether you were 'the' Colin Wright, and looking at your profile I think you are. Small world!

I am a fellow juggler, and used to run the Internet Juggling Database. We also very briefly bumped into each other in a corridor at Leeds Uni Physics department about 25 years ago ;-)

It's me ... hi!

You don't have contact details in your profile, but feel free to email me. I travel a lot and can put you in my geographical address book so that if I come within reach we can get a coffee.

Cheers!

Off-topic, but what do you use for your "geographical address book"? I would love to have something that showed all my contacts on a map, but haven't run into any software that does this ever.

It will come as a surprise to no one who knows me ... I wrote my own.

More, I created a system wherein people can register, and then whenever someone is travelling they can tell the system and it automatically emails everyone they know who is close to the destination.

I'm the only one who uses it, although there are a few hundred people on it, so I basically just use it as my geographical address book.

I also put landmarks, museums, and other places I might like to visit. When I tell it where I'm going it then sends me email to remind me of them.

I also wrote my own system for pretty much this exact purpose, although instead of emailing me reminders, it just lets me record notes on a map and then I skim that map whenever I am planning a trip to a given country or region.

It's online (but registration is invite only, let me know if you want to play with it) over at https://scoutmaps.io/ – at one point I was going to attempt to commercialize it, but eventually decided I liked it better as hobby software so that I can write features that better serve my current userbase of one :)

That is so amazing! I also attempted creating such a concept but never got anyone of my friends to use it... I ended up heavily using (and abusing) the Google maps share your location feature and I was so excited to see they are adding features related to notifications when people get close - only noticed it a few months ago. Telegram had also released similar features but only when you share your location live witch you can only do for a limited amount of time. Nevertheless interesting to see these kind of features are slowly getting implemented even if easy too late and not close to how I would like and imagine they could be... I also have my live location broadcasted here: https://chagai.website/location.html when it's not broken

This reminds me of Marcin Wichary's recreation of a clock on Polish TV: https://aresluna.org/polish-tv-clock/

He has a great writeup about it here: https://medium.com/the-outtake/the-clock-85e8e3a50e4b

Remixed with retina support: https://glitch.com/~noble-gratis-princess

What did you do to make it retina?

You need to manually create a canvas at screen resolution and scale it to fit the screen. A default canvas has pixels that are logical pixels, not actual pixels.

What does "retina support" mean? What is the benefit?

I can't tell, since I don't have a Mac, but looking at the code, it implements a note from the Safari documentation for canvas [0]. I assume that if you don't do this, it either is very small or very pixelated.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...

It certainly looks much less blurry on my Pixel 7 Pro with this version.

Cute, clever!

But the way the minute hand stays pointing to a multiple-of-five-minutes until it Boings! to the next increment is disconcerting.

It looks like it's slow all the time. E.g. 10:29 looks like 10:25 which is more than enough error to look wrong.

Maybe I'd learn to read the bent-hand deflection after a while. But I guess I prefer the clock I have that just points to the right minute all the time.

> But the way the minute hand stays pointing to a multiple-of-five-minutes until it Boings! to the next increment is disconcerting.

Yeah, it would be a bit more satisfying if the end moves discontinuously (as it does now) but the stem moved continuously.

Still very nice as it is though.

Here’s the author’s original post about the clock: https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/items/wobbly-clock/

This links to a Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/christianp/status/1250454284581457923

Which has at least one other interesting clock idea, this one with floppier hands: https://twitter.com/kangaroophysics/status/12508031830451814...

Feel like an idiot for at first thinking that the seconds were WAY too long. Only after a while I realized that every jump equals 5 seconds.

Waited 3 minutes to see the minutes hand move. Waste of time but satisfying.

Not a waste of time, but rather a satisfying exercise in patience.

Most satisfying to watch. Setting my alarm so I can see the hour change. I want a real one.

Edit: D'aww. Hug of death.

New URL: https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/wobble-clock/

it too has been hugged

i feel like i am really missing out on something here

Hmm. Working for me.

Interesting. I get a little uneasy watching it.

I see you shiver in antici......pation.

boingoingoingoingngngnggngggg

Made me think of Vetinari's clock.See, i.a., https://www.instructables.com/Lord-Vetinari-Clock/

How do you say

5:46 -> "Five and and bit tense 45"

5:48 -> "Five and 45 tense"

5:49 -> "Five and very tense 45" or "Five and loose 50?" ?

But I like it :D

> 5:49 -> "Five and very tense 45" or "Five and loose 50?"

Four past a quarter to six. As I'm posting this, it is 12 past half til 6 (Eastern).

Would be cool to build one of these in real life! Doesn't seem that hard to build, perhaps hard to calibrate though.

I don't see how a real life one could be made to look exactly the same (but I could be missing something).

The seems to have something that stops the end of it moving on until enough tension has built up to side underneath it. That much is fair enough. But then that same thing stopping the end would also prevent the same satisfying wiggle when it gets to the next position because it overshoots immediately.

The only thing I can think of is that the restraining pins move in and out is the clock have at just the right time but that would be quite a fiddly implementation and probably affect the visuals

A physical implementation could use magnets to hold to the specific spots. Once enough torque is built on trying to move the hand, it would snap out of place and would then find the next magnet and 'hold' onto that spot.

As an aside, I'm not sure that doing this for the hour hand is a "good" idea. The difference between 10:00 am and 11:00 am is significant and needing to check how much the bend is doesn't "feel" right.

(late edit thought) If we're getting to the "this is controlled by some other system that doesn't need to be purely mechanical", having an electromagnet on at the right spot that then toggles off at one 5m increment and on at the next so that there's only one magnet active at a time could reduce possible issues of having the wiggle/snap attach to the wrong magnet.

See also: It Shall All Be Mine, Gregory Bae, 2016. "Atomic clocks that are magnetized to tick in place." https://www.gregorybae.com/It-Shall-All-Be-Mine

Currently on exhibit at Chicago MCA - https://visit.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/gregory-bae/

Using magnets would definitely make for a cooler look, but this effect can be done using nails of varying heights.

The thing that I wonder about (with nails) would be "what would happen if the the flexihand was able to wiggle past the peg when it moved from one peg to the next?" In that case, I believe, it would just be a regular clock style hand.

It's possible that I've got the wrong mental model for how that would work.

I think you'd put the nails at N+1 position, not N. (e.g. for the minute mark, you't put the nail at 6, 11, 16, etc. not 5, 10, 15). Then, the hand would press against the nail and progressively bend until it slipped past the nail entirely and jumped to the next 5 spot (and not yet be touching the next nail).

In exploring an idea on this a bit more... I found https://ferrolic.com which... is interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PFgVtzsXHM is another video on the idea.

You’d need a mechanism at each 5 minute mark that grabbed the hand and released it at the appropriate time, then you could make the hands a s Wobbly as you want

You could get close by having the restraining pins hold the tip at 5N + 1 seconds instead of at 5N seconds

You can use a rubber second hand and put a nail at the 5 seconds, same effect.

That would probably prevent the wobble if the nails are not automatically retracted.

Without over complicating it, I wonder if you had a flexible second hand like a spring, that's just a bit too long, with pins on the 5 second hand, dots on the rest and decent motor to drive the shaft. As the shaft turns the spring builds up tension and eventually bends enough to jump past the pin.

I love it! And I think that the idea of random intervals averaging to correct values mentioned below would make it beautifully irritating.

Not a clock, but I was messing with soft body physics and ended up with this thing this weekend: https://mrrr.vercel.app [1]

Consider a v2 where the hands are physically simulated al dente spaghetti.

[1] (I ended up making a classic frame-by-frame animation though: http://mrr.sonnet.io - pitching it as an "AI-powered MRR optimiser" on LN)

Oh my god!! I forgot I had my laptop still connected to a bluetooth speaker in a different room and totally freaked out when those lips started making faint noises through a door!

Oh my god, that's hilarious but I'm so sorry for scaring you! (OK a creepier part of me is satisfied that I went full poltergeist in someone's house, but I promise to do these sorts of things sparingly.)

Unsure why, but this actually stresses me out. Never had anything trigger me like this (serious post).

Watching it really bothered me, too. After considering it for a while, I think it's because when I see something bending like that IRL my instinct is to make that stop happening so the thing doesn't become worn, permanently bent, or broken.

Explore that. Be curious about it. Why does it stress you out?

When you refresh the page, the animation continues playing perfectly. That is a very nice touch which often gets overlooked! Well done!

Do hands release from the line they're on at the point of the next time increment being reached (meaning, by the time they hit the next line, they'll be late) or does it kindly release earlier, affording time for the hand to travel to and arrive at the next line in time for it to represent the current time?

Just by observing it, when the machine clock clicked to 14:20 (UK time) the second hand snapped to the vertical and the minute hand snapped to the 4 (the 20 minute mark).

Does that answer your question? I don't know what I can do that you couldn't do for yourself, so maybe I'm not understanding your question.

I believe GP's question was: does the hand get released at 14:20 or 100ms before 14:20 to have it reach its position at exactly the right time, accounting for the animation delay.

Yes!

Disclaimer: Not my work!

Non-wobbly clock in SVG + JavaScript (without HTML): https://www.nayuki.io/res/full-screen-clock-javascript/full-...

At first, I thought it meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wobbly.

Alas, there's no sabo-tabby.

Made one today that shows progress over the year, month, day, hour, and minute:

https://neontime.surge.sh

Cool idea, but it feels wrong to me that it goes right to left — seems like it should move the other way.

Now that you mention it, agreed. I have fixed this moral outrage so the bars now progress the right way.

May be my imagination, but it seems the turning of the center pauses a bit after the end of the Second hand moves. Would expect the center to turn constantly.

Not sure why, but watching this makes me very anxious. Especially when the second hand is bending,just before it springs loose. Neat idea though.

Nice one :-) I think it would be better if the CSS and JS were inline instead of including them from the HTML, but this is just lazy me.

I had a one-handed watch once that was called "About Time" since you could only ever know about what time it was!

This is cool, but please don't hijack the browser full screen mode on click. It's a bit jarring.

Weirdly, I can hear this clock in a way

Some people can "hear" videos even though there is no sound:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42237092

This was my first thought when I saw it too, I immediately found myself making a sound effect for each tick. It could definitely benefit from a tasteful sproingy sound effect!

An appropriate sound might be a rubber band twang.

Or one of those springs that some doors use to dampen impacts with the wall.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ocvBI_vtJwA

Reminds me on https://atom.watch

Currently has a bug right now, showing 1.1.2023, also whoever drew the number 7 on that font needs a good talkin to

Ugh, that 7

This kind of reminds me of hospital clocks, where the second hand advances 5 seconds at a time.

Ugh, I just missed the hourly transition I was waiting for, while browsing elsewhere. Now I have to watch without blinking for the next 55 minutes.

(If I blink I will get distracted!)

Funny how little art projects like this are so intriguing.

What a time to be alive

I think I'd buy the physical version of this.

How fortunate I was to watch this for a few moments only to realize that it was 2:59

This is cool would like a mechanical watch that does this

Is it just me , or does it feel like time is slower per second.

ya but it flicks every 5 secs iiuc

Do the hands break after 10,000 seconds?

Very nice!

Thanks for sharing it!

stuck around for 2 minutes to see the minute hand wobble...

Thought it would be a little bit bigger than that.

Something wrong, yank?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0wXV1AYPsA

Curious: the timezone is off.

I want this but mechanical.

Obligatory mention of the lunchtime clock that works a bit harder before lunch, then evens things out afterwards: https://hackaday.com/2011/01/18/the-lunchtime-clock-gives-yo...

An incredible use of math

The minutes and hours hands don't work at all.

They only jump between markers, and only when they will tick to the next marker. Watch for longer.

They do for me. Maybe you just need to watch for longer.

It seems to be glitching somehow. The minutes needle jumps once, then gets stuck after that.

Have you watched for more than 5 minutes? Each hand jumps from one Division to the next, increasingly flexing in between jumps. It's working fine for me, and obviously for others, so either there's something odd about your setup, or it's just doing something you don't expect.

But do you have a business plan?

Time to pivot.

Wild to get a "This project has received too many requests, please try again later." message for what I assume is just a static page. Makes me make a note to self not to use glitch.me

glitch.me is clearly intended for small experiments, not for dealing with 10s of thousands of hits in just a few minutes.

I'm getting the author to move it.

Stand by ...

OK, here:

https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/wobble-clock/

Even when I've got a front page article in the past on HN at like 150 votes I only got about 6000 views in a day. This one has like 10 likes so I doubt it's getting 10s of thousands in a minute. Can only imagine it's some severe rate limiting to push glitch.me users for some paid alternative.

When some of my submissions have hit the front page I got a lot more that 6K views in a day, although probably 10K in some minutes is an overestimate, possibly by a lot.

Agreed that it's probably glitch.me pushing people to a paid option, but there's no real problem with that ... they are a business providing a service.

We love to see these sorts of projects running on Glitch with OR without a paid account!

We do have some default protections in place to prevent (even accidentally) problematic projects from taking too many shared resources.

We've temporarily removed those barriers for this project since it was getting such a big hug. It should stay up and be Remixable now.

disclaimer: I'm on the engineering team at Glitch.

okay but this was maybe a few hundred thousand requests over about an hour for 536 bytes of html and two js files of respectively 2232 bytes and 2667 bytes

like, an old netbook could serve up all those requests in 100 milliseconds with apache

on a 9600 baud modem (5 kilobytes 300_000 times an hour is under 4 kilobits per second)

are you hosting glitch.me on an amiga 500 on dialup in zimbabwe or something

I won't go into a ton of specifics, but we talk about the general limitations for projects here: https://help.glitch.com/kb/article/17-technical-restrictions...

it sounds like you accidentally set your request rate limit about four orders of magnitude lower than the other limits, because you set them to 4000 requests per hour, which is about a ten-millionth of a laptop

by contrast the 512 megabytes of ram is about a 64th of a laptop and the 712 megabytes of disk is about a thousandth of a laptop

this results in absurd situations like this one, where a purely static web app collapsed under a load you could literally handle on a commodore 64 on dialup

well, i guess with tls you might need a 25-MHz 386 on dialup

Very cool, can imagine that on my Apple Watch

To be clear, we’ve got Glitch projects doing a lot more volume than that, especially for static apps. This one was hitting our rate-limiting but that was a bit of an outlier and should be fixed now.

it's back!

worth noting that anyone can remix the project :) https://glitch.com/edit/#!/wobble-clock

As mentioned elsewhere, not my project.

Perhaps they serve requests in bursts, just like how this clock works.

Some sort of "wobble server" technology?

Impossible to read, unfortunately. It’s currently 3:55 here, but it looks like 2:55.

Yeah, this is design for the sake of design. A clock that has an ambiguous time readout really defeats the sole purpose of a clock - telling time.

Of course its design for the sake of design. I find it hard to imagine anybody inventing a "better clock". This is digital art and I like it.

I’m pretty sure it is just intended to be a bit of fun.

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