Epicycle Clock | Hacker News Reader

Epicycle Clock

sophiehoulden.com

182 pointsColinWright28 comments

Neat!

It reminds me a little of a screen saver called Fractal Clock that I wrote many years ago for MacOS X: https://www.dqd.com/programs/FractalClock/

Sadly, the screen saver stopped working as of (I think) Catalina and I have never gotten around to fixing it. But someone else wrote a very clever web version which you can see here: https://cakenggt.github.io/web-fractal-clock/ and the source repo is here: https://github.com/cakenggt/web-fractal-clock

I love these! I’ve seen them referred to as “hand in hand” clocks and there are a handful of physical manifestations that you can 3d print or make yourself

https://ytec3d.com/hand-in-hand-clock/ https://www.tindie.com/products/ekaggrat/hand-in-hand-clock-...

Cool! I didn't like that the orientation of the clock hands rotated over time, and I made[1] one that maintains the typical analog clock hour/minute hands alignment with 12 o'clock while rotating once per minute on a long second hand.

Scroll down if you don't want to wait for it to finish. Squint, and you might see a 12-ness nested in the epicycles.

[1] https://ouruboroi.com/epiclock

Also see https://dice.camp/@Sophie/110582295710095733

This made me smile :). What a fun clock.

Given CSS animations coupled with the new CSS trigonometric functions... this should be doable in pure CSS, minus the initial injection of the current seconds into a CSS variable on page load. There is no reason to do it in CSS, it just sounds like a fun weekend project (unless someone beats me to it, in which case a fun weekday project!)

Begging for a second hand.

There is one. You need to zoom in.

Is there one though? Or do you refer to the minutes-hand moving every 1 second?

There’s a button in the bottom right corner that will add seconds "_:00".

Newton, Shmooten, Epicycles worked!, they just didn't add enough layers. I'll put this next to my wonderful flat-Earth globe. https://makingmaps.net/2007/09/19/making-flat-earth-globes/

about 20 years ago a built a really really janky mechanical version of this.

Super cool, any pictures? I think the minute/second hands would probably be too hard to reliably see, but this would be a really unique looking watch.

lol there might be some on my nokia phone .. just let me dig that out of the closet. To be clear this project was moderately large, if i recall the hour hand (which was the longer in my design) was about 1 foot long.

Nice. Reminds me of one part of the Masagin demo [1], with lots of nested dials synched to the music.

1. https://youtu.be/sbQhgEJuExY?t=163

I like this a lot. Does anyone here have experience using Patreon for supporting this kind of work? Seems like a natural fit for a digital artist.

https://www.patreon.com/SophieHoulden

Curious is this just for fun or there is some advantage in representing the clock this way?

Well it’s helpful for understanding how Ancient Greek astronomers thought the planets moved. Epicycles were used to explain the apparent retrograde motion of Mars.

I love it, I was about to complain that all it needs is a 24 hour mode. But it has one.

Very nice.

Cool.

Why not go one step further and show epicycles for each minute as well.

There is, click the _:00 button, and zoom in to see the blue/teal seconds hand.

Aha Thanks!

I was looking at it on my mobile screen and missed those tiny options in the bottom. Cool.

Where is the black hand pointing to?

The same direction as the small (slow) hand on a normal clock.

Not quite, the "0" of the minute hand is always aligned with the direction of the hour hand, so it points >down< at 6:00 unlike an ordinary clock.

The black hour hand is moving the same as a normal clock.

The maroon minute hand is rotating at 390 degrees per hour relative to the clock face. It's rotating at 360 degrees an hour relative to the hand it's mounted on.

My favorite timepiece was xdaliclock

This is so spectacular

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