The Life and Death of the Bulbdial Clock | Hacker News Reader

The Life and Death of the Bulbdial Clock

ironicsans.beehiiv.com

138 pointsarantius24 comments

The buried detail that Evil Mad Scientist was acquired by Bantam Tools deserves an article on its own IMO. I find it sad that such a nifty small (and seemingly very personal) business would get gobbled up (though I would be happy if they proved me wrong about the typical fate of acquired companies!).

Yeah. Here is the press release [1] about the acquisition.

[1]: https://www.bantamtools.com/blog/bantam-tools-acquires-evil-...

I'm reasonably good friends with Windell & Lenore, and I think "gobbled up" is not the right way to look at it.

It's my understanding that they've known the folks at Bantam for some time now, and that given how hard it can be to run a physical product company (especially one that does some in-house manufacturing for your own products!) in the bay area, that they're looking forward to having such niceties as 'pto'.

They're really excellent people, and made a huge difference to me when I first moved to the bay area, so while it's sad to see them leave, I understand it, and hope this leads to a better situation all around for them.

I have every expectation that they're doing what they believe to be the right thing for themselves. I have no objection to that, and it isn't meant to be negative toward them in any way. I don't actually know them, for one. :)

It doesn't make it any less sad, however. It's just... the end of an era, it feels like.

I also have issues with M&A practices to begin with. While I can't speak for this particular case, I do worry that in general the frequency of M&A is trending toward harmful to our society. That may be coloring my view.

I just hope they release the MOnSter 6502 someday. That thing is cool, and if I happened to have the money, I'd probably pay a grand to be able to hang one on my wall...

> So they depend on the user referring to something called the Equation of Time to convert sundial time to actual time.

Not necessarily, or at least without explicit calculation. Good sundials are marked with a calendar that does that for you. Large analemmatic dials have places marked for each month where you stand the gnomon, which can be a person. There is one by the river in Stratford Upon Avon

https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/6232719

There are also dials that include a kind of circular slide rule that implements the equation of time:

http://www.short-humour.org.uk/Heliochronometer/Heliochronom...

I have a Bulbdial clock sitting on the mantel. I bought the kit around when they first came out but only got around to building it a few years ago. Recently when my niece stayed over, she slept in the living room, and she asked for "a nightlight". I turned up the brightness setting to provide a multicolored glow.

Lots of comments here about sundials and the equation of time, responding to OP comment that sundials suck.

The actual issue is that sundials reflect the movement of the sun, whereas we mainly use an averaged out mean time to describe when it is noon. Solar noon (when the sun is at it's highest point) is sometimes ahead of mean time noon, sometimes behind it. This is due to the movement of the earth around the sun (including whether the earth is east or west of the sun looking down from the above the sun), the earth's axial tilt, and your latitude. However, the variation is entirely predictable, as encapsulated in the so-called equation of time, which shows the variation that needs to be applied to get mean noon. Of course, none of this really matters if you aren't bothered about synchronising geographically distributed clocks, time zones, etc.

As an example of the other weirdnesses that can result from using solar time, consider how day length changes as we go from the shortest to the longest day. Where I am in the southern UK, sunrise continues to get later until about two weeks after the shortest day, and the major change of day length (at that time of year) is in the evening. This is the same effect captured by the equation of time and reflects the fact that we are on a wobbly planet that doesn't have a perfectly circular, perfectly vertical orbit around the sun.

[Edit - minor rewording for clarity]

Thanks. Thats new information to me that sunrise and sunset don’t move uniformly.

With RGB LED strips so common these days, you could make one pretty easily by getting a high density strip, measuring the spacing of the LEDs, and calculating the correct diameter for the strip's pitch. Doing some quick calculations, an LED strip that is 60 LEDs per meter would require a clock that is 16cm in radius, which would be a nice size for a wall clock!

You could simulate this using WebGL and some directional light sources. Then you don’t need to leave the house and it can be brought up on any screen.

https://webglfundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-shadows.ht...

For me, much of the appeal of this and similar ideas is precisely the physical aspect, including the use of real light and real shadows.

If you have a mechanical clock, put a single LED on the end of each dial, mount some frosted glass or plastic plate a few cm in front of the clock face, and glue a pole in the center of the plate between it and the clock face to make the LEDs cast shadows on the plate.

Easy, except for reliably powering the LEDs.

Inductively powered LEDs FTW?

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5140

Only vaguely related to the article, but I really enjoy the notion that the sun is a bad clock - like, that the time a sundial tells is unreliable.

It doesn’t match the other clock we made, sure, but boy that would’ve been a weird thing to explain to any human at all 200 years ago.

Mechanical clocks date back 700 years so it wouldn't have been a weird thing to explain, but clocks aside, it would already have been known that sundials aren't accurate, humans have been observing the seasons and positions of the sun for thousands of years. For the purposes they used it for, it would have been good enough.

Yeah, it does take you into a "what does time mean" rabbit hole. The sun is highly consistent, but that's not the same as convenient - we prefer to divide time into equal units, and leave the rotations of the earth to the International Earth Rotation Service.

> the sundial, can be ahead (fast) by as much as 16 min 33 s (around 3 November), or behind (slow) by as much as 14 min 6 s (around 11 February).

wow, I never knew!

> Why not replace it with a Bulbdial Clock that has no moving parts?

I missed the part where they explained how you get a moving shadow, without either moving posts or moving lights.

A series of fixed lights that turn on and off. Which results in quantized hand positions, but hey.

Real clocks already use quantized movements, the quanta are just tiny

True - it's very hard to build a continuous tickless clock.

I think Seiko's Spring Drive counts as continuous. There is a quartz crystal which times the electronic part but this only serves to retard the balance wheel rather and never completely stops it.

Great article! I'm especially interested because I make weird clocks & digital displays too.

Https://digitalhorology.com

Cool idea, but if you are going to use lights to cast shadows to (in some way) replicate a sundial, then use a 24-hour face ffs. The 12-hour analogue clockface is a dumb abstraction to get stuck on if you are going to the trouble of re-imagining how to build a clock.

Also, sundials don't suck.

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