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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It's a clock. Does it really have to have remote updating, a command line interface, an Internet connection, and HomeKit integration? That's too IoT.

I have three La Crosse clocks that run off the NIST time signal out of Boulder, CO, and need their AA battery replaced maybe once a year. The real challenge is running such a thing on a small battery for a year.

I once made a small clock that displayed "A LITTLE AFTER SIX" and such, changing its text every five minutes. Needed a power connection, though.

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I'm close to DIYing it also. I have two of the la crosse clocks. One works well. The other consistently fails to update. It would be cheaper to buy a new one to see if it's a dud or that location, but I already gave up on it and modified it to have a programmable LED strip integrated into it to visually indicate to my son when it was ok to get up for the day (before he could read a clock).

So, ironically, I've ended up with a non-automatic atomic clock that instead contains a raspberry pi pico w that speaks ntp and has a programmable LED strip. That I have to manually set every DST transition, although the LED controller handles it just fine.

I'm with you. I like the DIY, take-things-into-own-hands drive and exploration. I think the next iteration would be nice as a back-to-basics learning journey, to see how less can be more, and explore the possible tools. (e.g. likely settling on a more elegant setup as you imply)

There is a charming "Literary Quote" clock:

https://www.uncommongoods.com/product/literary-clock

and I've often wished that it had a set of quotes for such approximate times.

https://github.com/elegantalchemist/literaryclock

Apparently, since the Kickstarter for Literary Clock, there has been an update of quotes w/ approximate times.

Neat project though! Will keep it in mind for the next time I update a Kindle.

It's not quite the same, but your prose clock solution reminded me of this: https://www.authorandco.com/products/author-clock.

That is very nice. A large version of that would be a good bookstore window display for a busy street. It's too bad the Author Clock doesn't have a video output for a larger display.

The "a little after six" clock idea was from a old New Yorker cartoon. Searches for the cartoon have not been successful, because the original had no caption, and the Cartoon Bank search engine is a textual search. If anyone can find it, please let me know.

I feel like if you were gonna overthink this, you could’ve done something really cute and clever.

Like an AI that stares at the window and figures out which angle the sun is coming in, then makes a determination on what time it must be.

Then while it’s not sunny or can’t figure it out, it has dead reckoning, but it’s constantly looking at angles of shadows that determine if the time has drifted.

It would just start counting

Perhaps you weren’t familiar with how training and AI works.

Oh?

Coming soon, the AI powered sundial.

I mean, I made a clock with remote updating. No command line or HomeKit... Internet is handy because it reads an iCal feed to set the alarm.

I thought the remote updating would be more convenient than bringing it to the dev computer, but I dunno, it's really not... Except for the one I sent to a friend, but I think she politely stopped asking for help cause it didn't really work for her.

It has issues, but it might be a useful start for someone else...

https://github.com/russor/ClockThing/tree/main

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