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damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Thank you, the making of presentation coming soon!

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Some of you asked for a video of nubmer changing. Here it is completely behind the scenes with visible mechanics, enjoy:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cjvngsya64m5bb7/rhei-prototype-num...

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Yeah, when there is no number it turns to big blobs of liquid that actually touch walls of the screen on both sides, so i guess its bigger than 10mm in that case

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Yeah it was the biggest challenge, how to gently move liquid and not "expose" the mechanism behind it so it looks that liquid is moving on its own. I have a lot more videos, feel free to send me an email stankovicdamjan@gmail.com i will share. My plan is to publish the making of presentation by the end of this week

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

It was mostly for newspaper websites so they can get photos when they are publishing stories. Thanks!

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Yeah, so far no makerspace here in Serbia, however we have a lot of small local businesses and craftmans that you can pay to get something done.

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Yeah making just any prototype should have been much easier, i really tried to make something that looks beautiful even when its not animated.

KS, maybe one day :)

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

It could get away with none, however i wanted it to constantly move even while numbers are changed - otherwise i asked myself why build it out of liquid if its not moving.

On the other hand, you are right, it only draws power when it moves and it moves every other segment every few seconds which is enough to constantly animate the numbers, because the fluid needs time to readjust.

The motors are actually stepper motors, which made it all harder, because its not as easy to move them as it is to move servos, and steppers have no idea where they are which required an initial calibration sequence. The good news is that steppers are not loosing any steps, i guess the mechanics work very well.

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

yeah the size is the problem definitely. I experimented a lot with electromagnets and finally gave up, any result i could get didnt leave me with this kind of animation:

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

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

umm.. that would be very expensive :))

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

yeah my bad, i forgot to put a capital R which helps a lot in this case :)

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

At the moment its only a prototype. After some testing, if it reutrns promising results i would be more than glad to produce a smaller quantity of these. Unfortunately i have no idea about the price, sorry.

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Vide is a product of two very talented guys, Djordje Stojiljkovic and Nenad Veljovic. I will pass on your compliments to them. As for the website, that would be my primary profession UX/UI design :) Althugh it was all done in 1 day.

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

actually this was the hardest part, how to make numbers look thick and REAL, and connected. Here is a GIF that shows this nicely:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/066c8502j2zwlwo/rheiani.gif?dl=0

Thats the reason why i had to work with ferrofluid and change its structure and composition, i wanted to have thicker numbers. Whole screen is 10mm thick inside, and numbers sometimes go up to 8mm of thickness. They are especially nice from the angle because the seem like they float and not simply stuck to the wall. I will make better photos definitely.

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Its a stock music from audiojungle :)

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Guys that made video know what the song is, its a bought from audiojungle. I will find out whats the name or url

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Thank you so much. I am really, considering the fact that i started almost 4 years ago, then paused after few months and then spent almost the whole last year on it. Thanks again!

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Thank you, much appreciated. I think this is my favorite project so far just because i learned the most.

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

I am just working on this :) Somehow we missed to put a part of the transforming numbers in the video because we were on such a tight schedule. I will be updating website and more important i will launch the making of document of the whole project that will show all of this.

GIF on the way :) thanks a lot!

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

I had a problem with my hosting, however one of my friends solved it. Thanks so much for jumping in :)

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

If i use the regular ferrofluid it can last for quite long, however i dont like the effect of the fluid in that case, it has spikes and doesnt really look like a blob that i wanted to achieve. I have samples that are year old and work just fine so far.

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

It could, currently for animation i use 5 second interval, because its much more nice to look at because liquid slowly transforms. I will include new videos an GIF to show this.

However seconds would be doable but it would result in animation being constant since it needs about a second to transform, so i finally decided to go with HH:MM

Here is another video of this little thingy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoOMQ8TaTyE

you can see that the liquid is quite different, it was long time ago, but it basically acts the same but looks more blobby

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Hi Henk,

At the moment its working but its not perfect. The biggest challenge i had was to make this really look like fluid and kill the ferrofluid spikes. I simply wanted to animate the fluid not make it obvious that its a ferrofluid. So i had to thin the ferrofluid with all kinds of different things, some work better some work worse, still testing.

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Hi DanBc,

Thanks a lot!

Wow... were to start.. Perhaps the biggest problem i had was preventing the ferrofluid to stain glass and aluminum frame i used for the screen. I tried to get some help on the faculty of chemistry here in Belgrade, but no real success. Finally after months and months of experimenting with different liquids, you start to feel and "undertand" the way ferrofluid behaves.. very strange :) Its still not perfect but im working on perfecting it.

The first time i sketched the project seemed very easy, i will make a matrix of electromagnets and simply attract the ferrofluid. It actually gave some results but i realized that having a system that requires a huge amount of electricity to be spent all the time to simply show a number thats fixed - is not elegant. Here is one of the videos i recorded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvp7bWe-M94

So finally i decided to go with neodymium magnets and mechanics. Building this from scratch was a crazy adventure of lots of lathe machining and cnc machining and so on.

I had no training basically i had to learn all along the way. I used illustrator for the most of the construction, since i am UI/UX designer, and finally gave it up and learned solidworks so i can make a whole 3d model of the clock and assemble all parts in 3D.

For the next project i think i will have to curb the need to make it "perfect", i lost A LOT of time beacuse of this. For example each time i wanted to make a screen for this i had to buy a glass, cut it on waterjet, then drill a hole, then glue to the frame that needed to be cut on waterjet also and polished before adding adhesive and so on. And once it does not work, i have to do it all again...

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Hi Vortico,

Shooting took around 7 days because we were on a very tight schedule, trying to make it for the public announcement of the red dot results http://www.red-dot.sg/en/online-exhibition/rhei/

The good news is that i do have all the process over the year documented, if you want i can upload some photos but i am writing a making of presentation that i will place on behance and medium. I think it will be a really useful story for an industrial design student or someone who has good ideas but still not sure if he should start prototyping or not.

This was funded solely by me, which made it so much harder. I had to do freelance by day and work on this by night. Its difficult especially because prototyping means you have to make the same thing many times over and over again and its really time and money consuming.

damjanstankovicon Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

author here, i will be glad to answer any questions you guys have