“It´s been a long time since the hype for the tix clocks has faded. I started building it at the beginning of 2014! but, 2 kids and moving abroad made this project to fall in the list of priorities.
The idea of a tix clock is to count the dots that are illuminated. Each group illuminates the amount of LEDs corresponding to its digit of the time read in the HH:MM format. I know, life is hard enough to complicate reading the time, but it has color lights!
For this clock I used mostly scraps I had laying around. My wife had some unused lab tubes from some old experiment. She had like, hundreds of them, and I was wondering what could I do before discarding them.
I used to visit the reuse center in Ann Arbor, where you could buy pieces of reclaimed wood, mostly from the trimming or feeling of city trees. It was really fun to visit them because they always had a wide variety of woods in small pieces. So, the dimensions were based in those limiting factors.
This is the list of supplies, I added some links in case you want more info about the product.
- Wood - I used Cherry because it is beautiful and was the one I had. The piece I used was ~10.5” (266mm) x 4 3/8” (111mm) x1.6” (40mm).
- 32 Lab tubes the tubes I used where very similar to these. But any tube will work, the only thing is that you´ll need to use a different drill bit. 32 is the strictly necessary, but you´ll need more, since some of them will end broken.
- 32 WS218b LEDs I used these type of LEDs, but any other addressable RGB LED will work. I bought 100 for around 10 US Dollars
- Wemos D1 mini or any other ESP8266 (or ESP32) board will work, (NodeMCU, etc)
- Logic level converter
- jumper wires, conectors and
- Drill Press
- Glass cutter
- Capacitor (100uF or more at 16v or more)
- 1/2” drill bit
- Sandpaper 150, 220 and 400 grit.
- Finishing for wood, I used something I bought at Home Depot or Lowes, It´s called “Formby’s Clear Tung Oil” It worked really well.
- 5v power source”