Show HN: Weird Clocks

I had a lot of time on my hands so I spent Sunday afternoon coming up with a bunch of completely impractical ways to visualize clocks.

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AtomicOrbital 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

years ago in Japan daylight and nighttime were each given 12 hours and clocks were made to adhere to this ... throughout the year as summer days grew longer and nighttime shorter their clocks adjusted to make an hour longer or shorter self adjusting

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vunderba 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

TIL - this is very cool. It looks like somebody actually put together a wari-koma (temporal) watch in 2011 as well.

https://www.masahirokikuno.jp/watches/temporal-hour-watch/

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rendaw 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The non-fixed type system per https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%92%8C%E6%99%82%E8%A8%88 was called "futei jihou" (non-fixed time system), same with other sites https://museum.seiko.co.jp/knowledge/relation_16/ . "Temporal hour system" seems like the correct translation.

My guess is that "wari koma" here means basically "separated panels" (wari: broken, koma: panel). Wadokei means (traditional) Japanese timepiece.

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FinnKuhn 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you want to look at some old ones the Seiko museum in Tokyo has a few. Entry is free and I can only recommend it.

	▲	vunderba 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for the tip! The wadokei clocks on the museum's site look incredible. https://museum.seiko.co.jp/en/collections/traditional_Japane...

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rendaw 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Just double checking, but the day and night were each given 6 hours, not 12.

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shivang2607 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Its one of the best UI/UX I have ever experienced. Really cool man.

	▲	vunderba 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for the kind words!

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arc_light 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is so nice and original! You could easily pitch this to a watch brand to pick up the design and functionality.

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perilunar 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These are wonderful!

	▲	vunderba 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks perilunar - I see from your profile you're a clock enthusiast as well! I'm starting to think we should start an HN web ring for clocks. A bit of feedback for your sun clock: since it asks for my location, by the time I clicked “Allow,” it had already timed out while trying to get the location. You may want to have it continuously check for permission changes and then initialize the sunrise and sunset features once access is granted. Cheers!

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ivaivanova 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow, so cool. Looks amazing. You must really like clocks.

	▲	vunderba 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I do! Cogsworth is my spirit animal.

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BrendoTheBoy 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Really neat! Is this built through react?

	▲	vunderba 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks! It's actually just mostly vanilla HTML, CSS3, and Tailwind. I used ThreeJS for the solar clock, 3d euclidean clock and the water clock, and MatterJS to handle the physics for the marble based clock.

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hahooh 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i love the pi clock

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vunderba 4 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks that was a fun one to work on! I initially had it working at the second level HH:MM:SS but the zooming in and out on the canvas every second gave people whiplash.

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perilunar 2 days ago | parent [-]

I wonder if you could find all the seconds in the region around the HH:MM time — or more to the point, how much do you need to zoom out to find the nearest SS pair?

Then you could keep the HH:MM time centered as it is now, but highlight the nearest SS each second.

	▲	vunderba 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's a good idea! It would make that sixty seconds a little bit more engaging instead of just hanging around on one time and having to wait before it zooms out to find the next HH:MM combination. I had initially set it up to go for each second, but it was physically giving me whiplash.

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sturbes 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So cool!