This Clock's Electrical Guts Are a Work of Art

Gislain Benoit's hand-built creation contains hundreds of diodes, transistors, and other components.

By John WenzPublished: Jan 26, 2015

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"The Clock" is a perfectly good timepiece, but its creator envisioned it as something more—a work of art. This mechanical beauty uses 60 LED lights, 1161 diodes, 340 transistors, and 346 resistors. The LEDs light up to visualize time in a unique and creative way: They're powered by the 60hZ voltage common to American appliances. Creator Gislain Benoit explains:

The clock reference, in other words the heartbeat of this clock, comes from the AC outlet. Here in North America, the outlets supply 120 Volts, in 60 cycles per second, called 60 Hertz. This 60 Hertz signal is taken by the clock and is divided by sixty to produce a pulse of 1 hertz, which is one pulse per second. The same circuit which does this division is also used to animate the ring of LED lights around the clock digits. The 1 Hertz pulse is then taken to the seconds counter, then to the tens of seconds counter, then to the minutes, and so on, till the tens of the hours.

The time is adjusted not by button or dial, but by magnet—one hovers over a certain area of the clock to get the digital display to adjust time accordingly.

Benoit put hundreds of hours over three years of building and soldering by handing to the construction of the 14-pound timepiece.He's no stranger to complicated projects that visualize electricity. He also created The Tower, which uses LEDs to visualize electrical currents running through a lamp.

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Source: Hackaday.