Show HN: Belshazzar's Clock, luminous paint night clock
The Belshazzar clock, inspired by a biblical story, features a luminous drum, is powered by a stepper motor and ESP32C3 board, and currently displays UTC time. Future improvements are planned.
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The blog post discusses the development of a luminous clock named "Belshazzar," inspired by the biblical story of Belshazzar's feast. The author has previously created large-scale luminous displays for events but decided to design a more compact version suitable for home use. The clock features a 100mm diameter drum painted with luminous paint, powered by a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor and an ESP32C3 development board. The clock utilizes a string of 30 UV LEDs for illumination and receives time updates via NTP, although it currently displays UTC due to limitations in time zone support. The author faced challenges with the quality of ESP32C3 boards from AliExpress, including issues with onboard flash memory and WiFi chip design. Future improvements for the clock include enhancing its aesthetics and experimenting with photochromic ink for a daylight version. The author has made the project assets available on GitHub for others to create their own version of the clock.
- The Belshazzar clock is designed for home use, inspired by a biblical story.
- It features a luminous drum powered by a stepper motor and an ESP32C3 board.
- The clock currently displays UTC time due to limitations in time zone support.
- The author encountered quality issues with ESP32C3 boards from AliExpress.
- Future enhancements include aesthetic improvements and a daylight version using photochromic ink.
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6 commentsI imagine that you could improve the consistency and readability some by modeling the state of each pixel of paper. That way when the drum comes around you can compensate the exposure per pixel based on the current state to achieve better uniformity of display. In this way you could do exposure compensation on each row of output to make the display equally bright top to bottom. This would be similar to how a "no-refresh" epaper display works.
I've had Aqua and Green, and they look gorgeous.
say, why don't you move mirrors but the whole laser?
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