alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Carton Clock – A working pendulum clock made from empty drink cartons
After my last trash clock (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49930439), I wanted to see how low I could go. My latest clock is built mainly from empty drink cartons, plus a few skewers, some paper straws, a piece of string, some nuts as weights, and lots of hot glue. It has a pendulum, an escapement, and hands for seconds, minutes, and hours, and runs for about an hour.
The design of the gears and escapement was AI-assisted: Claude built me interactive browser tools that generate templates and 3D-printable jigs and tools.
I’m happy to answer your questions! And to the commenter who suggested I submit trash clock timekeeping as a talk to 40C3: I did, and it got accepted. CU at Congress, I guess!?
Comments
mrdabolins • today at 1:21 PM
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fahrvrgnugen • today at 12:10 PM
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Tangent: public school in the Midwaste in the 1970's… I remember we had a good number of guests visit elementary school, Junior high [1]. There would be perhaps an all-school auditorium/gymnasium event—like some kind of TED talk…
One such speaker was a Vietnam prisoner of war who gave a talk about his time in a Viet Cong prison (school appropriate?). He had built a clock while in prison from bits of metal from cans, perhaps a coat hangar or some other kind of wire… And he had brought a replica of it. For some reason that fascinated me. I suppose the ingenuity of humans when left with all the time in the world… idea hands and all that.
[1] (Or maybe it's selective memory and they were so not-the-normal-routine and that is why they stick in my head. There were plenty of other wild all-school events: an Apollo astronaut, some chemical company I suspect—performing feats of chemical magic, Simas Kudirka, some guy with a kind of doomsday computer—perhaps reflecting overpopulation and dwindling resources by 2026…)