Maker Roni Bandini has constructed a desk clock with a distinction, and in doing so turned again time — to when the beats of Web Time had been the way forward for timekeeping.
“In 1998, Swatch launched a radical idea: Web Time, a common time system for the net that divided the day into 1,000 ‘.beats’ as a substitute of hours, minutes, and seconds. The Swiss watchmaker even launched a line of futuristic wristwatches that displayed the time in .beats,” Bandini writes by means of background.
“However was this a Swatch thought? It seems that a couple of months earlier than Swatch announcement, an individual very accustomed to beats introduced the identical thought and even created a web site, i-time.com, to point out the Web Hour. That individual was Charly Alberti, the drummer of the Argentine rock band Soda Stereo.”
Alberti would later declare that his thought of beats-based Web Time had been stolen out from underneath him, costing him hundreds of thousands of {dollars} — although it wasn’t precisely a money-spinner for Swatch both, with the corporate failing to drum up sufficient curiosity within the idea and the final Swatch watch to incorporate the operate being launched to essential apathy in 2016.
Simply because the idea was not a industrial success, although, there is no motive it might probably’t be utilized immediately — being based mostly on the easy equation of at some point being equal to 1,000 .beats, making an hour 41.6 .beats lengthy and one second 0.011574 .beats. With these figures in thoughts, Bandini introduced again Web Time — utilizing a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 microcontroller board and a watch-like round show.
Bandini’s desk clock makes use of a consumer interface drawn by OpenAI’s DALL-E generative synthetic intelligence (AI) platform, made in black and white for a selected aesthetic. These are saved on the microcontroller and used with the LVGL library to create the graphical interface — with a real-time clock overlay exhibiting the present time in .beats.
The clock’s background graphics had been “designed” by OpenAI’s DALL-E generative AI. (📷: Roni Bandini)
“[The] XIAO Spherical Show is contact [sensitive], so you may configure alarms or swap between common time and .beats,” Bandini suggests of how to broaden the venture. “The nRF board has a [PDM] mic and accelerometer, so data from there might be used. One other fascinating possibility is utilizing interrupts to increase battery life.”
Extra data on the venture is offered on Bandini’s Hackaday.io web page, whereas the supply code is offered on GitHub underneath the permissive MIT license; a 3D-printable stand for the venture is offered on Cults 3D, underneath a closed license however free for personal use.