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Technology Science

Digital Clock Without Electricity or Moving Parts 269

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-where's-the-alarm-function dept.
NerdMachine writes "Throw away those slide rules and embrace the digital age. The Digital Sundial is a 10 year old invention on display in Sundial Park (Genk, Belgium), Deutsches Museum (Munich Germany), Kölnisches Stadtmuseum (Cologne, Germany), and Martha's Vineyard, USA. You need to pivot it to adjust daylight savings time. If you can't visit one of these, Digital Sundials International can sell you one for US$12,000+, or you can buy a pocket version for under US$100 for that special nerd in your life."
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Digital Clock Without Electricity or Moving Parts More

Digital Clock Without Electricity or Moving Parts

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  • Sunlight? Heard about it (Score:5, Funny)

    by SIGALRM ( 784769 ) * on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:36PM (#10978928) Journal
    In the true tradition of all sundials, the device is purely passive - it operates without electricity, and has no moving parts. Instead, the sunlight is cast through two cleverly designed masks
    I live in Seattle. Just a wild guess... but I don't think these clocks are going to sell well here.
    • Or New York City. Wasn't there something recently about how the buildings are so tall they're blocking out the sun?
      • So what's to stop you from placing it on top of the highrise and place a webcam in front of it. bjd
    • Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

    • I live in Seattle. Just a wild guess... but I don't think these clocks are going to sell well here.

      The University of Washington might disagree [washington.edu]!

    • I have my thoughts about it being a flunk too.. This is the thing geeks would love to have, unfortunately, I very much doubt it would work in basements, and normal people would just buy a digital watch, cos they think they're still pretty neat.
    • Yes, but they'll kick the shit out of the Arizona market. Stupid wall plug punks, all tired with they're sore backs from leaning down to reach the socket all the time wishing there was a solution to they're $10 digital clock expenditures and labor.
  • That will go perfectly with my new Digital Sun! I cant wait!

  • Defeating the purpose of the sundial (Score:5, Funny)

    by ralphart ( 70342 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:39PM (#10978968)
    $12,000 USD?? That doesn't seem like a very bright idea.

  • I cringe (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheRoachMan ( 677330 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:40PM (#10978990) Journal
    I cringe at the sight of that Belgian website about the sundial park in Genk. Awful awful awful. I'm ashamed for my country.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:43PM (#10979049)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:I cringe (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Usquebaugh ( 230216 )
        Twoo words Beer and Choclate. Waffles indeed.
        • And mussels/oysters and fish. The mussels are bred in the Netherlands and prepared in Belgium. Talking about good cooperation with our Belgium friends. Then we have the Belgium fries. I'm sure we left some gastronomic experience out, but that's out the top of my head.

          Belgo's in Dublin, Ireland has "bejaardentehuis" written all over its walls. In very large letters.
        • Twoo words Beer and Choclate. Waffles indeed.


          Typos aside, all is forgiven. =)

          Mmmmmm ... sweet Belgian beer.

        • add women! my girlfriend is belgian. Also delicious ;)
    • Hey, it said _UN_official.

  • Not until... (Score:5, Funny)

    by bourne_id ( 812415 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:41PM (#10979012)

    .. they have built-in calculators, can be worn on the wrist, and can run a scaled-down version of Linux.

    JMD

  • Doesn't a sundial require a moving part? (Score:5, Funny)

    by I_am_Rambi ( 536614 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:41PM (#10979016) Homepage
    as in the earth. If the earth didn't rotate, it wouldn't work. Sorry, but there must be a moving part.
  • If you can't visit one of these, Digital Sundials International can sell you one for US$12,000+, or you can buy a pocket version for under US$100 for that special nerd in your life."

    Evidently the sun does shine there for some people...

  • or you can buy a pocket version for under US$100 for that special nerd in your life.

    just happens to be me.

  • Only 10 years old? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This has to be the fastest slashdot has got an article to the frontpage. Congratulations

  • Okay, so to recap (Score:3, Funny)

    by cardshark2001 ( 444650 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:45PM (#10979077)
    It's some kind of fancy light bouncing device that can tell you what time it is every 5 minutes. It's not incredibly useful at night. You can't play doom on it.

    Next!

  • Spoiled Kids These Days... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Godling ( 42833 ) <gshippey.gmail@com> on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:51PM (#10979162) Homepage
    ...will never learn to read a proper sundial.

  • Ahh, sunlight... (Score:5, Funny)

    by revolvement ( 742502 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:59PM (#10979285)
    A slashdotter's arch-nemesis.

    *runs from the flames*

  • The Equation of Time (Score:5, Informative)

    by apikoros ( 774290 ) * on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:59PM (#10979289)
    Although the clock is set to read in 5 or 10 minute intervals, depending on the time of year it could still be up to 16 minutes fast or slow compared to your watch or clock because of the Equation of time [nasa.gov]. Our sense of time is so conditioned by our dependence on the mechanical/digital that solar time is now percieved to be "wrong".

    • Re:The Equation of Time (Score:3, Insightful)

      by shawb ( 16347 )
      And then there's the fact that the sun does not necesarilly shine for one half of a day (day being one complete revolution of the earth around its axis, not sunrise -> sunset... erk.)

      Where I live (Milwaukee, WI) sunset can be as early as 4:20 PM [timeanddate.com] on the winter solstice and as late as 8:35 PM [timeanddate.com] on Summer solstice (Central Standard Times, I believe.) I'd think that right before sunset the clock would read 6:00PM, so that's over an hour and a half off.
      • That would be true if the sun rose and set in the same angle over the horizon all year, but the sun does not do that. During the summer, it sets and rises north of where it sets and rises in the winter. At the equinox, it sets and rises due west and due east.

  • Better information (Score:4, Informative)

    by fredistheking ( 464407 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:59PM (#10979291)
    from the companues website [digitalsundial.com]
  • You need to pivot it to adjust daylight savings time.

    You are required to move it so it gives correct time for 6 months out of the year. I think that qualifies as a moving part.
    • "You are required to move it so it gives correct time for 6 months out of the year."

      No, it always gives correct time for the time zone it's specified. You don't change the time, you change time zones; where I sit, when Daylight Saving Time starts I go from Eastern Standard Time to Eastern Daylight Time. Eastern Standard Time doesn't change, it keeps on ticking along at UTC-0500.

  • Americans (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dazedagain ( 829634 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @05:33PM (#10979647)
    If it can't be installed in an SUV most Americans won't buy it anyway.

  • Globe as sundial (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SiliconEntity ( 448450 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @05:53PM (#10979850)
    I read an article in an old Scientific American about an especially simple sundial: mount a globe of the Earth outside, orienting it to be exactly parallel to the real Earth. That means pointing the north pole of the globe at the North Star, and rotating it so that your current meridian of longitude runs across the top. This will put your current location exactly at the top of the globe.

    The cool thing is that sunlight will now fall on the globe in exactly the way it falls on the Earth (during the day, that is). You can see the day-night terminator and it will be the same as the terminator on the actual Earth. You can see which polar regions are getting 24 hour sunlight or night. You can tell whether it is day or night anywhere on Earth, and even estimate what time it is there.

    It sounded pretty cool although I never bothered to try to set one up. You'd need some kind of waterproof globe that wouldn't fade in the sunlight. Probably there are some like this on public display somewhere.
  • The concept is more than ten years old; I read about a proposal for a digital sundial (in the same sense as this one) in a magazine called the Mathematical Intelligencer back in the 80s. However I think that design was more complex and involved some kind of custom fractal-like structure so that the sunlight was always shadowed just right to produce digits. The patented version looks simpler and perhaps less elegant but much more practical.
  • Moving Part: the earth

  • dated? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @06:28PM (#10980302) Homepage Journal
    That thang is wicked. Can someone license the mechanism and make a calendar? If not Julian, then maybe Mayan?
  • I dunno about you, but I would call the Earth a damn big moving part that is required for the operation of this thing...

  • Internet Time (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wwwillem ( 253720 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @10:01PM (#10982225) Homepage
    Would be cool to make one of these that shows Internet Time. You remember, that dot-com time invention from Swatch to have time-zone crossing con-calls at @526 and everybody would then know when that was. For those who missed that, Swatch wanted to cut 24 hours into thousand pieces, so one unit of Internet Time (called a beat) is app. 1.5 minute, which is accurate enough for things like the start of a meeting.

    The headache will be of course that sundials are by nature giving time in "local time" and need a correction to display "standard time". This problem would be agrevated when the dial has to display Internet Time, which can only be overcome to build custom sundials for every longitude on earth. This sounds bad, but sundials are anyway normally custom made, so maybe this isn't too bad. Probably the biggest obstacle is that now already, 5 years after the invention, nobody remembers what internet time was. Oh well.....

    • Re:Internet Time (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bitsy Boffin ( 110334 )

      5 years after the invention, nobody remembers what internet time was. Oh well.....

      The problem is, that it was a stupid "invention".

      You see, we already have a universally accepted standard time, Universal Time Co-ordinated (UTC).

      Not only is it universally accepted it's also trivial to convert between time zones, just add or remove hours (and occasionally minutes) as necessary.

      Swatch "Internet Time" offered nothing over UTC, it was, without a doubt, pointless.

  • A deserving patent (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cardbox ( 165383 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @04:44AM (#10984205) Homepage
    This design was turned up as "prior art" when I was drawing up my own patent for moire-based time indication. It was sufficiently offtopic not to be relevant, but it was rather a nice idea so it's good to see it being implemented. It also sets a useful pricepoint for my own design...
    Yes, it would be cool to display the date but there are a couple of problems.
    1. When you're considering time, the sun moves round and round (forever westwards), so one position corresponds to one time, but when you're looking at dates, it oscillates (between north and south), so any date indication will be ambiguous between November and January, October and February, September and March...
    2. Near the solstices the noon sun moves very very slowly, so the degree of amplification of motion required would be enormous and you'd run into diffraction problems.

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