Life Time Century Clock
This clock makes a full revolution every 100 years to represent a person’s life.
Clocks, whether the wall-mounted, wrist units, or even those that live on your phone, keep us coordinated for work, school, meetings, and a plethora of other interactions. The analog-style Life Time clock, by Henry York, takes a step back from the day’s hustle and bustle and completes one revolution of the hour hand in 100 years. A century can then be used as a rather optimistic view of one’s lifetime, or maybe not, given medical advances that are hopefully on the horizon.
Mechanically, the clock is a fairly generic timepiece, using a standard coil setup to tick the seconds/years away. Instead of the coil being driven by the original circuitry, however, York subbed in an ESP8266 development board to trigger each temporal step once every 20 hours. The ESP gets time data from an NTP server, and if a sequence shorter than a century is desired–say to show how long the weekend is going to last — this can be adjusted via a serial interface.
The clock also features a strip of LEDs around its inner circumference, which can provide illumination, or perhaps even special effects as the project develops. It’s quite a clever concept, which would seem to work pretty well, though one could argue that it will take a lifetime (or more) to actually test it.
Code for the build is found on GitHub for your use and/or perusal.
