It’s that time of year to start thinking about gifts for the ones you like to spend time with. Why not give them the gift of time! We’ve put together a gift guide of clocks and watches in all shapes and designs for you to make or give as a project for your DIY time loving friend. They’ll love that you took the time to think of them!
Available At Adafruit
Edo-Style Clock Kit from Gakken: Experience a favorite feudal Japanese time-piece by building your own beautiful dual-foliot, Edo-period Japanese mechanical clock!
Edo-period Japanese clocks were unique mechanical clocks that adapted Western clock-making techniques to tell traditional Japanese time. This kit from Gakken has two foliots – one for the day hours and one for the night hours. The front and rear foliots switch between 6 AM and 6 PM automatically.
A foliot is part of the Verge escapement of early clocks. Even if you’re not a clock expert or enthusiast, this kit is fairly easy to build and should only take an hour or so. While the instructions with this product come in Japanese (great for practicing your Kana & Kanji reading skills!) Gakken has thoughtfully provided an English guide for download here
Read more
Solder:Time Desk Clock: Make a sleek full featured, conversation starting desk clock. The Solder:Time™ Desk Clock is the latest addition to the Solder:Time kit family. The Solder Time Desk Clock (STDC) is a DIY soldering kit. You only need to provide some basic electronics tools; Solder iron, solder, screwdriver, some fine grit sandpaper and wire snips. We’ve pre-programmed the chip, so it’s ready to roll once assembled.
Itching to hack in some custom code or hardware? Bring it on! Designed with hack-a-bility in mind, the STDC is based on the same ATMega microprocessor used in the Arduino products. There are extra digital and analog pins broken-out, an open serial port as well as I2C all easily accessible within the case, as well as an integrated prototyping area on-board. Download the sketch from our web page, modify it, add extra hardware if that’s your thing, and WOW your friends (or the Internet) with your amazing add-ons. Read more
Xronos Clock(from greek Χρόνος [kronos] which means Time) is not your average alarm clock. It’s an open source, hackable and customizable device. It has a stylish look, is hand made, and it talks!
Xronos has an internal backup battery that will allow it to keep time if you forget to plug in. All settings are saved to flash memory (EEPROM), so you don’t have to worry about power loss and all your alarm settings and preferences will be there when the power comes back on! Since all audio files are kept on SD card inside, you can even change alarm tones, or replace voice prompts with your own (though only ones that follow Xronos’ naming convention).
Xronos has three cool looking durable arcade buttons that give you simple access to all of its features! Read more
Bulbdial Clock kit is based on an original design concept from IronicSans.com and developed at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. It works like an indoor sundial, but with three shadows of different length. You tell the time just like you do on a normal clock, by reading the positions of the hour, minute, and second hands.
The bulbdial we are carrying comes with red, green and blue LEDs for the ‘hands’, a black/smoke laser-cut enclosure and a wall adapter. When finished, it looks like the picture shown above!
The Bulbdial Clock is sold as a soldering kit [?]. Basic electronic soldering skill is required, and you provide basic soldering tools: a soldering iron + solder and small wire clippers. You will also need internet access to read or download our detailed assembly guide. No additional knowledge of electronics is presumed or required. Easy “through-hole” construction and clear, photo-heavy instructions are provided. Read more
Solder:Time DIY watch kit: Calculator watches are back, but microcontroller watches are always in style. Make your own with this easy to solder real time watch kit from SpikenzieLabs! It comes with a unique laser cut acrylic casing which protects the watch and looks snazzy besides: the four individual acrylic parts cut to fit the internal PCB, battery and switch perfectly. Included is a velcro wrist band. After soldering the Solder:Time, the watch is built by stacking the acrylic parts with the PCB and holding it together with the included screws.
The Solder:Time was designed to be a wrist watch. It doesn’t have to be limited to living on your wrist, you could also use it as a badge or desk clock.
Features:
Great looking laser cut acrylic case
Unique watch
Easy to solder
Stand alone project – no computer or other programmer required. Just solder it and it’s ready!
On board Dallas DS1337+ Real Time Clock (RTC) for super accurate time keeping
Jumper (on bottom) for always on use.
Hackable: Programming and I2C pads labeled on bottom
Clear front and back casing to show the internal electronics
Adjustable wrist band
Can be also be worn as a badge with optional badge clip.
Long lasting battery, with special LED lighting method and very low power processor sleeping.
Solder:Time II was designed to be a wrist watch. It doesn’t have to be limited to living on your wrist, you could also use it as a badge or desk clock.
This new version is even more hackable than ever. The on board microcontroller in this model is the very popular ATmega328P used in many of the current versions of Arduino™. In fact, you can reprogram your watch using the same Arduino™ IDE software that you use for a regular Arduino.
The Solder : Time II is different from the original Solder:Time in many ways. The display has been upgraded to a set of four 5×7 LED matrix modules. This gives you control of a 7×20 matrix for a total of 140 LEDs!
The new LED matrix allows for an amazing amount of information to be displayed; aside from the current time… The date, month, words, scrolling messages, graphics, special characters … the possibilities are endless. Read more
Ice Tube Clock kit: This is our first clock kit design, made with a retro Russian display tube!
Cool glowing blue tube with 8 digits, PM dot and alarm on/off indicator
Adjustable brightness
Alarm with volume adjust
Precision watch crystal keeps time with under 20ppm (0.0002%) error
Clear acrylic enclosure protects clock from you and you from clock
Battery backup will let the clock keep the time for up to 2 weeks without power
Selectable 12h or 24h display
Displays day and date on button press
10 minute snooze
Integrated boost converter so it can run off of standard DC wall adapters, works in any country regardless of mains power
Great for desk or night table use, the clock measures 4.9″ x 2.9″ x 1.3″ (12.5cm x 7.4cm x 3.3cm)
Completely open source hardware and software, ready to be hacked and modded!
Complete kit comes with a 110/220V 9VDC power supply (a $1 plug adapter from your local hardware store will allow it to be used worldwide), all components including PCB, vacuum fluorescent tube, backup battery and a clear acrylic enclosure. Assembly is required! This kit is made of through-hole components but is best built by someone with previous soldering experience as there are many parts and steps. Read more
TIMESQUARE DIY Watch Kit: Show up stylish AND on time to any event with this awesome looking DIY watch. We have a few watch kits here at Adafruit but we finally have one that looks good and fits well, even for ladies and kids and others with smaller wrists and hands. Its got a 8×8 bit matrix display and a repurposed silicone watch band for a professional look.
64 LEDs light up to tell you the time in a variety of ways. Built into the kit are 3 different watch ‘faces’ – a scrolling marquee with time and date, a binary watch display (for geeks, robots and binary fans), and a moon phase display (for beach-combers, werewolves). There’s also a built in battery meter so you can check your battery life. Want to make your own watch? Easy! The microcontroller is an Arduino-compatible, all you need is an FTDI Friend and the Arduino IDE and you can design your own watch faces and upload them to the TIMESQUARE.
NeoPixel 60 Ring Wall Clock: This project uses the DS1307 Real Time Clock with an Arduino to display the time as a series of colored arcs.
With the new NeoPixel 60 Ring, we have a perfect display for presenting the time with RGB LEDs!
Hours are represented by red, minutes by green, seconds by blue. The arcs overlap and the colors mix. Minutes and seconds are each represented by a single green or blue LED, respectively. In the 12 hour version, a single red LED represent 24 minutes. The image above represents 3:48.
To build this project you will need:
4 x NeoPixel 1/4 60 Ring – so you can make a NeoPixel 60 Ring
DS1307 Real Time Clock breakout board kit
Arduino Uno or other Arduino compatible microcontroller such as the DC Boarduino
Adafruit Perma-Proto Half-sized Breadboard PCB
OLED TRON Clock: While watching Tron for the umpteenth time, I started thinking about how data could be displayed in abstract, but still readable, ways. The OLED display, with its crispness, seemed like a good fit for what I had in mind. After considering a few different options, I settled on building a stylized clock display.
You will need:
Arduino Uno
Monochrome 128×64 OLED graphic display
DS1307 Real Time Clock breakout board kit
Trinket Powered Analog Meter Clock: Trinket lends itself very well to building clock projects, its small and easy to hide behind a larger display. And clocks don’t need a lot of logic, this example only has maybe 20 lines of code. Adding a digital display via I2C is possible using seven segment or character-based displays (with the library code posted for other projects).
This project interfaces Trinket to the the Adafruit DS1307 real-time clock (RTC) breakout board to form a clock. But in a twist, the display is done using two analog meters. One for hours, one for minutes.
The Trinket can output to a meter without digital to analog converters. Trinket has pulse width modulation (PWM) on three of its pins. The meter uses a moving coil inductance movement, acting to average the indication of current flowing through it. If you have narrow pulses, the average voltage it sees is lower, thus the current is lower for the fixed resistance attached to it. For wide pulses, the meter sees nearly the supply voltage and will stay around the full scale. This circuit varies the pulse width sent to the meters proportional to the hour of the day and the minutes after the hour.
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NeoPixel Ring Clock: Build a clock with NeoPixel rings and FLORA! The FLORA GPS provides accurate timekeeping, and the clock’s circular motif make it a handsome addition to your desk, wall, or even around your neck. Read more
Wave Shield Talking Clock: Here’s a different take on DIY clock projects. Whereas most dwell on visual displays, ours features Adabot’s friendly face speaking the time.
Best of all, you can make this your own…give it your face and voice…or if you can do impressions, how about an Arnold Schwarzenegger or Dave Jones clock? Anything goes!
Read more
MONOCHRON We wanted to make a clock that was ultra-hackable, from adding a separate battery-backed RTC to designing the enclosure so you could program the clock once its assembled.
128×64 LCD (KS0108) – we special-ordered the black and white display
ATmega328 processor (we even stuck an ‘arduino’ stk500 bootloader on there too)
Laser cut enclosure in black acrylic
Beeping/blinking alarm with 10 minute snooze
Battery backed-up real time clock (DS1307) keeps time even when power is lost for years
European/US 12 or 24 hour time display as well as date
Completely open source hardware, all firmware, layout and CAD files are yours to mess with
Plenty of space for mods, a prototyping area for soldering stuff in
Read more
Adafruit Holiday Shipping Deadlines 2014
Here are your 2014 shipping deadlines for ordering from Adafruit. Please review our shipping section if you have specific questions on how and where we ship worldwide for this holiday season.
The Adafruit Shipping Department works hard to get your orders out as quickly as we can, but once they’re in the hands of our carriers they’re out of our control.
Carriers have been struggling to keep up with the sharp rise in online orders. Last year UPS, FedEX, and USPS all experienced delivery delays (http://tinyurl.com/ku5f4a6).
So all the Adafruit Shippers say: Please be sure you get your gifts early! Order as soon as you can! Once you place your order we’ll ship like the wind!
UPS ground (USA orders): Place orders by Friday 11am ET – December 12, 2014 – There is no guarantee that UPS Ground packages will arrive in time for Christmas.
UPS 3-day (USA orders): Place orders by Wednesday 11am ET – December 17, 2014 – Arrive by 12/24/2014.
UPS 2-day (USA orders): Place orders by Thursday 11am ET – December 18, 2014 – Arrive by 12/24/2014.
UPS overnight (USA orders): Place orders by Friday 11am ET – December 19, 2014 – Arrive by 12/24/2014.
Please note: We do not offer Saturday or Sunday service for UPS or USPS.
Thursday, Dec. 25, 2014, Christmas, no UPS pickup or delivery service.
Thursday, Jan. 1, 2015, New Year’s Day, no UPS pickup or delivery service.
United States Postal Service, First Class and Priority (USA orders): Place orders by Friday– December 12, 2014 – Arrive by 12/24/2014 or sooner.
USPS First class mail international (International orders): Place orders by Friday – November 21, 2014. Can take up to 30 days ore more with worldwide delays and customs. Should arrive by 12/24/2014 or sooner, but not a trackable service and cannot be guaranteed to arrive by 12/24/14.
USPS Express mail international(International orders): Place orders by Friday – December 5, 2015. Can take up to 15 days or more with worldwide delays and customs. Should arrive by 12/24/2014 or sooner.
Gift Certificates are always available at any time.
When in doubt contact us!
