The 1983 Clock Four Decades in the Making

In 1983, a 14-year-old [Will] saw an LED clock in The Sharper Image store. At $250, it stayed in the store. That was a lot of money back then, especially for most teenagers. But [Will] didn’t forget. After high school, he and a friend planned to build one from scratch. They worked out how they would do it and did a little prototyping, but never really finished. Well, they never really finished at the time. Because 33 years later, [Will] decided to finally put it together. Check it out in the video below.

[Will’s] learned a lot since his original design, plus we have tech today that would have seemed like magic in the late 1980s. But he wanted to stay true to the original design, so there’s no microcontroller or smart LEDs. Just binary counters and a lot of LEDs. There’s even a 555 doing duty as a reset timer.

The original design used the 60 Hz signal from the AC power supply. [Will] made that one concession to modern times and powered the clock from USB-C. That meant adding a reference oscillator, which is a good thing, anyway, as he explains in the post.

The result looks good and we don’t envy him soldering 275 SMD parts! He even graciously made a few and sent one to his old friend.

We don’t know why we were surprised [Will] soldered all those parts. He’s a key member of the people who put on the SMD soldering challenge each year at Supercon. Most LED clock projects from those days used 7-segment displays.