Hypnotic Clock Maker Does It Again

Kinetic art is a special kind of mesmerizing, and makers are understandably drawn to clocks. They offer possibilities in animation, explorations in user interaction, and are practical enough to be easy to justify. Having a whole collection of clocks might make justification a little bit harder, but it’s absolutely no reason not to build another.

Moritz Von Sivers clearly has a thing for experimenting with unique mechanisms. You may have seen his original servo word clock, lenticular clock, or another one of many timepieces. Now Sivers has made another winner with his entry in Instructables’ annual Colors of the Rainbow Contest.

This clock overlays blue and red numbers on an LED display and, by harnessing the magical properties of the electromagnetic spectrum, separates hours from the minutes through a diffraction grating screen. Red light is bent more than blue light, so by carefully positioning the screen he can make the red minutes appear to the right of the blue hours. For bonus points he glued another sheet of film to the print bed and transferred the diffraction pattern to the part – a trick I’ll have to keep in mind for any rainbow projects.

You could use the technique to build a pair of glasses to reveal secret messages. But the application here works well, and would look amazing among a collection of moving art. You can learn to build your own on the Instructable.