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Borys Lykah
Home Projects Blog
Nonius Clock
A modern watch is less of a practical device and more a style choice.
I'd like to present a novel quirky way to display time. This clock
face only needs one moving part to tell time - the rotating ring.
Yet, unlike a clock with only an hour hand, it has a precision of
under one minute. The idea is to add an auxiliary set of minute and
hour marks - similar to the design of a vernier scale or nonius on
the measuring instruments.
How do you read time? The dial has marks for minutes both on the
rotating ring and on the fixed ring around it. A pair of marks aligns
at the current minute. The marks for the hours are also indicated
with alignment - although the fixed marks for hours are on the circle
inside of the rotating ring. The marks are wide enough that the marks
get disconnected after the minute or hour are over.
This post continues below, but first let's see the clock in action.
It looks much better on the Retina and other displays with high pixel
density.
{{ i }} {{ i == 0 ? params.numberOfHours : i }}
Time
Sync Time:[ ] Set to midnight Hours [ ] Minutes
[ ] Seconds [ ]
Parameter Presets
Chaotic hours, ordered minutes, (default) Ordered hours, chaotic
minutes Chaotic hours, ordered minutes with a gap on 10-12 The ring
fully rotates in one week
Parameters
Number of marks for hours on rotating dial: [ ]
Number of marks for minutes on rotating dial: [ ]
Middle ring rotates: ( )clockwise ( )counter-clockwise Distance
between hour markers: ( )shorter ( )longer Distance between minute
markers: ( )shorter ( )longer Number of hours on the dial: ( )12 ( )
24 Display minute labels every N minutes: [ ]
Display label for minute 59: [ ] Thickness of minute marker.
At 1 there is no alignment after minute passes:
[ ] Rotating ring makes a full rotation in N
hours: [ ]
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Imagine a clock that only has a single hour hand. That is how the
tower clocks showed time in the old days. And this is how Meister
Singer watches still tell time. It is a clean dial but less precise
than a regular watch that has a minute hand.
If we could tell the slightest change of the position of the hour
hand, we could tell time more accurately. There is a tool for that -
a caliper with a sliding vernier scale. It relies on the vernier
acuity property of human eye - that is, the human eye can tell
whether two lines are misaligned by a tiny distance, even when the
distance is too small to notice otherwise.
The rotation of the ring is much slower than the change of minutes
and even hours - in other words, the alignment changes much faster
than the ring rotates.
The speed of the rotation and the position of marks are determined by
the mathematical properties of the clock. At the core of them are the
observations that the next mark for minute must align at 12 o'clock
at the beginning of the hour, and that the minute mark alignments
must change sixty times faster than the alignments for the hour
marks. That is enough to calculate the layout of the marks for the
given number of hour marks. The math gives us several solutions for
layouts, so we can choose a more aesthetically pleasing one.
Reading the alignment is easier in the real world than on a screen. I
would like to make a wall clock with this design. Printing on a
transparent plastic and slowing down the rotation can be tricky,
though. One possible simplification is to replace the rotating ring
with a rotating circle and move the hours on the outside. To keep the
face from getting too busy, we could display the hour markers as
colored segments - with the thin lines for the minute markers over
them. In most of the layouts there is a gap between the minute marks,
which can house the date window.
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