The Digimech Clock by Duncan Shotton pantomimes the look of an LED clock through an ingenious cycling of segmented cryptograms printed on long mechanical sliders. It’s much huger than you’d expect, which is too bad: with some miniaturization, this is a clock I’d like to have.
Digimech Clock [Duncan Shotton via technabob]
that’s a cool clock.. the story was added at http://gearcult.com
When I was a kid in the 70s, we had a clock radio that worked in a similar fashion, except the patterns were were on rotating cylinders behind the curved display, and did not have a new pattern for each digit, like this one does, which is what makes it so huge. My sister and I would drive ourselves nuts trying to work out what the pattern on the cylinders would look like- it’s not an easy problem.
I can’t remember if the cylinders would rotate by the same amount each time the digit advanced, it could well have been variable.
Those aren’t cryptograms, they’re just negatives of the digits that probably act as masks that block the light from showing through in the appropriate places.