Fibonacci clock

Clock for Nerds – Fibonacci Clock

If you are too bored of looking time at the old fashioned Analogue or Digital Clocks, Philippe Chretien from Montreal, Canada has made something interesting. [highlight color=#FF0000 ]It’s the Fibonacci Clock, the nerdiest time piece ever made.[/highlight]

He arranged 5 squares whose side lengths are first five numbers of Fibonacci series i.e. 1 1 2 3 5 in form of a rectangle. The hours in the clock are displayed using red color and minutes are displayed using green color. When a square has to show both hour and minute, it is colored blue, white squares are assumed to be null.

[highlight color=#FF0000 ]Reading time in a Fibonacci clock requires you to do some math.[/highlight] To tell the hour, you should simply add up the corresponding side lengths of red and blue color, for minutes you have to add the blue and green colored boxes. Since the minutes are shown in five minute intervals, you have to multiply the sum of green and blue colored boxes by 5. White ones are ignored.

 

Let me do one for you :

 

Here in the first case you have red color in boxes 3,2 and 1 and no blue colored box. So, for hours we get a sum of 6. For calculating minutes, we first add green and blue so the sum comes out to be 6 and then we multiply it by 5 to get the minutes i.e. 30. So, the time shown in the clock is 6:30.

fibonacci clock
Credits – www.theguardians.com

 

[highlight color=#FF0000 ]Fibonacci Clock is an open source hardware project based on Atmega328 microcontroller that runs Arduino, and users can customize it according to them by making changes to the clock’s code using Arduino IDE.[/highlight]

There are more than one combinations to show a single time. [highlight color=#FF0000 ]To make it interesting, the combinations are picked up randomly so you never know which one the clock will choose.[/highlight] The clock is also programmed to work as a lava lamp with changing colors. So, this clock is both nerdy and beautiful.