The one “innovation” I’m pretty proud of is that I found that the space in the socket where the hole is for the vacuum port is the perfect size to cram in a Neopixel (WS2182B if you’re nasty). I was able to backlight the tubes and it looks damn cool (if I do say so myself).
The glass makes for a nice light pipe for the LED giving them a neat ethereal glow. The idea I was going with is I could change the color based on if the temperature was rising or falling.
I figure that if you have enough disposable cash to buy a $30,000 clock, you probably live in a place where one room could be sacrificed to the god of steampunk, and the decor could be sampled in small doses.
So true. Yet there is always the one, just-getting-by, uber-nerd out there who MUST have this ‘coolest of things’ thing. (I picture the recent post re the guy who spent $35K to be turned into an ‘elf’. One of those… MUST HAVES.)
My mind is stepping dangerously into the ‘World of Must Haves’.
Absolutely, I’m an embedded systems programmer and you can certainly make things dumb enough to be invulnerable to most types of attack. The problem is that computing power is so cheap these days and there’s so much pressure to get to market fast that it’s easy to throw in a bunch of garbage you don’t really need and maybe don’t understand or haven’t looked at closely.
With a device like this clock, there’s no need to have it even listen to any incoming traffic, and it only needs to do NTP and maybe DHCP. You can set up some microcontrollers so that they won’t execute code from RAM, and that alone makes them invulnerable to many types of vulnerabilities.
Without the ability to pass executable code to the MCU, an attacker is limited to subverting the device using the code it’s already running. That can still leave things like DoS amplification attacks where the attacker is exploiting what might be the normal behavior of a protocol or service, but the narrower the scope of the device, the easier it is to secure it.
Assuming it’s just checking the time, it’s one way. It’s from inside your home network out. As such the worst it can do is inform some entity (probably a government) that some item in your house would like to know what time it is.
This was so much cooler than the post that spawned it, thank you for sharing it.
Had the same problem. Briefly thought it had to do with “Ted talks”.
shudders
Well, yeah, of course; nixie clocks are all the rage, at the moment. It’s niot terribly difficult to build your own.
https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry+pi+nixie+clock <- Not being a wiseass, honest, there’s just “that many” freakin’ hits. Check it out.
for $30k, it can have its own rubidium frequency source, so it would never need setting. Good to a millisecond per year. My Atomic Nixie Clock has one that I got on ebay for $300. They cost less now.
http://www.nixiebunny.com/rbnix/rbnix.html
It’s cool, I learned how to use Google awhile back, but thanks for the reminder.
That’s possibly the most functional menorah I’ve ever seen.
There are also terrestrial time stations whose signals might be easier to get than GPS in some situations. (Or not? I don’t know. I know they exist.)
http://genesisradio.com.au/VK2DX/time_signals.html
It would seem pretty simple to have one or two passive radio time signal receivers in the clock getting UTC and then have a literal knob on the front to set the local offset.
Is changing the time by hand twice a year really that big a deal?
And if so, shouldn’t DST just be abolished?
Building web servers into all the world’s timepieces does not seem like the right answer.
No, and no.
But it is nice when your phone and your computer do it automatically. The clock in my car… let’s just say sometimes it takes me six months to get out the manual and figure out how to set the time.
And no, DST saves energy and makes it easier to work those 12-hour days, and the only cost is Arizona congressmen constantly complaining about DST. (Indiana doesn’t like it either, so Mike Pence is totally in your corner!)
IKR?
Nixie Time Protocol is the best!
Never thought of that, now I want some random sci-fi “B” movie to feature one that big so bad!
220deg? That’s either really hot or really cold!
I’m wondering now if someone like Fritz Lang has already done that.
