Show HN: Belshazzar's Clock, luminous paint night clock
(blog.karliner.net)73 points by mkarliner 10 days ago
73 points by mkarliner 10 days ago
Interesting, I'll have to think about that. Actually, with rare earth paints, the big issue is persistence, which is rather too long. In the current script, I only turn the drum 1/4 turn, so it takes roughly 4 minutes to illuminate the same patch again. Otherwise the lowest digit tends to be blurred because it is a combination of the last two values.
Have you tried 360nm LED? The higher orbitals drop faster or so I've been told.
Maybe you could make a clock based on a cylinder of sealed powder. You draw the time on it, and when it's time to update, you rotate the cylinder enough to mix the exposed powder and draw the next time.
Maybe the same thing could be done with beads and something similar to the marble machines to replenish a screen of beads, then dump it when the time is invalid.
Not sure if you can get this where you are, but I've personally used some of these glow powders, and they get very bright: https://unitednuclear.com/glowinthedark-items-c-101_45/
I've had Aqua and Green, and they look gorgeous.
Have you come across Stuart Semple/ Culture Hustle?
He makes a lot of interesting paints and pigments, and is UK based.
https://culturehustle.com/collections/powder
I've bought a couple of versions of his blackest black paint, and one of his whitest white, and they've all be extraordinarily good.
I have some of his "LIT - THE WORLD'S GLOWIEST GLOW PIGMENT", but I haven't used it yet. I have no doubt it'll be great as well.
(I have a vague plan to paint a motorcycle in Black4.0 to see if it's unreflective enough to evade the IR laser speed detectors cops use here...)
That's a great idea. I'd love to see if it works.
I've wondered whether it would be possible to design a motorcycle with a surface that's non-reflective to radar because of it's shape or texture, like how stealth planes work.
EDIT: I realized the super black paint is probably the worst thing you could do for your own safety on a motorcycle, but that's besides the point...
Looks cool, but if the "writing on the wall" is only supposed to be the current time, there are enough (much more mundane-looking of course) alternatives, e.g. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Emlimny-Digital-LED-Projection-Al...
Indeed. And the red most use (a) doesn't blow your night vision, (b) isn't visible through your eyelids. (I recommend one where, if it also displays the time itself, shows the time in red too, at least when the room's dark.)
Once you've had this on the ceiling for a while, it's annoying to have to look for time on a nightstand or your wrist.
i want to mix this with https://github.com/LingDong-/shan-shui-inf to make a real-life infinitely scrolling procedural animation
Sweet hack, thanks for sharing. I remember playing in the dark with luminous paper as a kid - If I remember correctly, I would take a hacked up disposable camera and put various objects in front of the paper before triggering the flash.
I imagine that you could improve the consistency and readability some by modeling the state of each pixel of paper. That way when the drum comes around you can compensate the exposure per pixel based on the current state to achieve better uniformity of display. In this way you could do exposure compensation on each row of output to make the display equally bright top to bottom. This would be similar to how a "no-refresh" epaper display works.