A clock needs to tell you the time. Mike Harrison’s clock page demonstrates how quickly that requirement can deteriorate into 200-volt Nixie supplies, giant electroluminescent digits, custom PCBs, reed switches, and a display bright enough to light the room at night.
The page is part of Mike’s Electric Stuff, and it reads like a notebook from decades of electronic tinkering. The oldest clock shown dates to around 1982 and uses ordinary red LEDs with an MM5387 clock chip. From there things get progressively less reasonable.
There is a huge Nixie clock built with East German Z568M tubes, a Burroughs B7971 alphanumeric display, a tiny Nixie car clock built from three stacked PCBs, light-guide filament displays, a 4.5-inch electroluminescent clock, dot-matrix clocks, and commercial countdown displays.
The construction notes are the archive
The value is not just photographs of glowing numbers. Mike documents the actual engineering decisions.
One clock uses a PIC16C84 with cascaded 74HC595 shift registers and high-voltage driver transistors. Another uses 200-volt AC for electroluminescent strips. The tiny car clock has a switch-mode supply generating roughly 200 volts for miniature Nixie tubes. Time-setting buttons are sometimes replaced with magnetic reed switches because visible switches would spoil the case.
There are also wonderfully specific historical details. A giant countdown display was built for the UK iPhone launch. Another Nixie display was made for a Channel 4 television production. One early PCB was etched using a drip tray from Mike’s mother’s refrigerator.
That is the sort of sentence no content strategy meeting ever produces.
For people building clocks now, the page still provides ideas about display technology, packaging, high-voltage drivers, and the visual character of obsolete components. For everybody else, it documents what hobby electronics looked like before every project began with an ESP32 and a GitHub library.
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The page is still worth visiting just to see how many different ways one person found to display four digits.