FLW Clocks

[Tom Harris]

Everyone on this list has heard of four letter word clocks. But a clock with seconds has 6 digits. Has anyone ever made a six letter word clock?

Tom Harris <celep...@gmail.com>

[Nick]

I saw an Italian one a few years ago using B7971s...

Using the some of the smart sockets etc. available it'd really be quite easy to make one...

Nick

[Tom Harris]

To answer my own question Evil Mad Science Labs have a five letter clock, but it only displays random words, not walking the tree of word associations like a real FLW clock.

Tom Harris <celep...@gmail.com>

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[Dylan Distasio]

Evil Mad Scientist's clock is pretty easy to hack if you wanted to change the way the words flow.  Lack of RAM out of the box is your only big challenge.

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[gregebert]

Not to mention a lack of affordable tubes....7971's aren't very common on EBay, and when they do appear, the price skyrockets.

I'm not a fan of segmented displays, so I've wondered if it's even possible to make a tube with 26 cathodes (A-Z), and perhaps fewer if you got clever by splitting letters with similar shapes, such as O,Q,C and I,T. Apparently Burroughs made 'alpha' tubes with letters A-M and N-Z (with a few letters missing) but I've never seen one. And neither is a full alphabet.

[John Rehwinkel]

> Not to mention a lack of affordable tubes....7971's aren't very common on EBay, and when they do appear, the price skyrockets.
> I'm not a fan of segmented displays, so I've wondered if it's even possible to make a tube with 26 cathodes (A-Z), and perhaps fewer if you got clever by splitting letters with similar shapes, such as O,Q,C and I,T. Apparently Burroughs made 'alpha' tubes with letters A-M and N-Z (with a few letters missing) but I've never seen one. And neither is a full alphabet.

However, there are some NL-40225AL available on fleabay (auction 251387544213), displaying A, B, C, D, E, +, and -. $5.62 apiece. Not my auction (but I bought some).

http://www.tube-tester.com/sites/nixie/data/B-40225-AL/b-40225-al.htm

- John

[gregebert]

Thanks, but I have to resist the temptation (VERY difficult, I might add).....almost like an alcoholic reaching for the bottle.

I dont have any forecasted projects that could use these, and they are smaller than my other nixies.

If you end up making some kind of texty device with your tubes, please post photos!

[Morris Odell]

I've been tempted - not with B7971s but with a 40 character VFD I have had in the JB for years. It could scroll six letter words and even jargon nicely and there are no gaps between the three groups of 2 digits as in the 6 digit clock. As someone else said, memory space is the issue - I built a FLW a few years ago and that one had about 4000 words in memory with is 16000 letters. That's fine for the 32K micro I used. The 6 letter word lists on the net have between 15000 and 22000 words depending on censorship level. Taking the larger number, that's 132000 characters which is quite do-able with a larger micro. On my FLW I kept all the dirty words and have a selector switch on the back to keep it clean when required, such as when the grandkids get fascinated reading the words. There plenty of VFDs on the e-place in the $100 range.

Currently I'm using the VFD in a speaking clock that emulates the old telephone time service :-)

Morris

[Jack Buechler]

As the B7971’s are so expensive these days, perhaps we should look for really large VFD’s. Or LED matrices.

One of the important points in using them, as you already noted is to look good, they need to have accurate spacing, so it sort of rules out individual LED’s - which are really cheap.

I like the idea of a scrolling clock or FLW – these days micros are not expensive. So it should not be too difficult to do a large scrolling clock then the issue of four, five, six , sever or more scrolling words is not an issue, especially if the matrices can be banked together.

 ----------------------------

Jack Buechler

T: +44 207 0437809

M: +44 7946002001

S: jack_buechler

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[John Rehwinkel]

As the B7971’s are so expensive these days, perhaps we should look for really large VFD’s. Or LED matrices.

I scored some huge two-character VFDs from an elevator panel refit, along with several smaller 16-character ones that  accept serial input at 600bps.

The IV-4/IV-17 ones are a good size and still affordable.

Noritake occasionally gives away some nice VFD doc matrix displays, too.

One of the important points in using them, as you already noted is to look good, they need to have accurate spacing, so it sort of rules out individual LED’s - which are really cheap.

You can build it up out of individual alphanumeric LED displays, which are available in a bunch of large sizes (like the Evil Mad Science 5 letter clock).

I'm also working on an ongoing project to use an old monoscope tube as a character generator to display nicely formed characters on a small CRT.  This could be the basis for a 4/5/6LW

project, including some fun effects like stretching letters vertically or horizontally, and moving them around.  I'm on about the sixth redesign (LT1172 switching regulator driving a CCFL

inverter with a voltage doubler) of the monoscope power supply at this point.

I like the idea of a scrolling clock or FLW – these days micros are not expensive. So it should not be too difficult to do a large scrolling clock then the issue of four, five, six , sever or more scrolling words is not an issue, especially if the matrices can be banked together.

Some of the PJRC boards have PLENTY of memory and CPU horsepower, and they're small, cheap, and can be used with the Arduino toolset.

- John

[Grahame Marsh]

On 16/04/2015 14:11, John Rehwinkel wrote:

I'm also working on an ongoing project to use an old monoscope tube as a character generator to display nicely formed characters on a small CRT.  This could be the basis for a 4/5/6LW

project, including some fun effects like stretching letters vertically or horizontally, and moving them around.  I'm on about the sixth redesign (LT1172 switching regulator driving a CCFL

inverter with a voltage doubler) of the monoscope power supply at this point.

I've built a character display on a single 1" CRT (DH3-91) with the idea of using several in parallel to make a multi CRT FLW+. Project was sidelined by other projects...

FLW on a 1" CRT is easy



And on a 3" CRT, 6 letters (or more) is practicable. My current scope clock project uses a 5" CRT so I was looking for a much larger word list and probably some form of scrolling proverbs perhaps.  I'm aiming to store the words and proverbs on a small removable SD card so updating the library does not involve reprogramming the micro, just updating the text files on the SD card. In terms of a CRT, it is a good use for a rectangular CRT which fits well displaying letters.  To get nicely formed letters I'm using the sine/cosine drawing method (i.e. David Forbes scope clock).

Grahame

[Quixotic Nixotic]

On 16 Apr 2015, at 14:26, Grahame Marsh wrote:

I was looking for a much larger word list and probably some form of scrolling proverbs perhaps.  

Grahame, I was working on a list of proverbs and quotes mentioning time or related to time in some way, for a similar reason.

My list, which may need weeding, is at http://www.clock-it.net/quotes.html

It assumes you can do a single quote mark/apostrophe and a minus sign. Otherwise no punctuation, all caps.

John

[Grahame Marsh]

Oh yeah! that's a bloody good list that I have immediately copied into my proverbs directory!

I have a lot of Terry Pratchett (RIP, tearfully) in particular from "Thief of Time", but mostly not related to time such as Blake etc, as well as the common proverbs, also things like "He's dead Jim" and "May the farce be with you" which can be absolute corkers when they appear.

When I get a chance, I will sort through my lists for time related sayings and email you any that might add to yours.

"Give a man a fire and keep him warm for a day; set a man on fire and keep him warm for the rest of his life"

"Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll eat for the rest of his life; give a man a few cats and he'll do nothing else but fish"

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[petehand]

That is an excellent list.

[robin bussell]

On 15/04/2015 11:55, Tom Harris wrote:
> To answer my own question Evil Mad Science Labs have a five letter
> clock, but it only displays random words, not walking the tree of word
> associations like a real FLW clock.
>

Hi Tom,
I'm soon going to be embarking on making my own FLW where F=either
Four or Five as I've got 5 B7971 and some smart socket boards. I've yet
to decide what to use to actually drive the smart sockets and have taken
onboard the need for data space. So I've a fair bit of soldering to look
forward to this weekend to get the smartsockets populated and then I'll
have to think about how to generate the words.

Can you tell me more about "Walking the tree of word association" sounds
interesting ... does each word have stored with it the most likely next
words according to a literature analysis or something?

Cheers,
Robin.

[Quixotic Nixotic]

On 16 Apr 2015, at 20:48, robin bussell wrote:

> Can you tell me more about "Walking the tree of word association" sounds interesting ... does each word have stored with it the most likely next words according to a literature analysis or something?

No, I think it was that old game where you could change one letter in a word at a time, look through the list, see if a suitable word was in your vocab. If not, then whizz through the loop another time and choose another combo. Which is OK I guess, but to me not all that clever and not much better than random, except perhaps elegant in that fewer segments ever change. With Chris Barron's Smartsockets they provide the means where by such boring, yet subtle, changes don't ever happen, through the rather clever transition styles that are provided.

I like the randomness of my clock in profanity mode, especially if anyone of an ecclesiastic, other religious or mystic bent comes around to bore me senseless, erm, I mean entertain me.

I do like to see people choke on words. A random scatter of photons that can elicit such reactions is revealing of entrenched viewpoints in an individual. The problem will be entirely theirs. Don't worship graven images is a phrase to which should be added: don't take offence to the written word. Just in case someone doesn't realise a word is also a graven, or in our case electronically illuminated, image. We are all slaves to our own preconceptions, myself included.

Am I being impolite? Well if you were in an Arab country and someone offered you the sheep's eyeball, it would be you who was impolite to refuse the delicacy. It all depends on social context.

Should art provoke as well as entertain and be completely sycophantic? If there is no profit or political motive, then art can do what it damn well pleases in my book and you can damn well ignore it as you see fit.

I am invited and entreated these days to embrace every minority group and religion under the sun as being valid in some way, merely because it implies its existence and asserts itself. Therefore, I also reserve the right to challenge assumptions in any way I see fit, without the need to apologise. If an arrangement of letters should result in a sequence that shocks, so be it. If it delights then no apology is ever necessary. If it offends, then ooh dear, we better all watch out for the thought police.

Freedom of speech is the most important right in the world. People aren't stupid, let them make up their own minds on the basis of who or what (the word clock) said, in what context it was said and in the milieu or to whom it was addressed.

A sense of humus is necessary for every keen gardener,

John

[Neil]

Well, as a very long term lurker in this group, I don't normally have much to say. However seeing this subject means I have to own up to a slow burn project I which I am just now gathering parts for. I have had a FLW based on ZM1350 displays for quite a while and it died some time last year. When I bought the ZM1350s long ago, I bought six in case I ever wanted to build a clock, so with the death of the 4 display FLW, I decided I would make a new clock out of all six displays, taking an easy route by using Smartsockets. When I ordered the six Smartsocket boards from Jan he sent eight  - he only had eight left so sent the lot. Well, with the boards in my hands, it only took about 30 seconds for me to decide to buy two more ZM1350s so that I could build an eight digit/character array. Don't ask me why - the idea just appealed to me. Clock/scrolling display/FLW/6LW/8LW - there are lots of possibilities. Not sure when any of this will actually get built yet, but I'll post some pictures when there is anything to show. :-)

Neil

[Greg P]

I wish someone would build a kit that uses the 5971 Alpha tube.  I have a stash of these just waiting to be lit.

[Morris Odell]

That's a wonderful list - just the thing for a 40 character VFD!!

Morris

[petehand]

I would do that for you. How many have you got?

[Nick]

I'd be interested as well - got a bunch of these waiting!

Nick

[John Rehwinkel]

On Apr 16, 2015, at 9:26 AM, Grahame Marsh <graham...@googlemail.com> wrote:

> FLW on a 1" CRT is easy
>

> <fbjfbgje.jpg>
>
> And on a 3" CRT, 6 letters (or more) is practicable. To get nicely formed letters I'm using the sine/cosine drawing method (i.e. David Forbes scope clock).

I'm guessing the letters in the picture of the 1" tube are not formed by sine/cosine. Raster, maybe? Can you share some details?

- John

[Grahame Marsh]

My first published scope clock, you've seen it before

http://www.sgitheach.org.uk/scope1.html

pixel based just using two DACs to position the beam. Bresenham's
algorithm to draw the lines. Display is 64 x 64 pixels on the 1" tube.
To move forward I would certainly now use sine/cosine drawing. I store
the words in an external eeprom, in the future I'm planning on using a
SD card.

Grahame

[koolatron]

I actually designed and built a FLW clock out of IV-4/IV-17s; they’re quite nice little tubes and currently still reasonably easy to get on the e-site.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/709108/iv4lw.JPG

And here’s a short movie of an older version of the clock “walking the tree” as was mentioned earlier in the thread:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/709108/iv4lw2_wordwalk.mov

Once I’ve finished up the software, I’ll open it up if there’s interest.

Sean

[GastonP]

Very nice... I have bought 10 IV-4's just for this kind of thing.
If you decide to go open please share.

BTW... which processor are you using?

Gastón

[Jon D.]

I've got a bunch of IV-4s and IV-17s, so I'm definitely interested.  Count me in once you open it up.  TIA

Jon D. 

[koolatron]

Gastón,

Sure thing.  I will post here when I am happy with the firmware!

The MCU is an atmega32u2 clocked at 16 MHz.  It has a built-in USB peripheral for communicating with a host computer.

Sea

[Tom Harris]

Interesting discussion. Lots of interest in FLW clocks and derivatives. What interests me is using that database of word associations derived from psychological profiling, so that for example after the word "flee" the word "fear" shows up 80% of the time, with the word "foes" taking the remaining 20%. A random word would only be chosen when a word caused no associations, there are quite a few in the database. I suppose there were recorded at the end of a session. Nice touch Dr. Odell with a dirty word defeat switch. These show up quite a lot in the database. An interesting inverse position would be to only use dirty words :)

As to displays, I have some huge 8" high flipdot 5x7 matrix display that came from highway signs. I am prototyping a driver circuit, and I want something impressive for them to display. Sorry no glowing glass, but flipdots are pretty cool.

Tom Harris <celep...@gmail.com>

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