My Colour-coded Combinatorial Clock
Tessellated Circuits: Home => Old Home => Colour Clock  

What is this and how do I read it?

NOTE:

When the page is load­ed, any diff­erence in the hour indicat­ions of the two clocks below the menu should be ex­plained by your time zone diff­erence to Van­couver Is­land, BC's curr­ent time zone: PDT. Any diff­erence in the min­utes should be min­imal, un­less your clock is badly set or you live in New­found­land, or some other chrono­metric­ally rebellious lo­cation!

This is a software version of a hardware clock that I designed for my own use so that I could see the time, at night, with my limited vision without my glasses. See further for some of the developmental details...  As to why I have produced this as a software clock: well mostly for self-training purposes, both to teach me how to read it at a glance, and as software training: every time I come into contact with a new language that should be able to perform the function, I try it. I guess you could consider it my personal next step beyond the usual “Hello World” program.

Here are four hardware versions that I have built over the years:

Photo 1. The first fully packaged version.
Photo 2. My “Mini me”.
Photo 3. At Maker­space Nanaimo.
Photo 4. A ping-pong ball test version.

In the table below, you will see the values assigned to the 12 combinations of colours used in each of the two positions, left and right. The table has been arranged as 3 rows by 4 columns so that the correspondance to an analog clock face can be demonstrated: the top colours of each column are, in order (reading left to right) red, green, yellow and blue and the bottom colour in each row is in the same order but with blue deleted from the sequence. The top colour of the pair is more sig­nificant and cor­responds to one quarter of the clock face as shown by the quarter-coloured circles in the bottom row of the table. The bottom colour further subdivides each quarter into three parts: either an hour, for the pair at the left, or a 5-minute interval for the right-most pair.

0
Hour:
00(12)
Minute:
:00
3
Hour:
3
Minute:
:15
6
Hour:
6
Minute:
:30
9
Hour:
9
Minute:
:45
1
Hour:
1
Minute:
:05
4
Hour:
4
Minute:
:20
7
Hour:
7
Minute:
:35
10
Hour:
10
Minute:
:50
2
Hour:
2
Minute:
:10
5
Hour:
5
Minute:
:25
8
Hour:
8
Minute:
:40
11
Hour:
11
Minute:
:55

Showing the correspondence of the top colour of a pair to a clock face:
top-right red bottom-right green bottom-left yellow top-left blue

Take a look at my collection of clock web sites...there are some inter­esting and strange clocks out there!

Contact TC about this page.