Dave Ehnebuske's Laser-Cut Tide and Time Clock Moves Wooden Water to Illustrate Sea Levels
Housed in a laser-cut chassis, an AI-generated seaside scene is covered and revealed in time with the tides in the real world.
IBM Distinguished Engineer emeritus Dave Ehnebuske has put together a clock with a difference, not only keeping track of the tide times but also displaying the water level — by physically moving an overlay on top of an AI-generated seaside scene.
"Ever wanted to know what the local tide was doing," Ehnebuske asks, rhetorically, by way of introducting his latest project. "Here's an IoT device that uses a NOAA API [Application Programming Interface] to tell you all about it. It displays how long it is until the next high or low tide and shows the current water level."
Tide clocks aren't exactly a new concept, as any sailor, fisherman, swimmer, or surfer will know. Ehnebuske's take on the concept, though, is unusual. The laser-cut housing has a 24-hour mechanical clock in its upper half, but rather than displaying the current time a single hand — connected to a hacked quartz movement — displays the number of hours until the next high or low tide.
Below the clock is a laser-etched seaside scene, though on which doesn't exist. "Just because I could," Ehnebuske explains, "I used StableDiffusion v2.1 to produce the illustration by giving it a text description of what I wanted and a photo of a similar scene for guidance." The resulting lighthouse scene is then partially hidden by another laser-etched image of the sea itself — with the panel rising and lowering on a stepper motor according to actual sea levels as reported by the NOAA.
Inside the clock's housing is a chain-drive system for raising and lowering the "sea," plus the modified quartz clock movement. Everything is driven by an Arduino sketch running on an Adafruit Feather ESP32-S2 with USB power, while an optional battery keeps things ticking over when away from a power source — though it leaves the sea level alone in order to maximize run time.
More details on the clock are available in Ehnebuske's GitHub repository, along with the firmware source code under the reciprocal GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1.