Erich Styger Builds His Heaviest Clock of Clocks Yet: the Chunky MetaClockClock

Embedded engineer and professor Erich Styger is bringing back the Meta Clock, a digital clock made up of analog clocks, in a revamped wood-housed form: meet the newest entry in the MetaMetaClock family.

"The MetaClockClock is a clock made of clocks," Styger explains. "It consists of multiple dual-shaft stepper motors, arranged as a matrix of 5×12 analog clocks. Each clock has two motorized hands that can move independently. The clock can tell the time, but in a unconventional way. The entire matrix creates a meta-display that shows the time or other information. Between the updates, the hand can do coordinated, choreographed movements."

The project builds atop Styger's original Meta Clock, unveiled six years ago but since taken down from his website following a claim from Swedish design house Humans since 1982 — which said it has "the copyright to works displaying digital time using a grid arrangement of analog clocks," a statement Styger decided not to attempt to disprove in a court of law.

Styger hasn't disclosed why he believes the MetaClockClock, which uses a 5×12 matrix of what he describes as "analog clocks" — built from scratch using dual-shaft stepper motors and laser-cut hands that are lit by a hidden LED ring around each dial — won't fall foul of the same copyright claims, but is choosing to release the design files and source code anyway. Like its predecessor, the MetaClockClock can display a digital time on its analog faces — but it can also display any other short text, too, lighting only the clock faces that make up the message.

"The firmware is built with NXP MCUXpresso IDE (Eclipse based) and VS Code," Styger explains. "It includes a command line interface and remote shell over RS-485. Commands allow to run the clock in interactive mode. The clock implements three fonts: 2×3, 3×5, and 4×5."

"This clock has been the most time consuming and complex one so far," Styger continues. "The Shapeoko CNC plus with the new 3D printer added new ways for the mechanical build and enclosure. It took me more than three months for the enclosure and 3D printing alone. I'm very pleased with the decent and smooth oak wood enclosure. The massive wood makes it my heaviest clock with a weight of 10kg [around 22lbs]. But it is aesthetically pleasing."

The project is documented in full on Styger's website, with hardware design files and firmware source code published to GitHub under an unspecified open-source license.