Marcin Saj's MORSEDOT Clock Puts Dots and Dashes — Or Four Other Encodings — On Your Desk

Maker Marcin Saj is back with another mechanical display, now a flip-dot clock that takes a little decoding work before you'll be able to tell what time it is: the MORSEDOT Clock.

"MORSEDOT Clock is a desktop flip-dot clock that displays time through changing patterns instead of traditional digits," Saj explains. "Hours and minutes are represented as visual patterns rather than conventional numbers. Unlike conventional displays, every update is physical. As the time changes, the flip-dots produce their characteristic mechanical click. Time update animations can be adjusted in the settings, from full display transitions to a minimalist mode that updates only the discs needed to show the new time."

The MORSEDOT Clock isn't Saj's first clock design to use a flip-dot display — a mechanical dot-matrix system that physically flips small discs to reveal either a dark or a bright side, allowing text and images to be displayed. Previous designs, though, have focused on replicating numerals — though the Flip-Disc Binary Clock, which Saj took to crowdfunding back in 2024, adopted an alternative approach by encoding the hours and minutes as binary numbers instead.

Building on that, the MORSEDOT Clock is inspired by Morse code — representing the digits as a series of visual dots and dashes using the system invented by Samuel Morse in the 1800s. Alternatively, the clock can be switched into the user's choice of four other encoding modes: binary, like the Flip-Disc Binary Clock; Stibitz' Excess-3, developed in the 1930s by George Stibitz for use in digital systems; a Fibonacci sequence, based on Leonardo Fibonacci's 1202 discovery; and the POSTNET code developed by the United States Postal Service to create scannable codes for rapid mail sorting.

The MORSEDOT Clock is currently funding on Kickstarter starting at €99 (around $114) for "super early bird" backers, with hardware expected to begin delivery in October 2026; while fulfillment is never guaranteed in crowdfunding, Saj has a proven track record of delivering on his promises. The firmware has also been released on GitHub under the permissive MIT license, with enclosure files available on Printables for 3D printing.