Roni Bandini's Nordic nRF52840 Desk Clock Brings Back Internet Time, Counts the .Beats of the Day
Invented by either Charly Alberti or Swatch, depending on who you listen to, Internet Time is alive and well in this LCD desk clock.
Maker Roni Bandini has built a desk clock with a difference, and in doing so turned back time — to when the beats of Internet Time were the future of timekeeping.
"In 1998, Swatch introduced a radical concept: Internet Time, a universal time system for the web that divided the day into 1,000 '.beats' instead of hours, minutes, and seconds. The Swiss watchmaker even launched a line of futuristic wristwatches that displayed the time in .beats," Bandini writes by way of background.
"But was this a Swatch idea? It turns out that a few months before Swatch announcement, a person very familiar with beats announced the same idea and even created a website, i-time.com, to show the Internet Hour. That person was Charly Alberti, the drummer of the Argentine rock band Soda Stereo."
Alberti would later claim that his idea of beats-based Internet Time had been stolen out from under him, costing him millions of dollars — though it wasn't exactly a money-spinner for Swatch either, with the company failing to drum up enough interest in the concept and the last Swatch watch to include the function being released to critical apathy in 2016.
Just because the concept was not a commercial success, though, there's no reason it can't be applied today — being based on the simple equation of one day being equal to 1,000 .beats, making an hour 41.6 .beats long and one second 0.011574 .beats. With these figures in mind, Bandini brought back Internet Time — using a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 microcontroller board and a watch-like circular display.
Bandini's desk clock uses a user interface drawn by OpenAI's DALL-E generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform, made in black and white for a particular aesthetic. These are stored on the microcontroller and used with the LVGL library to create the graphical interface — with a real-time clock overlay showing the current time in .beats.
"[The] XIAO Round Display is touch [sensitive], so you can configure alarms or switch between regular time and .beats," Bandini suggests of ways to expand the project. "The nRF board has a [PDM] mic and accelerometer, so information from there could be used. Another interesting option is using interrupts to extend battery life."
More information on the project is available on Bandini's Hackaday.io page, while the source code is available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license; a 3D-printable stand for the project is available on Cults 3D, under a closed license but free for private use.