One of the coolest things to happen in deep geekery in the last few years has been the emergence of lots of mom and pop electronic kitmakers. The latest are Jared Boone and Jenny Marx and their company ShareBrained Technology. Their first offering is an awesome, and very buildable, clock kit called The Chronulator ($49).
Inspired by other cool kitmakers of record, such as Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and Lady Ada at Adafruit Industries, ShareBrained has gone out of their way to make a really sweet kit that’s very easy to build, with well-designed, well-written instructions, an equally well-designed circuit board, and tiny components thoughtfully sorted and bundled in little envelopes.
The Chronulator picks up on two popular techno-culture trends: bizarre, even tortuously geeky ways of telling time (a la Toyko Flash Watches) and the steampunk/retro-tech craze. Here, time is translated via a microchip and a crystal to two needle-gauge/panel meter displays, one for hours, one for minutes. The kit includes the PCB, all the parts to populate it, and the two meters. The kit does not come with the instructions. Those are downloaded from the ShareBrained site. Viewing them beforehand will give you some idea of the difficulty involved in building the project (which should be easy for even the newbie wirehead) and for the level of care evidenced throughout the product.
Being a product of the current DIY/maker movement, The Chronulator is not a kit that leaves nothing to your own imagination or your desire to hack the gadgets in your life. The ShareBrained site has a template to use in building your own faceplates, some examples of different plates you can print out and use, and a challenge to come up with (and share) interesting designs and means of mounting your clock. Jared and Jenny have plans to add a Hacker’s Guide to the site with tips, tricks, and techniques for reprogramming the microcontroller in the clock to read and display other types of data. (Which, BTW, ties into another emerging techno-culture trend: using analog gauges and other retro display tech to display Net-based data.) I’m excited to see what sorts of creative uses builders of The Chronulator will dream up.
If you have a budding electronics enthusiast on your holiday list (or even a seasoned pro), The Chronulator would make a very fun and unique gift.
