Jenclock (or ‘swearyclock’), a clock using IV-17 VFD tubes

This is an IV-17 VFD clock I made for my Jen. Each tube has 16 segments, in a ‘starburst’ that can display alphanumeric characters.

Armed with this power, it seemed a bit of a waste to just display the time. So, I gave it Tourette’s; every now and then it’ll swear, completely at random. It has an alarm (making a ZX81-esque squawk through a recycled PC speaker :) ), a broken calendar (that always seems to report Jen’s birthday..), an ambient light sensor (to dim in the dark – these tubes are bright!), a battery backed-up RTC chip and a DS18B20 onewire temperature sensor (to show a value a bit like room temperature, but next to a 60V VFD powersupply so a bit higher).

It also has three rudeness settings, for when it is demonstrated to family or old people. ‘Mild’ says things like “crap”. ‘Fair’ says things like “shit”, and ‘Very’ says things I can’t write here, like “cockface”. The old joke goes that I know a lot of swear words, so I needed to use the ATmega168P with 16K of flash (I couldn’t fit it into the ATmega48s).

Built November, 2010