Show HN: Weird Clocks

4/7/2026 at 1:54:26 AM

years ago in Japan daylight and nighttime were each given 12 hours and clocks were made to adhere to this ... throughout the year as summer days grew longer and nighttime shorter their clocks adjusted to make an hour longer or shorter self adjusting

by AtomicOrbital

4/7/2026 at 2:56:09 AM

TIL - this is very cool. It looks like somebody actually put together a wari-koma (temporal) watch in 2011 as well.

https://www.masahirokikuno.jp/watches/temporal-hour-watch/

by vunderba

4/7/2026 at 4:01:17 PM

The non-fixed type system per https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%92%8C%E6%99%82%E8%A8%88 was called "futei jihou" (non-fixed time system), same with other sites https://museum.seiko.co.jp/knowledge/relation_16/ . "Temporal hour system" seems like the correct translation.

My guess is that "wari koma" here means basically "separated panels" (wari: broken, koma: panel). Wadokei means (traditional) Japanese timepiece.

by rendaw

4/7/2026 at 10:00:23 AM

If you want to look at some old ones the Seiko museum in Tokyo has a few. Entry is free and I can only recommend it.

by FinnKuhn

4/7/2026 at 3:20:43 PM

Thanks for the tip! The wadokei clocks on the museum's site look incredible.

https://museum.seiko.co.jp/en/collections/traditional_Japane...

by vunderba

4/7/2026 at 4:00:48 PM

Just double checking, but the day and night were each given 6 hours, not 12.

by rendaw

4/6/2026 at 6:52:12 PM

Its one of the best UI/UX I have ever experienced. Really cool man.

by shivang2607

4/6/2026 at 11:13:05 PM

Thanks for the kind words!

by vunderba

4/6/2026 at 7:52:32 PM

This is so nice and original! You could easily pitch this to a watch brand to pick up the design and functionality.

by arc_light

4/6/2026 at 8:05:24 PM

Wow, so cool. Looks amazing. You must really like clocks.

by ivaivanova

4/6/2026 at 10:43:18 PM

I do! Cogsworth is my spirit animal.

by vunderba

4/6/2026 at 5:33:36 PM

Really neat! Is this built through react?

by BrendoTheBoy

4/6/2026 at 5:57:14 PM

Thanks! It's actually just mostly vanilla HTML, CSS3, and Tailwind. I used ThreeJS for the solar clock, 3d euclidean clock and the water clock, and MatterJS to handle the physics for the marble based clock.

by vunderba

4/6/2026 at 7:44:14 PM

So cool!

by sturbes

4/6/2026 at 10:17:22 PM

i love the pi clock

by hahooh

4/6/2026 at 11:12:50 PM

Thanks that was a fun one to work on! I initially had it working at the second level HH:MM:SS but the zooming in and out on the canvas every second gave people whiplash.

by vunderba