Building A Clock Based on Incoming Emails

Overview

This clock operates and run at a normal pace when there is no email waiting or otherwise be driven hyperactively forward for every new kilobyte of email.

Details

The design of the clock is very simple as it includes a battery that drives a circuit controlled by a quartz crystal, and that triggers a solenoid, which in turn rotates a magnet motor in its magnetic field. The gear train for all of the hands is driven by the motor which provides the control of the whole device. A mystery chip sealed in plastic is contained in the heart of the circuit board.

Since the PIC microcontroller can be used to control the clock, it was configured to check mail. A java application on a web server was created since it was much easier to have a server check the email and monitor email accounts for incoming messages. A UDP message is sent when new mail comes in so an embedded coprocessor called Siteplayer was used to listen and receive the UDP message as per PIC instruction. The Siteplayer passes the number of bytes to the listening PIC which drives the clock forward.