3D-printed marble clock

We mastered clocks a while ago. Each iteration on the clock is basically an art piece. Polished brass, Nixie tubes, even fancy Rolex wrist-watches – for anyone with a phone in their pocket, they’re all obsolete, but they look brilliant. Joining the ranks of useless beauty is this creation from Sakati1984. They’ve used a Raspberry Pi Pico, 227 marbles, twelve servos, two metal rods, and a handful of other components to create this fully functional clock.

Rather than selecting balls on the fly to represent the characters, the machine relies on the balls being in the right order, making this useful for telling the time, but not for displaying live data. The refresh rate is also seven seconds, so there’s no point adding a seconds counter – for that, you can just look at your smartphone.