Beautiful Fibonacci Clock Requires Math Work To Tell Time

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“A clock for nerds” (their words, not mine), the Fibonacci Clock is a desk clock that uses the Fibonacci sequence to tell time. And, because it’s for nerds, you will need to do some math involving the famous number sequence in order to tell the time. That way, you can let everyone who visits your digs know that you’re not just some nerd with awful social skills, you’re really, really good at math, too.

The clock face is divided into five sections, each one corresponding to the first five numbers in the sequence. The two small ones are 1, the next smallest one is 2, the next one is 3, and the big one on the right is 5.

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To read the hour on the Fibonacci Clock, you have to look for any square colored red and add them up; the minutes are read by adding up squares that are colored green. When a square is blue, that means it should be added to both the hour and minutes. All white squares are meant to be ignored. Oh yeah, the minutes are only displayed in five minute increments, so whatever total you get needs to be multiplied by five to get the approximate time. Using this system means there are different ways to tell the same time, which the clock will choose from randomly, ensuring you’re likely to do math every single time.

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Since it comes with LEDs already, the clock can be used as a lamp – just press the mode button on the back to turn it into bedside illumination.   For the tinker-happy, it uses an Atmega328 micro-controller running Arduino, so you can hack with custom code for turning into whatever nerdy ideas you can come up with.

A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Fibonacci Clock. Pledges to reserve a unit starts at $115.

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