A Giant Clock Tells Time by Crawling a Hand Along a 2.3-Meter Rail on the Ceiling
The Long Clock
The Long Clock uses a roughly 2.3-meter rail mounted on the ceiling, with a single hand slowly traveling along it to show the time. It was built so children watching movies would notice time passing through a large visible mechanical movement rather than an alarm.
Mechanically, it is essentially a one-axis CNC machine. The build reuses a roughly three-meter aluminum extrusion, linear rails, a stepper motor and other parts salvaged from older projects. A carriage moves the pointer along an elongated clock face. It was created by freefoote.
The problem was simply not having a clock in the room, and the solution was not to buy one but to mount a 2.3-meter CNC mechanism on the ceiling. The clock itself is harder to ignore than the time.