WallClockGen

Quantifying the Current

This art piece makes visual the living and breathing nature of the national power grid in real time. Once powered on, it monitors the grid's pulse by counting the beats, acting as a guage of the grid's current performance. If the art piece loses power, the displayed progress is lost. Counting restarts after power is restored, and the cycle resets from zero.

All of circuitry that makes up the art piece (with the exception of power supplies) is analog. Every digit is controlled by a sequential logic decade counter IC. Each digit's IC recives a clock signal from the prior digit and provides a clock signal to the subsequent digit's IC. The digit in the 1's place receives a rectified and attenuated clock signal originating from the AC waveform of the power grid. This means that the grid itself provides the primary clock of the piece.

Given that the United States power grid oscillates at 60Hz, this means that each digit increments at the following rate:

These values are calculated using the following equation:

$\frac{10^{d}}{60^{x} 24^{y} 365^{z}}$

d: zero indexed, the digit to inquire about
x: set to 1 for seconds, 2 for minutes, and 3 for hours.
y: provided that x is 3, set to 1 for time in days. Otherwise set to 0.
z: provided that x is 3 and y is 1, set to 1 for time in years. Otherwise set to 0.

Below are some additional photos of the prototyping and building process