20 HP · clock
A clock for a whole set. It runs three days of twenty-four hours at whatever length the set is, from a minute to an hour, with a moon that climbs the whole time. When the time runs out, the moon falls, and the first dawn comes again. Its outputs give the set its shape: the dawns and dusks, the days stepping up, the nights, a clock that tightens as the end comes, the last six hours, and the end itself.
Turn LENGTH or DREAD: drag up or down, roll the wheel over it, or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. Press RESET or SKIP for a trigger, and hold SLOW for a gate.
Day I · dawn
example patches
The module's own engine, the firmware's, running in your browser and checked against it tick for tick.
Time runs from the first dawn to the end of the third night: seventy-two hours, however long that is. LENGTH sets it, from a minute to an hour, with noon at about eight minutes. Patch a clock into CLOCK and LENGTH counts clocks an hour instead, in twelve steps from one to sixty-four, so the three days come out on the beat.
The face is the clock. Twenty-four lights ring it: dawn on the left, noon at the top, dusk on the right, midnight at the bottom. The hours since this day's dawn stay lit, and the current one is brighter and breathes. I, II and III, across the middle, show the days begun. In the last six hours the whole ring flashes on every TICK. At the end everything goes dark for a moment, then the first dawn's light comes on.
Nine jacks, knocked out of white on the panel. The triggers are 10 ms and the gates 5 V.
A trigger as each day begins and as it turns to night. The first dawn fires at the start, after RESET and after the FALL.
0, 1 and 2 V for days I, II and III. At a volt an octave, a sequence through it goes up an octave every dawn.
A gate, high from dusk to dawn. Open a drone with it, or patch it into SLOW so the nights take three times as long.
HOUR fires on every hour. TICK is a clock that runs faster each day: four an hour, or the incoming clock, times 1 + DREAD × 0.5 on day II, × 1 on day III and × 2 in the last six hours.
FINAL is a gate for the last six hours. FALL fires when the time runs out, and on the same tick the clock starts again at the first dawn.
Alone on the spine: 10 V × (t / 72)1 + 4 × DREAD. With DREAD down it climbs in a straight line; all the way up, it hardly moves until the third day, then comes down on you.
One knob for how much the end bunches up. It shapes MOON's climb and TICK's speed together, so as the third night comes on the voltage rises faster and the clock tightens.
Two boards behind the panel. The main board has the knobs and jacks on its front and an RP2350 on its back, running this page's engine once a millisecond. The face is a round board of its own, standing on the main board just behind the panel, its 27 warm white LEDs in the panel's holes and twelve spring pins on its back pressing on the LED driver's pads.
Drag to look around; lift the panel for the face board. Nothing has been built yet.
THREE DAYS is designed, and its engine runs here. Nothing's built yet, and there's no date.