So I have recently moved into a new home and it’s looking a bit empty. So, whilst I want to try and build some furniture, I decided to start small and I needed a clock for the living room. I did consider another nixie clock or some complex arduino project but decided on something simple. I bought a quartz movement from eBay and decided to laser cut an interesting face.

After some thought I decided on a half-tone design. Half-tone is an optical illusion they use in newspapers to give the illusion of fading with just one colour, black. I took a simple clock face image then in photoshop used the half-tone filter. This then converted in the image into a collection of different sized dots. This can easily be cut on the laser cutter.

I chose white acrylic and it took about 20min on a 60W laser. I’m pretty pleased with the results.