Swan Station Countdown Timer

I’ve always been fascinated by the split flap clock design. There’s something invigorating about hearing the mechanical “clack” of their tiles or the monotonous ticking filling a board as an analog display. Little did I know watching Lost back in 2005 and being introduced to the Swan Station, that I would actually be building one of almost sixteen years later.

It was around this time I stumbled onto Mr. Volt’s amazing builds and his published STEP file for his build of this exact clock. Not only would this build be a challenge of reverse engineering, it would be one of endurance, as hand painting a hundred faces on split flap tiles would take quite a while.

There was so much I learned with this build, I can’t even begin to articulate all of it. Building the electronics stack from a few minutes of Mr. Volt’s circuit description, swapping parts for Adafruit Feather series (while also making an attempt at CircuitPython), to the calibration aspect of physical parts against a custom firmware.

While I have both the source code published for the firmware and frontend UI, it really doesn’t give justice to the iteration that it took to deliver this. In the end, I had the clock from the Swan station hanging next to my workbench, fully controllable via a web interface with a stylized CRT terminal. Apologizes to my wife and daughter for having to listen to the beeps and repeating klaxons pumped through an 8 watt speaker.

Circa May - August 2021