Gradual

Beautifully-animated dripping light clock

A project at Tomorrow Lab for Gradual

Tags: Electrical Engineering, Firmware Development, LED

Role: PCB Design, Firmware Development

A lamp that tells time in a beautifully unique way.

Using the concept of ‘time chambers’ and ‘dripping light’, the light starts dripping from the top chamber and, as it fills, it will drain and fill the ones below it. The product’s firmware and hardware were designed to be as modular and flexible as possible to allow endless combinations of chambers and time durations. Gradual sells the lamps and customizes them for every customer. For example, one version may have 5 chambers representing seconds, minutes, hours, days, and weeks. In another example, there may be 3 chambers representing years, decades, and millennia.

The app, by BornFight, allows the user to set aesthetic parameters including overall brightness, drip rate, and other physics of the drip.