A player piano for neon, and I want one…
The Tamura Lumitime looks like a digital clock: a red 7-segment display, glowing. Mark Furneaux took one apart, and Hackaday covered the teardown. Inside there is no counter, no real-time clock and no logic chip. Hackaday describes the guts like this:
Instead, a motor drives a series of gears that turn metal plates that move under sliding finger contacts.
So the time is a program stored in metal, which makes this a ClockPunk machine wearing a space-age costume. Every digit you see was decided by where somebody cut a plate, and the neon is just the lamp that reads it out. I like that the cheat is honest.
Timekeeping is where I’d poke at it. The article gives no accuracy figure, and one commenter guesses 10 to 50 ppm if the motor locks to mains frequency, which is a guess, so I’d trust it exactly as far as I trust the wall socket. A collector forum poster says that in Lumitime clocks cams push leaf contacts and the motors often burn out, with replacements very hard to find. One commenter found the cheapest unit on eBay UK at £250.
Win. At £250, watching the plates turn is the whole show.