Someone Built a Clock With 60 Water Pumps and Zero Regrets - Yanko Design

"Each digit on the clock is made up of a fifteen-segment display, except instead of LEDs, each segment is a small glass bottle. When a bottle is filled with dyed water, the segment is active. Empty it, and it disappears. Put enough bottles together in the right configuration and you get numbers. Numbers that tell you it's 4:37 in the afternoon, rendered entirely in colored water."

"The clock uses 60 pumps in total, a stepper-driven peristaltic pump paired with membrane-pump boosters, to route dyed water into the precise bottles needed for each digit. The water isn't doing any actual timekeeping here. It's purely the display medium. The electronics handle the time; the water handles the theater."

"Rather than individually draining each one with a separate pump, Strange Inventions engineered a servo-driven linkage that flips all nine bottles in a single digit at once. It's one motion, one satisfying dump, and the digit resets. Getting that 3D-printed mechanism to"

Each digit is built from a fifteen-segment layout where every segment is a small glass bottle. Bottles filled with dyed water become visible segments, while empty bottles disappear, forming readable numbers. The clock shows time such as 4:37 in the afternoon using colored water as the display medium. Timekeeping is handled by electronics, while water only provides the visual effect. The system routes dyed water using 60 pumps total, including stepper-driven peristaltic pumps and membrane-pump boosters. Emptying is done with a servo-driven linkage that flips nine bottles in a digit together, creating a single reset motion.

Read at Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News