Well if you think about it they are massively overpriced. My dentist has one of them, they do look really good but are either machined alu or plastic with some diffused LED's in the background that are most likely controlled by a microcomputer inside a wood chassis.
So if you'd make it yourself, excluding the time learning to code a relatively simple code the price would be:
40$ for a CNC'd plate if you know someone who owns a CNC router
25$ for a Raspberry Pi ZeroW and Adruino
20$ for a chassis out of wood
11$ for 121 LEDs
10$ for a light diffuser
10$ for some cables and solder
Now, I'm talking here about prices that you'd need to pay if you do it as a single person - imagine the margins and the price that qlocktwo has to pay for such things.
Hi cool1o,
I built several replicas of the qlocktwo in different sizes (both 45x45 and 90x90) with
Simo_6732, i'm a young engineer, and designed at CAD most of the parts of the clock.
The costs you're talking about are not that accurate in my opinion.
Let me explain you why:
1. Yes you can get a wood or plastic plate machined for such price, but we're talking about routering, not laser cutting, wich is more precise and won't have rounded corners on letters, wich is a major design flaw of the plate (you said you're a designer, i'm sure you can understand that).
if you go to qlocktwo site yourself you can see how the font was chosen to be futuristic and not roundy.
I'll post a comparison as in the early stage of prototipation we managed to have a cnc router for wood and created a plate for coding and testing.
I'm sure you can spot wich is the laser cutted in steel.
2. The raspberry pi or arduino are very very inexpensive, a lot less than what you mentioned if you don't mind using legal replicas.
Let's talk about accuracy. You need an external device to have at least an acceptable accuracy, as arduino can be a clock by itself, but will never be a trustable clock (even in the low term).
Accuracy problems are jokes if you mention the coding involved in the clock to make it work properly. It looks very simple, it's just a clock right? we tought that before we started coding the matrix manager and the showing-time routines. It took us almost 2 months of coding and testing (for a grand total of 60 to 70 hours just for coding). You can never predict all the problems of a system before you test it (maybe i'm just a young inexperienced engineer, i'm not saying you can't do it faster ).
3. The chassis. Oh boy this was fun. Yes, wood is very inexpensive,
But let's talk about designing and machining the matrix, about the costs of the cnc router(if you have one) ore the costs of manufacturing this complicated piece. You need to design and make 114 cone-shaped holes, the rails for the cables and the hole where your arduino will sit. Fun fact, we managed to do it in 2cm of thickness for the 45x45 and 3.3cm for the 90x90 beating qlocktwo itself in making a thin device.
4.Ok i'm not going to be technical in this department, as it would be very inappropriate for this forum, but still:
-If you manage to buy that quantity of nice quality LEDs at that price point i'm very jealous
-I don't think you're aware of how much power an LED needs, we used 4Amp 5V for the 45x45, and 8 Amp 5V for the 90x90. Go on amazon, you'll find the bad ones at a very low cost, wich will set your house on fire after a month, and you'll hear a constant annoying noise coming from your beautiful clock until then. You need a good, silenced, insulated one. It isn't cheap, they start at double the price of the bad quality leds you mentioned.
5. Light diffuser: I'm dead serious, if you manage to find light diffuser in thin sheets at that price please DM me, i'm interested.
6. Cables cost is not the problem, the problem is that, unless you want to make a messy circuit you'll need to design a PCB to manage all the boards involved, and the cables to control and power the matrix. I'm not even talking about the fact you'll need at least a couple days of soldering for just one clock.
This is what we made, and we're not even considering designing and finding the correct fonts, making proportions look right as the original (i'm sure you'll be faster than me in this).
If you like diy as much as we do, you'll enjoy the journey, but at least expect to double the costs to have a nicely done clock.
You're underestimating the costs of materials, and completely ignoring the manufacturing costs, labour etc..
Most of the parts of this clock require massive machines to be done (at least for the 90x90 version), or a lot of human labour (wich you can source from yourself if you diy it).
All of this if you don't consider the designing and prototyping process costs, wich could be counted as 0 for a mass production product, not for such a niche clock.
I'm going to post a couple pictures of our work right there:
The 90x90(in brushed stainless steel finish):
The 45x45(in raw iron finish):
I'm quite sure you'll see by yourself that the only difference is that we don't sign them with the Qlocktwo logo.