原创 Vetinari clock: The decisions that must be made

Things are going merrily along with regard to my uber-cool Vetinari Clock project. The wooden cabinet is being handcrafted by my chum Bob (a master carpenter) using an amazing aluminum-colored veneer on the front of the enclosure.

An amazing aluminum-colored veneer.
 

This cabinet will be complemented with new Art Deco faceplates for the antique analogue meters that are being designed by my friend Denis (Web guru and graphic artist extraordinaire).

As soon as Denis has worked his magic (graphics to come in a future blog), master machinist John Strupat in Canada is standing by, poised to leap into action to fabricate the new faces.

Meanwhile, the guys and gals at Instrument Meter Specialties (IMS) are currently checking the meters out to make sure everything is "tip-top." As soon as I get the new faces from John, I'll hand them over to the folks at IMS, who will install them in the meters, make sure everything is still tickety-boo, and then return my little beauties to me.

What do you mean, what am I doing in all this? Why, I'm masterminding operations. It's a hard and thankless job, but somebody has to do it. While all of the above actions are taking place, for example, there remain decisions that have to be decisively and decidedly decided upon.

Consider the various operating modes and associated sound effects. We'll start with base-level mode in which silence is golden. Next, we'll have a standard mode, which will be characterized by a regular "tick-tock" sound. Of course we will also need the clock's namesake Vetinari mode, in which the "tick-tock" sounds are disturbingly irregular (e.g., "tick, tock, tick, tock … tick-tock-tick … tock …"). I'm also toying with the idea of an outrageously, earthshakingly, teeth-rattlingly loud "Westminster Chimes" mode, and I'm dilly-dallying with the temptation to add a sweet little "Cuckoo clock" mode. On top of all this, we're going to require some debug and test modes.

But we digress … all of these modes and sound effects will be the subject of future columns. At the moment, I have more pressing concerns, because decisions need to be made with regard to the layout of the front panel. In my original blog on this topic, I showed the relative locations of the four analogue meters. Initially, these meters were all I planned to have on the front panel. I'd vaguely considered that any switches used to select operating modes and so on would be mounted out of sight on the back of the clock.

As fate would have it, however, I was rooting around my office looking for something or other, as you do, when I ran across a forgotten cache of antique switches I'd acquired a few years ago. These have a certain "Oooh, shiny!" quality that I feel would really complement the front panel.

Some rather cool antique toggle switches.
 

I started off with the fact that odd-numbered groups of things like switches (say three or five) tend to be more visually appealing and aesthetically interesting than even-numbered groupings of the same objects. This led me to my first-pass layout, in which we have three switches mounted horizontally centered on the small "tock-tock" meter. We'll call this Option A as illustrated below.

Layout Option A
 

Next I dropped the three switches so that they are still presented horizontally, but now they are lined up with the bottom of the "tick-tock" meter. We'll refer to this as Option B as illustrated below.

Layout Option B.
 

Once you've started with this sort of thing it's hard to stop. Options C and D maintained the horizontal line-up, but involved different placements centered about the large hours meter as illustrated below.

Layout Option C.
 

 

Layout Option D
 

At this point I started to grow a tad adventurous. "What about a triangular grouping that complements the positioning of the 'minutes,' 'seconds,' and 'tick-tock' meters?" I thought. The result is Option E as illustrated below.

Layout Option E.
 

The advantage shared by all of the possibilities presented thus far is that adding the switches does not increase the size of the front panel. But then I started to ponder whether or not this really is an advantage, because the aluminum-colored veneer is so impressive that maybe this is a case of "more is better." Thus, I started to consider the idea of a vertical arrangement for the switches as illustrated in Option F below, because this serves to increase the width of the clock.

Layout Option F.
 

It was around this time that I started to ponder the fact that three switches would offer only eight possible modes. It's amazing how quickly you can use these modes up. If we use one switch to select between the main "Test" and "Run" modes, for example, then this leaves us with only four sub-modes for each case.

The point is that I actually have five of these tasty little switches sitting on my desk waiting for their new lease on life. If we were to use all of these little beauties, and if we were to use one to select between the main "Test" and "Run" modes, then we would still have the capability to support sixteen sub-modes for each of the main modes. These ruminations led me to Option G as illustrated below.

Layout Option G.
 

Of course there are many more possibilities available to us. For example, we could stick with just three of switches on the front of the clock and use these to select between sub-modes, and we could have an additional switch on the back of the clock that is used to select between the main "Test" and "Run" modes.

Alternatively, we could … but "No!" Now my poor old noggin is starting to ache. I don’t see why I should suffer alone, so I'll hand this over to you. What do you think? Do you prefer any of the layouts presented above, or do you have alternative suggestions for me to consider?