Meet our newest creation. Klapklok is a mechanical pixel clock with 69 elements. It’s a rounded square of 45 cm, just 13 mm thin, and it diplays a whopping half a dot per inch. Lightweight paper-like flaps switch from black to white, acting as pixels. Every 2,5 minutes, the hands on the clock are redrawn. In between, Klapklok is completely inert. It doesn’t emit light, it’s silent and it uses almost no energy when the flaps are not in motion.

Klapklok’s flaps move every 2,5 minutes with a soft, gentle whisper. Every hour, all sixty-nine flaps briefly change at once to display the time as numbers. Moving all flaps together creates a peaceful, calming rustle. Like the sound of sixty-nine butterflies. Klapklok is the gentlest cuckoo clock you’ve ever heard.

Klapklok might look very simple, but beneath the surface is an advanced array of spools, magnets and electronics. The lightweight flaps are pushed and drawn in a controlled motion to withstand interference. Movements are layered to minimize energy.

Klapklok is a clock, first and foremost. Like most clocks, you can set the hours and minutes with four buttons at the bottom. To streamline development, we put a Bluetooth chip in the prototypes, and wrote a small app. This turned out to be so convenient that it’s in every Klapklok now. Apart from setting the time, you can do much more with the app. Even make your own 69 pixel drawings!

Peter, Greet and son Piet, inventors and builders of Klapklok and Wheel.

Like our Wheels, we make Klapklok in our lab in Schagen, Noord-Holland. The base structure of Klapklok is milled out of high performance bio polyurethane. We carefully fuse a warp free sandwich with a fiber sheet contaning the electronics. The hinges are transparent, the flaps are made of a paper-like durable composite. Klapklok has a built-in 3 meter tangle-free metal usb-c cable and a separate small power supply.