About Binary Clock

A binary clock is actually pretty easy to read once you have someone explain it. That is what I will hopefully do on this page.

Let's start by taking a look at a single moment in time, using the example below:

The first thing to notice when reading the clock, is that it is broken up into three columns: hours, minutes, and seconds. As you probably already expected, hours are represented in 24h time.

Now that you know about what each of these columns represents, lets look at how to read each column. Luckily once you know how to read one column, you can read all three. Each time component is made up of two closely packed columns. The column on the left represents the tens digit, and the column on the right represents the ones digit.

In order to determine the numeric value of one of these individual columns (the tens or ones digit), you need to do a bit of simple math. Starting with the bottom row for the column, this represents 2⁰. The cell immediately above is 2¹, and above that is 2², and the topmost cell is 2³. So now you just count all of the illuminated cells in that column to arrive at the number for the tens and ones digits.

As a quick review, here is a quick listing of the important powers of 2:

Armed with the above, we can now calculate the clock as follows: