Clock Functional!

-
I've been able to get lots done on the clock over the Thanksgiving weekend.  I haven't been able to work on it for a while.  I needed to make the hands for the clock and wrap it up to finish the top section with the actual functioning clock.  I drew out some hands in AutoCAD that I thought I could cut out by hand, but then I thought about having them laser cut and wanted something more intricate.  I had poked around a bit at having them cut, but couldn't get motivated to redesign the hands.  I opted to go back to my original plan and cut them out by hand.  With some sheet metal I had, an air nibbler, and a hand nibbler I set to work.  I managed to get them all cut out with only a handful of blisters and sore hands.  Here are some photos of the cutout hands:
Hands cut out, but still with the paper templates attached.

The templates have been removed and the hands cleaned up, ready for paint.

With the hands cut out, I had to shorten each of the center shafts to fit behind the glass door.  I had intentionally left them long because I didn't know how long I needed them to be when I built the mechanism. With the shafts shortened, I mounted the mechanism, Arduino, and wireless bridge into the back of the clock body:
The rear of the clock body showing the guts.  This is minus the power supplies.

The front of the clock with a couple hands attached, but no photos in them yet.

I chose some nice photos of each family member, converted them to a sepia look, and cut them out to fit.  A little bit of glue and I had a finished clock top.

The finished clock top with all five hands with their appropriate faces!

My next steps are to finish restoring the clock base and waist to complete the grandfather clock.  This should go relatively quickly, but I'll post updates to it.  I also need to post the files and code that I used for the face, hands, etc.

What an awesome project this has been!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

V-22 Osprey Project - Design Changes for v3

-
Image
It's been a busy end of 2021, and as we start 2022 I'm getting closer to building version 3 of the Osprey wing.  The single biggest problem I've faced is the amount of backlash in the direct spur gear drive of the tilt mechanism.  It introduces some nasty instability that, left unchecked, would likely destroy the model in flight. I've investigated other tilt mechanisms, but the one I keep coming back to is the rack and pinion design that Tom Mast uses in his model at Rotormast.  His design uses a high-torque digital servo with a small pinion gear driving a rack attached to the rotor nacelle.  The servo has been modified with an external potentiometer that's driven by a gear on the translation tube to give positional feedback to the servo.  I like this design a lot because 1) It works, and his model is proof, and 2) it requires less torque from the servo and has less backlash. I ordered the pair of modified servos, potentiometer, and rack from Tom's site and star
Read more

V-22 Osprey Project - Flight Control

-
Image
Now that I have a conceptual idea of how to build a V-22 using leftover mCPX BL parts, how do I go about controlling such an aircraft? I own a Taranis X9D+, and it can control up to 32 channels using dual receivers, so that won’t be a problem. I’m sure that I can create a mixing profile in the transmitter to handle just about anything, but I’m also sure that just like any multi-rotor “drone," this thing will need some form of automatic flight stabilization. I own a few multirotor aircraft and I’m familiar with how they function. Some research into the popular flight control software (Betaflight, iNav, Cleanflight, LIbrepilot, etc.) all came up short. No one has written code for off-the-shelf flight controllers to manage a dual-swashplate aircraft. I would have to build my own. I have not delved into writing code for flight controllers, but I have built a number of Arduino projects, and some of them utilize RC inputs to control servos and motors. It occurred to me that I
Read more

Whereabouts Clock Update

-
Image
After a few months, Life360 has gone the way of Apple and locked down the API I used to get location data from the phones.  This is disappointing, but inevitable. I found on a forum for Home Assistant that the app OwnTracks might be a suitable alternative. It's a neat little app that will trigger the phone to send its location data via MQTT to a server that you specify. I had to rework the code a bit, but the new operation is as follows: OwnTracks on the phone will push location data per its configuration to the MQTT server (Docker container) The Mosquitto (MQTT Broker) container will receive the data and forward the data to its subscribers The MQTTWarn container is a subscriber and translates the received data and adds it to the MariaDB database The Apache web server hosts a Python CGI script that is checked each minute by the Arduino microcontroller.  If the data has changed, the hands are moved to the new location. The only exposed port to the Internet is TCP 1883 for MQTT
Read more