This clock is similar to another we’ve featured a few years ago, which also used a Magna Doodle, but greatly improves on the idea. In total, the whole build uses three stepper motors, two to control the movement of the arm, and one on the back of the tablet to sweep a magnetic bar which “erases” it. That way, to draw on one of them you don’t need to add a point of articulation to bring the pen up and down, simply attached a controllable electromagnet to the end of a two-dimensional SCARA arm. The clock works by exploiting the principle that Magna Doodle tablets work by being drawn on with a magnetic stylus. And if you have one of those still lying around with some old toys and don’t mind cannibalizing it for the project, you too can follow along the source files to build your own.
But if you simply like your clocks with their electronics exposed, check out this free-form LED clock or this neat circuit sculpture clock.Ĭontinue reading “Drunk Wall Clock Uses Convoluted Circuits To Display Time” → Posted in clock hacks Tagged clock, ESP32, raspberry pi, vgaįollowing a surge of creativity fueled by the current lockdown, writes in with his tabletop clock driven by a robotic arm drawing on a Magna Doodle tablet. We love projects like this that accomplish a simple task in a convoluted way, and there’s no shortage of needlessly complicated clocks, whether physically drawing the time or using machine-learning data. Mounted on a round panel of recycled wood, it makes a beautiful wall ornament for any hacker lab. This fits well with the overall aesthetic of the clock, which consists of a heap of PCBs held together with cable ties and electrical tape. The clock got its “drunk” label because the process of repeatedly running the date command and parsing its output is slow and prone to hiccups, resulting in a display where the seconds advance in a somewhat unsteady manner. The resulting “NTSC” signal is then fed into a small TFT display that shows the time. could have simply hooked up a VGA display to this, but instead went for another layer of complexity by converting the VGA signal to something resembling composite video, using nothing more than three resistors. This is a little PCB with an FPGA that emulates an OLED display and outputs the image to a VGA connector. The “FPGA” part is where it gets weirder: the ESP32 is hooked up to a VGA1306 board. It then telnets into the system, logs in, and requests the current time using the Linux date command.
That mouthful is an accurate description of what it does: at the heart of the device is an ESP32 that uses WiFi to connect to a Raspberry Pi. Here at Hackaday we can never get enough of odd clocks, and we’re delighted to see ’s creation called the Wifi-Telnet-FPGA-NTSC Drunk Wall Clock. A variation on that would also make a really nice clock display.Ĭontinue reading “Robotic Doodle Clock” → Posted in clock hacks, Robots Hacks Tagged arduino, arm, dry erase, felt, servo
This reminds us of that felt-tipped Turing Machine. The entire thing is driven by an Arduino compatible board mounted on the base of the clock. From there it starts to draw the time, tracing the segments of each digit multiple times to achieve a readable number. The video after the break shows the bot in action, at first flexing its wrist to switch back and forth between marker and eraser.
We think if the arm holding the acrylic writing surface had been at right angles this would not look nearly as pleasing. The shape and building material used here really make the timepiece look great. There’s a bit of play in the arm joints and some loose motor precision which results in a wavy font that prompted to name his project the Doodle Clock. It will show you the time by drawing it in dry-erase marker.
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