The Open Source Cookoo Clock prodjet

[daniel]

Hello all...

I had an idea I wanted to throw out there and see if anyone wanted to kick it around some....

I have come across a source of Vextra Stepper Motors at about 5 bucks apeice, they are not large like the ones on our bots, however they are much bigger than the ones in printers. Here is a picture

2399

The model is PX243M-01AA incase anyone wants to look it up....

Anyway, I thought, with a micro controller, they would make awesome clock motors, due to the fact you can program them to do srewy things at set times like a cuckoo clock does at noon.

I imagined a clock with the hands at 11:59, but instead of clicking forward one more minute it suddenly goes in reverse very fast until the hands read 12:00

My intest also was peeked when I saw how many people were intrested in making their own circuit boards on their bots.

So anyway, I can get the steppers and I also have a programmer for programing pics. I have a handful of pic 16f684's, but my programming skills kinda suck and I'm not sure how to program the pic to work like a real time clock.

Anyway, I thought the shopbot community could do some cool stuff with stepper based clocks...

Just a thought............

[myxpykalix]

could you use these motors for say a rotary table? If so, i'd like to experiment with something like that. So let me know how to get a few of these.

[dana_swift]

Jack, all it takes is a gear head, you decide how much torque you want and that determines the speed you can get from a given motor. If slow is ok, it will always work.

Connecting it to the Shopbot controller is another interesting question.. as near as I can tell the controller doesnt know what kind of driver is connected. The driver gets a TTL direction command and one TTL pulse per step. So now it is a matter of comming up with a suitable driver for whatever stepper you have.

Daniel-

Interesting idea, and you should have no trouble at all making your clock. It will be a great learning opportunity for your PIC programming.

Since your application requires almost no torque, (presuming you are only driving the clock hands) then you can make it do exactly what you are describing.

If you step up to a CPU with more muscle, you can set up a multi tasking operating system and have lots of stepper motors doing all kinds of things simultaneously. FYI I use the Renesas M16C embedded CPU's all the time, most embedded engineers don't know about them, but lots of horsepower at very little cost increase over a PIC. The M16C60 series is one to consider (200k+ flash, 20k+ ram, 5 uarts, 6 timers, 10 parallel ports, 8 a/d's, 2 d/a's, I2Cbus, CAN, etc) and in the 10-20 dollar region. They have a very good C complier for it also..

Be sure to post how your clock project goes.. cutting the parts should be easy on the bot too..

D