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

32679.jpg

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............