Analog Clock

-With digital style

Challenge: Create a clock to tell time that is operated only by a raspberry pi with servos.

This was the first project for my robotics course, and very much set the tone for how I would tackle projects. The intended goal behind the design was to have a single positional servo control the whole clock with periodic (once/min) action. Because the servos were low quality, our design contained two ratchets so the clock would always register into the same position, despite any servo slop. In an effort to have a visual readout much like a digital clock, we incorporated Geneva gears so digits remained correctly aligned as long as possible.

While the .dxf’s for the 1:1 gears were generated, I designed the 12:1 and 6:1 Geneva gears from scratch first in SolidWorks then Adobe Illustrator. Steel rods were used for the 5 axles, and the wood components were produced through a combination of laser cutting and traditional woodworking tools.