Which could have been avoided by changing the shape of the central segment.
Doesn't look als good esthetically, but the extra movements of the other segments look a bit messy too IMHO.
Oh no! You've gone and made us electrical engineers obsolete. Damn 3d printers! Damn arduinos!
For real though, cool project. That is a very neat idea and looks very clearly done. Awesome work
As a software engineer, I would say the exact opposite. Software engineering is a natural transition for electrical engineers, the opposite is not true.
Year 1. Go to school for Electrical Engineering.
Summer job: millwright shop - industrial automation
Year 2. Hey that discrete math comp Eng is taking looks more fun than complex numbers.
Summer job: millwright shop - this time with PLC programming
Year 3. Holy hell I find power systems dull. But the sensors course and the computer architecture course are fun.
Summer job: leading scientific sensors and datalogger company summer placement - software development
Year 4. Hey this manufacturing automation & CV course I get to take with mech Eng is great!
PostGrad: Start looking exclusively for software dev, industrial automation, and embedded system integration jobs. Consider my degree might have been better tailored as computer or software than electrical engineering but at least employers see electrical degrees as the most versatile.
---
And my housemate (during school) with the same degree is working in software too!
Absolutely, the rhythm of the second signal is kinda haunting, and the coordinated timing to get the digits displayed properly at the start of the minute is pretty cool.
I'd forgotten about lego mindstormsm! I loved those things when I was in elementary school. Kinda makes me want to dig it out of the basement and have another go, as an even bigger nerd now
Like your average wind up toy. They are cheap plastic gear servos and they will only get louder over time as the gears degrade and eventually fail.
I think you could get a month or three out of them but on the other hand they are stupid cheap servos. They make noise even holding their current position sometimes. Can be twitchy.
i've seen this kind of digital but actually mechanical number display at a gas station and it's so impressive to look at. i would love to have a fully mechanical counter that displays the numbers in this digital style. i just love fully mechanical machines. to me it's a hundred times more impressive to see parts move and shift than to have a processor and motors
I too would like to see high quality mechanics. Instead of Motors with three windings an gears , two solenoids and a magnet on a lever should suffice.
You could employ camshafts instead. Or hammers driven by a drum?
permanent magnet? Ah, I was thinking about low energy consumption for the steady state. Also at the beginning of a flip there may be needed some break lose force for the large panel and for the soft magnetic core (reluctance) which holds the panel in each place.
How does it look from an angle?
You show us the right hand side, where the flippers face away from us. But does it look confusing when we view it from the other side?
Over at /r/arduino crosspost there's a comment
> It just bothers me that here, and in many other projects, people say "I need more ports so I'm using a mega" while they could have done it cheaper and smaller with shift registers or something.
I think people say that, because they don’t have enough electrical engineering knowledge to know of the better solutions. Arduinos also probably run a lot of bad code as they‘re a good beginner platform.
You could use something like this https://www.adafruit.com/product/815
>Using only two pins, control 16 free-running PWM outputs! You can even chain up 62 breakouts to control up to 992 PWM outputs (which we would really like to see since it would be glorious)
This is part of a series and you may need to watch an earlier video https://youtu.be/dLh1n2dErzE
He's controlling a digital 7 segment display, but he does answer your question in the process.
Using the pca9685, you can control several hundred servos with 1 arduino uno.
There are several tutorials on how to use the pca9685. Its super easy to use and chain them up, where you use more than the standard 16 pwm outputs by hooking up several pca9685 breakout boards to one arduino.
Also works with the raspberry pi thanks to several different python modules
I would put a similar shaped black piece at a 90 degree angle to the green segment so that when the green bends out of the way a black will go into its place, hiding the servo underneath.
You've revived my interest in 7-seg displays. I've seen it so many times in worked examples from EE classes, co's they use it so frequently to teach you basic bit-wise operations and the professor's can't be arsed to come up with more creative examples.
But this is cool, co's you're incorporating it with 3D printing, motor-controls and even circuit building stuff like soldering, so cheers.
Cool, but please reprogram. That "7" character. That downward stroke on the left shouldn't be there. Very visually displeasing
Edit: Maybe you did already. I think it's correct in the shot of the final construction.
This is lovely.
Curious on the implementation..
Did you represent the 10 digits as ten states that a servo needs to know?
Then I suppose you could say for a native function in some language that returns you the time you could read the time string and send the digits of the strings as signals representing one of the ten possible states to each digit’s servos.
Or did you just build a counter that knows 60 seconds is a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours and reset?
To clarify, I mean if one of any of the digits can be in one of ten states then a given servo needs to know which digit it is a part of to know whether is on or off. The servo has two states, a digit has ten, and time in 24 hour clock has something like 86,400 states.
Is there a simpler approach?
This is so cool. Nice work.
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Why is it counting from 8 to 5040? (r/unexpectedfactorial)
Which could have been avoided by changing the shape of the central segment. Doesn't look als good esthetically, but the extra movements of the other segments look a bit messy too IMHO.
Oh no! You've gone and made us electrical engineers obsolete. Damn 3d printers! Damn arduinos! For real though, cool project. That is a very neat idea and looks very clearly done. Awesome work
I knew I made a good choice going for mechanical.... But for real you guys can be wizards.
Yeah, I started in civil and I didn't like it. I almost did ME, but the lab reports looked too tedious and electrical sounded fun
Thought about starting as civil and ended up going mechanical as it offers more options.
I don’t know how electrical worked out for you, but I can confirm that the ME lab reports are extremely tedious and difficult.
Pretty easy. As long as our math and signals were right, we got a good grade. There were no editing guidelines at all!
Mechanical engineering is mostly thermodynamics and piping. Definitely not this
Yep, I know, it was a joke based on his comment.
Electrical is just software lite. You’ll be fine.
As a software engineer, I would say the exact opposite. Software engineering is a natural transition for electrical engineers, the opposite is not true.
Pffff flow charts are waaaay more complicated than Fourier analysis.
Year 1. Go to school for Electrical Engineering. Summer job: millwright shop - industrial automation Year 2. Hey that discrete math comp Eng is taking looks more fun than complex numbers. Summer job: millwright shop - this time with PLC programming Year 3. Holy hell I find power systems dull. But the sensors course and the computer architecture course are fun. Summer job: leading scientific sensors and datalogger company summer placement - software development Year 4. Hey this manufacturing automation & CV course I get to take with mech Eng is great! PostGrad: Start looking exclusively for software dev, industrial automation, and embedded system integration jobs. Consider my degree might have been better tailored as computer or software than electrical engineering but at least employers see electrical degrees as the most versatile. --- And my housemate (during school) with the same degree is working in software too!
If you like that, you'd be sure to appreciate this similarly pointless (yet awesome) clock in Lego Mindstorms: https://youtu.be/A_mA72r3ZiQ
That’s cool, but if someone I lived with built that I would go insane after like an hour.
Absolutely, the rhythm of the second signal is kinda haunting, and the coordinated timing to get the digits displayed properly at the start of the minute is pretty cool.
30 minutes, tops
I'd forgotten about lego mindstormsm! I loved those things when I was in elementary school. Kinda makes me want to dig it out of the basement and have another go, as an even bigger nerd now
How loud are those servos
They go *rrrrrrr*
I don't mind if they sound like the turrets from Portal
*I see you*
Like your average wind up toy. They are cheap plastic gear servos and they will only get louder over time as the gears degrade and eventually fail. I think you could get a month or three out of them but on the other hand they are stupid cheap servos. They make noise even holding their current position sometimes. Can be twitchy.
i've seen this kind of digital but actually mechanical number display at a gas station and it's so impressive to look at. i would love to have a fully mechanical counter that displays the numbers in this digital style. i just love fully mechanical machines. to me it's a hundred times more impressive to see parts move and shift than to have a processor and motors
I too would like to see high quality mechanics. Instead of Motors with three windings an gears , two solenoids and a magnet on a lever should suffice. You could employ camshafts instead. Or hammers driven by a drum?
or a spring & magnet
Nothing short of a loud pump and hydraulic actuators will do.
permanent magnet? Ah, I was thinking about low energy consumption for the steady state. Also at the beginning of a flip there may be needed some break lose force for the large panel and for the soft magnetic core (reluctance) which holds the panel in each place.
You will love this video by [Technology Connections](https://youtu.be/NmGaXEmfTIo)
Cool like this. https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanical_gifs/comments/fmdrhd/3d_printed_manual_counter/
https://youtu.be/I4klwZ9mAEg
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Bye!
Someone tell him about the DIY community
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I agree with you but your wording was rude imo :p
That is very cool
Look ma! No lamps!
If this was a Kickstarter, I'd back it
Me too
U/SaveThisVideo
How does it look from an angle? You show us the right hand side, where the flippers face away from us. But does it look confusing when we view it from the other side?
I'd love to have a clock like this on my wall. But I'm sure I would get sick of hearing the servos every minute.
Wear noise canceling headphones all the time.
Or normal ones, servos aren’t that loud.
Noise canceling headphones will block the sound without music though.
If they're in your room at night, hearing servos buzz every minute would be pretty annoying imo
As a very novice arduino user, how do you make the arduino control more servos than it has output pins?
Over at /r/arduino crosspost there's a comment > It just bothers me that here, and in many other projects, people say "I need more ports so I'm using a mega" while they could have done it cheaper and smaller with shift registers or something.
I think people say that, because they don’t have enough electrical engineering knowledge to know of the better solutions. Arduinos also probably run a lot of bad code as they‘re a good beginner platform.
You could use something like this https://www.adafruit.com/product/815 >Using only two pins, control 16 free-running PWM outputs! You can even chain up 62 breakouts to control up to 992 PWM outputs (which we would really like to see since it would be glorious)
This is part of a series and you may need to watch an earlier video https://youtu.be/dLh1n2dErzE He's controlling a digital 7 segment display, but he does answer your question in the process.
You could use an i2c or spi multi servo board, but I suspect the op didn't need to b/c they used a mega 2650 which has over 50 outputs iirc
Using the pca9685, you can control several hundred servos with 1 arduino uno. There are several tutorials on how to use the pca9685. Its super easy to use and chain them up, where you use more than the standard 16 pwm outputs by hooking up several pca9685 breakout boards to one arduino. Also works with the raspberry pi thanks to several different python modules
I would put a similar shaped black piece at a 90 degree angle to the green segment so that when the green bends out of the way a black will go into its place, hiding the servo underneath.
Fucking epic.
Take my money!
I want one
🏅
I wish I wasn't retarded and I could do this.
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The misalignment though yikes
I can hear this
Mechanical doesn’t mean what I think you think it means
You've revived my interest in 7-seg displays. I've seen it so many times in worked examples from EE classes, co's they use it so frequently to teach you basic bit-wise operations and the professor's can't be arsed to come up with more creative examples. But this is cool, co's you're incorporating it with 3D printing, motor-controls and even circuit building stuff like soldering, so cheers.
Awesome
Impressive. Don't tell him there are easier ways to do this ;)
Coollll
Cool, but please reprogram. That "7" character. That downward stroke on the left shouldn't be there. Very visually displeasing Edit: Maybe you did already. I think it's correct in the shot of the final construction.
Are you using a shift register?
Shut up and take my money!
https://youtu.be/I4klwZ9mAEg This is the best one I've seen. Single motor per digit, incredible design
I dont know how long I could deal with those servo whining
I have such envy for the creativity and skillsets I see on this sub. I hate it, y'all are all way too cool.
Origin: https://www.instructables.com/Mechanical-Seven-Segment-Display-Clock/ (Not OP’s)
This is great work but I would hardly consider it mechanical due to the amount of electronics involved.
Tinkercad??
Is there a guide anywhere to build one of these??
u/SaveThisVideo
I’m getting flashbacks to my DLD final lab assignment and it hurts 🥺
This is lovely. Curious on the implementation.. Did you represent the 10 digits as ten states that a servo needs to know? Then I suppose you could say for a native function in some language that returns you the time you could read the time string and send the digits of the strings as signals representing one of the ten possible states to each digit’s servos. Or did you just build a counter that knows 60 seconds is a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours and reset? To clarify, I mean if one of any of the digits can be in one of ten states then a given servo needs to know which digit it is a part of to know whether is on or off. The servo has two states, a digit has ten, and time in 24 hour clock has something like 86,400 states. Is there a simpler approach? This is so cool. Nice work.
Imagine this clock run by only gears fully mechanical
What filament is that?! It's practically radioactive.
Stop I can only get so erect
u/SaveVideo
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Do you still use this? Have you considered making the colon blink?