The clock consists of three 3D-printed drums that are mounted on a common axle and linked together with gears and a Geneva drive. Designs differ, but they all have something in common in their use of gravity to open the leaves and display their numbers.īut what if you turned the flip clock on its head? That’s pretty much what accomplished with a flip clock that stands up the digits rather than flipping them down. People collect and restore the electromechanical timepieces with devotion, and even seek to build new kinds of clocks based on split-flap displays.
The venerable flip clock has become an outsized part of timekeeping culture that belies the simplicity of its mechanism. If you were thinking you’ve seen these Solari soft-flap displays here before, you’d be quite correct, but if you’re not so much interested in marking the passage of time, but bending such devices to your other indication whims, we’ve got you covered also.Ĭontinue reading “A Solari Mechanical Digital Clock Hack With A Little Extra” → Posted in clock hacks Tagged flip clock, retrofit, servo, stm32 Firmware source, utililising FreeRTOS can be found on the project GItHub, with schematics and Fusion360 files on the Hackaday.IO project linked above. Once zeroed, the clock could then be advanced to the correct time and kept current. Sensing of the zero-hour position was done by monitoring the date-advance mechanism, that is not used in this model of clock. The solution was to sneak in a crafty MG996R high-torque servo motor, which pushes on the hour-advancement lever, allowing the unit to be zeroed much faster. In order to synchronise the mechanism with the electronics, the unit could have been driven to advance a minute at a time, but since every hour would need sixty pulses, this could take a while given the limited speed at which that could be done reliably.
#Flip clock driver
Minute advancements were effected by driving the clock’s 24V electromagnet with a DRV8871 motor driver IC, the power supply for which was generated from the USB supply via a TPS61041 boost converter. Using some strategically-placed magnets and hall effect sensors, the status of the internal mechanism could be determined. An STM32G031 runs the show, with a few push buttons and a SSD1306 OLED display forming the UI. wanted autonomy, and came up with a solution to make the thing fully adjust itself automatically.Įlectronics-wise, initial prototyping was performed with a Nucleo 32 dev board and a pile of modules, before moving to a custom PCB designed in Altium Designer. Since the clock requires a single pulse-per-minute in order to track time, the simplest track often followed is to open the back, set the correct time manually by poking the appropriate levers, and then let an external circuit take over clocking it.
That sounded like a challenge, and the resulting hack is a nice, respectful tweak of the internals to bring it into the modern era. Was perusing an antique shop in Bologna, and came across a nice example of a late 1950s timepiece, in the shape of a Solari Cifra 5 slave clock, but as the shop owner warned, it could never tell the time by itself.
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