Two minor clock projects and an update

I recently completed a couple of new clocks, both brief experiments.

Neopixel clock

The first uses a circular array of WS2812 LEDs, sometimes known as neopixels. It's hard to take good pictures of it, as the brightness of the LEDs overwhelms the camera on my phone. This will give a general idea:

The LEDs are this product. It consists of several concentric rings which different numbers of pixels. It's a nice, cheap product and comes with connectors so that you can use just some of the rings and address them in any order. The only alternative I found was an overpriced product from Adafuit.

The outermost ring has 60, making it suitable for minutes and seconds, and the next has 48, meaning you can displays hours down to quarter-hour resolution. I use the next ring, with 40 pixels for a temperature display, although that part of the software is not complete. The controller is a M5StickC Plus. Strictly speaking a level shifter should be used between the 3.3V output of the ESP32 in the M5, and the 5V needed for the control pin of the pixels, but it seemed to work OK without one. The only problem I had was during prototyping when I had it connected up through leads with alligator clips. For some reason, the signals got corrupted in this case. Using a breadboard or soldered connections works fine. The hours and minutes are displayed as a sort of swoosh with several LEDs at different brightnesses. The case is 3D printed in clear PLA. This does make the pixels a bit fuzzy, though most of the fuzziness in the video is from the camera.

The neopixel clock is not very practical. It's surprisingly hard to read the time without hands to direct your eye. I hoped the swooshes would help, but they really don't: every time I look at it, it takes a few seconds to read off the time, when it ought to be near-instantaneous.

Favre's Full Clock

The second recent build is Jacques Favre's "full clock". It's a straightforward clock mechanism driven by a small stepper motor, the widely used 28BYJ48. I used the ULN8003 driver board that came with the one I bought instead of the L293D preferred by Favre. The clock needs two 608 bearings, and there are printable versions. I had several 608s in stock, so used them instead.

The clock runs silently and smoothly. I like this design better than Steve Peterson's stepper clock (see this post), which is not quite as quiet and slightly jouncy in its movement. One concern is whether the 28BYJ48 will stand up to continuous running as they aren't really designed for it.

I am thinking of making some of Favre's other clocks, and this short project was meant as a way of learning more about his design style. Almost all of the parts worked fine. The only modifications I made were to shrink two parts with an inner thread by 95% for a better fit, and to make the hands a bit less boxy. There are some shafts glued together from two halves and I made 1mm diameter holes in them so I could use a pin or piece of wire to keep them aligned while the glue set.

Peterson 10 day clock update

Steve Peterson's 10 day clock was the first one I made. One problem I have had with it is that after a few weeks of running, the pendulum amplitude gets less and less until it stalls. Reading the comments thread on his myminifactory page, this is a problem which several people have had. The proposed solution is always to find ways of reducing friction, and I have been through several cycles of doing so: re-cleaning the bearings, polishing the arbors, reprinting the gears in regular PLA instead of silk PLA, lubricating with white lithium grease. I also tried adding more weight. The pattern has been the same every time: it seems good at first, but after 4-6 weeks of use, the problem recurs. I'm now trying ceramic bearings to again try to bring down the friction. We'll see what happens.