Ridiculous Laser Wall Clock

servo controller

[nickjohnson] has produced an incredibly silly laser wall clock. It was built to test out his PWM servo controller board. He created a wall poster featuring numbers 0-9, hour, minute, AM, PM. The controller points at each symbol in sequence to spell out the time. It changes position every second which creates a nice ticking sound. The clock may be goofy, but you should have a look at his parallel port controller since it’s designed to be simple and uses common components.

19 thoughts on “Ridiculous Laser Wall Clock

  1. Not ridiculous at all, it’s a stepping stone for his sentry gun project, you don’t get much more practical than that. personally, i’m more of a cloak pack & shocklance kind of guy…

  2. This is cool. But then perhaps, there is no need to do a dot pointing. You can make use of the temporal summation property of human eye (1ms) to generate string of timing. I tried this in the early 90s. But then the servo has to be replaced by steppers.

  3. That’s cool and all, but inertia is going to be a problem when you mount a heavy gun to it and try to sling it around that fast. Plus I wouldn’t trust any robot (or many people for that matter) with a loaded weapon. Still an awesome project though.

  4. looks like you need a new place to host images and whatnot for this. Please feel free to email me as I can provide you with some fast hosting for your images that relate to this story, with no cost to you!
    Neat concept for the clock, I might build one of these for my office, just because……

  5. Wow, I can’t believe the positive feedback I’ve recieved. Thanks all.

    I’d love to give someone the files to be mirrored. If you are, I’ve put my email address up on that page temporarily, so drop me a line!

  6. to quigley,

    I agree that inertia could be a problem. My only solution to that would be to “gear down” (or, more likely, use a lever) to reduce the range of the servo from 180 degrees to something more like 45 degrees. I think that would improve response, but I’ve not tried it yet.

Leave a Reply to nguyen_van_thocCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.