When you think of open-source hardware, you probably think of electronics and maker tools– RepRap, Arduino, Adafruit, et cetera. Yet open source is an ethos and license, and is in no way limited to electronics. The openmovement foundation is a case in point– a watch case, to be specific. The “movement” in Openmovement is a fully open-source and fully mechanical watch movement.
Openmovement has already released STEP files of OM10 the first movement developed by the group. (You do need to sign up to download, however.) They say the design is meant to be highly serviceable and modular, with a robust construction suited for schools and new watchmakers. The movement uses a “Swiss pallets escapement” that runs at 3.5 Hz / 25,200 vph. (We think that’s an odd translation of lever escapement, but if you’re a watchmaker let us know in the comments.) An OM20 is apparently in the works, as well, but it looks like only OM10 has been built from what we can see.
If you don’t have the equipment to finely machine brass from the STEP files, Openmovement is running a crowdfunding campaign to produce kits of the OM10, which you can still get in on until the seventh of June.
If you’re wondering what it takes to make a mechanical watch from scratch, we covered that last year. Spoiler: it doesn’t look easy. Just assembling the tiny parts of an OM10 kit would seem daunting to most of us. That might be why most of the watches we’ve covered over the years weren’t mechanical, but at least they tend to be open source, too.
It is neither “escarpent” or “escarpment”.
Also “movment”.
Apart from that it’s a fine article.
Fixed, thank you.
I’ll have you know that my wartch has both and escarpment and a movment, you insensitive clod! /s
There is also a missing “(“, presumably before “we think that’s an odd…”
What does a steep slope or long cliff have to do with a watch movement? Perhaps you’re referring to an escapement rather than escarpment?
The Swiss have no shortage of either!
(fixed. I blame the frailties of the human condition, and also autocorrect.)
An escarpment being a sort of land dune, it’s something I’d normally picture in hilly areas, whereas Switzerland’s vibe is more whole-ass mountains, so I wonder if it actually does have any? I don’t see how this thread can continue until geographers resolve the crisis.
Anyway
I’d never considered watchmaking, but I suddenly realise that I do have a fairly precise CNC machine, plus a bunch of tiny endmills from back when I thought that might be a good way to mill PCBs, so perhaps I should give this a look. Although I’m guessing I still need to make or buy a bunch of jigs and stuff to put it together, and buy jewels and springs and what not.
In case you haven’t, I’d suggest watching the clickspring youtube channel for relevant content. You may get addicted to watchmaking, intimidated by the exhibited skill level, or maybe both.🙂
I also recommend some channels on YouTube dedicated to clock repairs. There are a number of them out there, but my favorite is Wristwatch Revival.
The level of precision required for a mechanical clock movement is insane, the pieces are tiny and you have to step up your machining game for that (I believe I saw a video talking about sub-micron precision, but I may be misremembering it).
Unfortunately, they are not actually crowdfunding kits. They are asking for donations to create tooling so that sometime in the future, they can make kits. But your $$ now does not actually get you a kit. Quite different…
The correct name is “swiss lever escapement.” The swiss lever has two pallet stones on the pallet fork that are what catch the teeth on the escape wheel and provide controlled impulses of power to the balance wheel to make the thing tick.
Because analog is cool. Why do people collect watches? Why do we fix them? Digital watches just become landfill garbage when they break or a segment starts to fade, or … and also they take a battery. Digital has no class so to speak. No tick-tock… Analog clocks will usually end up in a collection, or passed to the next generation that appreciates analog devices! Never need a battery (well the spring is a ‘battery’ that utilizes human energy to recharge). Of course like a lot of things, some people will never ‘get it’. One man’s junk, is another man’s treasure. YMMV.
BTW, my ‘digital wrist watch’ has to be set every week. It is not a precise time piece. My vehicle(s) clock needs updating every so often… Where is the 1000000x more precise ;) ?
Very. I use to look through those expensive watch catalogs, the movements a thing to behold. Illustrates perfectly that engineering can be beautiful and functional.
Yeah, instead of doing a cool thing I’m not into, they should do a boring thing I consider superior.
Seems like for some folks, nothing’s more fun than yucking someone else’s yum.
If they had a manufacturer lined up, I’d seriously go for it. But buying the tools to start manufacturing? That seems too much of a stretch.
(Love the idea though…)
just wait a few years and that precision goes from 1000000x to 0x when the screen goes out, the battery goes out and/or the SOC manufacturer stops making the board the system relies on. Yea the firmware maybe open source, the API, and maybe the PCB design. But unlikely you’re making the actual chips, displays, or sensors or have the facility to do so.
Analog watches even built to an 1800s standard are ‘good enough’ for basic time keeping and will continue being so essentially forever. And they can be built with hand tools (and a lot of skill).
and its fun.
For funsies.
I have half a dozen digital and analogue quartz movement watches. My most favourite watches are well over 20 years old, not working, and no longer repairable (no one makes or maintains the electronic guts for digital watches). I’ve left the digital/quartz movement analogue watch behind, and now proudly own a fully analogue automatic winding watch. From what I can see, you can get such watches maintained and repaired now (even the “ancient” watches from the 1930s), while the “digital” or near digital watches gather dust in a drawer.
As for accuracy, think of this: what matter that your watch keeps time to 1 second per century, if you keep mis-setting it. Your watch, while accurate, may be 5 to 10 minutes off from /my/ watch, or /her/ watch, or WWV or CHU or the time displayed on your smartphone. So long as the watch is accurate enough, it doesn’t matter whether it uses digital or analogue technology, spring powered or battery and quartz crystal.
PS:
A_do_Z:
Take a look at some of the wrist watch repair hobby videos on
youtube. While Clickspring is great (especially for his recreation of the Antikythera device, his “watchmaking” videos are sparser. The watch repair hobby channels give you a better idea of what, how, and why.
https://www.youtube.com/@WristwatchRevival/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@rescuingwatches/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@WeekendWatchRepair/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@watchrepairtutorials/videos
Amuses me to wear a mechanical watch. All the code, for all the products, I’ve written, is obsolete or will be obsolete, while that mechanical clunker will still be ticking.
Electronics based things have perishable components: capacitors, PCBs, plastics, code, frameworks, specifications. That “1000000x more accurate” GPS receiver module (right?) might only work for 10 years.
My analog self winding watch has been running since the 60s with no maintenance (yet) no batteries and no charging. Hard to beat that.
Because every day can’t be Summer’s Eve day?
Really not true that analogue is junk – its often superior to digital really, digital just get used for everything because its simpler to have only on and off states, and now we have many cheap faster oscillators to fake analogue well enough the fact it is faking rarely matters in the real world…
In the case of timekeeping for humans the maximum accuracy that people can really deal with is measured in whole minute probably, maybe seconds for a few things, anything less than that and it really isn’t relevant to people, so there is no great need to be more precise than that. As by the time any communication of time that matters can be delivered more than a few seconds have passed, even if you where trying to navigate by the stars and time your human limits in measurement precision and the quality of your lookup table…
So what a human timepiece needs is to be reliable, long lasting, good to a few seconds a week or so (which is something analogue watches usually best by being accurate to a few seconds in a year) and visually appealing as humans really are magpie like… And for that an analogue watch is actually superior to digital as a general trend, with watches that are a few hundred years old still keeping good time with a little maintenance, the self winders never running out of power without any effort if you wear ’em. So analogue are actually more precise on average than the digital watch that only lasts maybe a handful of years keeping good time on the one battery but dies without warning to ruin its average, and way way better than the modern smart watch that lasts maybe a whole day keeping superb GPS/Network time before it needs manual intervention – making it actually worse than most manually wound watches as most of those last more than a day..).
IMHO, interesting how the mechanical watch making regularly makes full circle and comes back to the point they left more than 100 years ago – precise-making each part in such a way that they’ll all fit together well in one unit.
It was the US watch makers (some were UK watch makers who decided to seek better opportunities, btw) who figured out that it is easier/cheaper to make a lot of spares en mass, each with its own specific irregularity, then match the parts that would work more-or-less-well together during the assembly, so that exact/precise tuning can be simplified to the point, where unskilled/cheap labor can be used during the assembly. UK watch makers stubbornly insisted on exact piece making thus making fewer and better quality watches, but eventually the influx of the US-made cheaper watches won. There is fascinating book that describes this and many other things in excellent details, out of print, obviously, but worthy reading, “Revolution in Time” by David Landes.
BTW, I still think the Bulova’s Accutron was the best hybrid between the two, electrical watch, so to speak, since it eschews the need for the entire enchilada, escapement, etc. One large wheel that’s being spun by a quartz-activated tuning fork. No need for the extensive escapement solution that compensates for the differences in the released force of the wind up spring.
If one is to seriously go the rabbit hole of purely mechanical watch making, tourbillon would be the next logical step.
To the accutron: There is no quartz in that one. It is a metall fork plus driven by a set of coils (2 for the swinging, one for regulating the amplitude. And it was far from easy to make. There is a ratchet wheel 2.6mm in diameter with 360 tooth (still a mystery how that is made) and a ratchat stone hold in place by a spring 1/4 of the thickness of a human hair.
I no need watch, but NEED gasoline engine!
ideal, for small device with, certificate etc. Ideal!
Wait a while, and somebody, somewhere, will build a watch powered by one if those great, but tiny, V8 engines.
Wow, what a wealth of valuable and interesting comments deleted because someone at HAD disliked that one poster thought digital was better and so deleted all the replies as well. Shame HAD, shame on you.
Don’t you remember the clownshow https://hackaday.com/2024/10/12/if-you-cant-say-anything-nice/
It wasn’t a clownshow though. One person commented on digital vs analog and precision and numerous people weighed in with valuable perspectives including on what precision means and industry insider knowledge that you really can’t find outside of comment sections like this.
What happens when you start deleting a lot of comments i.e. to enforce a mood rather than a TOS is that people with valuable knowledge stop posting and we are left with the above useful comments like “it’s a fine article” which add nothing.
Indeed, though usually those comments will come back, eventually once somebody reviews them. Not that unusual for comments to disappear around here for a while before they get put back, and I’d far rather there was some moderation even if its flawed and seems to be somewhat automatic. Perhaps simply because somebody hit ‘report comment’ by accident when they meant reply… As still plenty of dissenting opinions and debate in the comment sections here, so its a healthy and useful place to read more than the article.
Seen what happens in some other forum when the moderation is allowed to slide for a while and you can’t get the rational, insightful debate filled folks to come back to the hateful swamp having moved on to pastures greener. So as long as its not burning out the team doing the moderation…
I’ve observed the comments for a while as well, and see this as a quick of the comment system. Not just that comments are a chain, and it seems the root comment gets deleted, the rest goes as well. However, I also see comments deleted, reappearing, and disappearing again. So it may be a quirk of some automated system.
On topic:
I’ve registered and downloaded the step, and it’s a rather interesting one. I don’t have the programs to manipulate the file, but in my slicer I disabled some of the large bits to observe the other bits. I don’t entirely understand where they keep their source, as it’s open-source, after all. The 3D files aren’t open according to the agreement. As I’m a lock guy — not a clock guy — I have difficulty assessing the mechanisms.