Clocks are almost the ideal devices to inspire creativity in hackers — they have a simple, well-defined task, but there’s an almost unlimited number of ways to carry it out. [ekaggrat singh kalsi]’s OVODYO is a particularly intriguing approach, tumbling a pair of icosahedral counters to display the current time.
Each 3D-printed icosahedron has numerals sunk through each of its twelve sides, and is raised above the base of the clock on a brass support shaft. An inner drive shaft runs through the center of the support shaft and drives a set of beveled gears. These spin the outer shells around two axes, periodically cycling through all twelve faces. The pattern in which an icosahedron rotates means that only set of numerals appears upright at a time, making it easier to distinguish the time.
A split path around the icosahedra both lets them rotate around the support shaft and shows off the internal gearing. On the control side, an ATmega8 drives a pair of stepper motors with drv8833 motor drivers, using a hall effect sensor to detect each indicator’s position. Since the minutes dial only gives the time in five-minute intervals, it also drives an LED strip to indicate the exact minute.
[ekaggrat] has a long history of creative clock designs, from this dynamic chain-link sculpture to a hair-tie clock or a mechanical seven-segment display.
That’s pretty sick. What a cool gear train.
Feels like something that has to run inside a glass dome with all the exposed gearing that will just be a dust magnet. Though that might well make it look even more interesting.
Put the dice in a cup and shake it (dice roll) until the right numbers are up, you’ve got five minutes until you lose. Bonus: easy to clean from dust. Problem: you have to read the dice after each shake. Annoying kink: make a “d’oh” sound whenever the wrong number is up.
Isn’t a 12-sided solid a dodecahedron?
An icosahedron has 20 sides.
it is a truncated icosahedron. I made a mistake in putting the technical name
Dodecahedron has 12 pentagonal faces.
Icosahedron has 20 triangular faces.
it is a truncated icosahedron. I made a mistake in putting the technical name
Looking at that mad me think, for some reason, of an IBM selectric typewriter. So my question is how many individual sides can this type of gear train present? With enough it could be used to build a typewriter/printer. Maybe I’m crazy.
my mistake this is a truncated icoshohedron