![]() ![]() 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. Posted in clock hacks, Microcontrollers Tagged flip clock, ntp, split flap, Trinamic, wemos d1 mini If none are available at your local thrift store or yard sales, you can always roll your own. There’s plenty of fun to be had with classic flip clocks like this, and with a bit of hacking any old split-flap display should be usable for your own clock project. cleverly solved this problem by placing an IR proximity sensor near the lowest digit, allowing the D1 to count the number of digits that have flipped over and thereby deduce the current state of the display. Displaying that time would be tricky with the original hardware though, because there is no indication of which numbers are displayed at any time. Thanks to its WiFi connection, the D1 can find out the correct time by contacting a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server. ![]() He designed a small PCB that fit the original housing, on which he placed a Trinamic TMC2225 stepper motor driver, a Wemos D1 Mini and a small 5 V power supply. So decided to replace it with a modern stepper motor. However the original motor had died, and a direct replacement was impossible to find. Because this motor runs in step with the mains frequency, it also acts as the clock’s timing reference. Like most flip clocks from the 60s and 70s, the Copal clock uses a small synchronous AC motor to advance the digits. One such example is the lovely 1960s Copal flip clock (in German, Google Translate link) that has been working with - he managed to bring it squarely into the 21st century without changing its appearance one bit. But sometimes, an old clock is just perfect as it is, and only needs a bit of an upgrade to help it fit into the modern world. Many of the clocks we feature here on Hackaday are entirely built from scratch, or perhaps reuse an unusual display type.
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