This design is both simple and complex and could be intimidating as a finished project, attempting to piece together where everything goes and how to engineer a solid, dependable performance. Therefore, if in possession of a PCB (or breadboard), a few of his basic components, and time with a 3D printer, it is possible to build a personal clock. ![]() Generously, all of the design files are on GitHub. By making his own PCB for the microcontroller and stepper driver, created a concise and compact build. The hour and minute are indicated by two orange posts inside of the large gears. The ATtiny drives the stepper motor forward every minute, moving both the hour and minute hands through the 3D printed gears. The ATtiny controls a Darlington driver IC, which runs the stepper motor. The clock’s controller is based around an ATtiny2313 microcontroller programmed with the Arduino’s sketchpad. Printed in black and orange as a model, the clock makes use of a few basic battery components and lets the 3DP gears operate. It is actually an ingenious design for a clock that involves a fair amount of DIY innovation and gives the user a blank canvas where the clock’s face would be. Upon closer inspection, the chronological nature of the print becomes clear. EJW 3D-printed clock.zip includes Autodesk Inventor files and solid model exports (stl and sat files).At first glimpse, the new 3DP clock from Hackaday user echoes a looped rollercoaster or a Ferris Wheel, with its base and ridged circle. I've included the complete CAD files from the escapement shown here, so you can use my models as a starting point for your own creations. Obviously, nice escapements and clocks can be built by hand, and I encourage anyone mechanically-minded to at least visualize how escapement works, if not trying to build one yourself. The bed size of the Statasys (about a cubic foot) prevented me from building much larger versions of this escapement where the tolerances wouldn't be as much of an issue. The weight, which is out of the video frame, is connected to a spool on the center of the escapement wheel via a white string that is almost in visible in the video. In the video, I have quite a large weight pulling on the escapement wheel and the pendulum moving briskly, but if the pendulum loses just a little bit of energy and doesn't make a full swing the escapement wheel doesn't lock, and instead, spins freely dropping the weight. While it did work, the tolerances on the one shown were not quite good enough for it to work consistently. The escapement proved to be the biggest challenge. I printed working gears, springs, and escapements in my attempts to test out each of the required components. ![]() I imagined that after dissolving away the sacrificial material, you could wind the clock up and have it start ticking. I was big on clocks, and was trying to design a fully 3D-printable clock. This project dates to 2001 when I was at the MIT Media Lab. With careful design, you can create captured moving parts, like the interlocking gears shown in the Slideshow. The hot noodles are printed layer-by-layer and fuse together building finished-quality-level parts. ![]() The Stratasys FDM works by laying down "hot noddles" of ABS plastic and a sacrificial material that can be dissolved by water. These are the basic components of a clock 3D-printed by a Stratasys FDM 2000.
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