In my previous post, I replaced the electronics of my several-year-old lunar clock design with modern parts. In this post, I’ve replaced the laser cut parts with 3D printed parts, with particular attention to the clip that holds the photo interrupter in place.
Continue reading Lunar Clock: Designing a 3D Printed ClipTag Archives: Lunar Clock
Cost-Reducing the Lunar Clock: IOT Really is Here
I have to confess that sometimes I need a push to make the right design choice.
It’s been a long time – way too long – since I worked on my Lunar Clock project. In the meantime, Sparkfun has introduced new, inexpensive microcontrollers aimed at Internet-of-Things applications. I knew one of those new microcontrollers would be perfect for the Lunar Clock, but I dragged my feet.
Then one day, a Github user pointed out that one of the boards I was using has been obsoleted.
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A Bit of the Mechanics of the Lunar Clock
I’ve been doing a bit of mechanical work on the lunar clock, that I started in my previous post.
As a prototype to help me design the laser-cut parts, I cut out a strip of 1/8″ MDF, cut a square for the motor’s shaft and two holes for the motor mounting holes, then mounted the motor to that strip of wood.
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Unboxing My First Ponoko Shipment
A short time ago I excitedly received my very first shipment from the laser cutting service Ponoko. Here’s a narrative of the unboxing, to let you know all the lovely details.
When the box arrived, I plopped it on the floor to cut it open. Our dog Pippa couldn’t help checking it out.
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WiFi and Steppers and Slots! Oh, My!
Lunar Clock project is starting to feel real!
After having no luck making the ESP8266 work with an Arduino Mega, I switched back to the wonderful Sparkfun CC3000 WiFi Shield. It is playing nice with the Mega now – with an interposed Sparkfun TransmogriShield to convert the Mega SPI pins to the Uno pins that many Shields expect. Update: I replaced both these retired boards in a later post.
I happened to have an old, inexpensive unipolar stepper motor lying around, so I’ve hooked it up and am able to precisely turn it using the Arduino Stepper library. I should probably write a Post about that. The upshot is that after reading the comments in the Stepper library source that said the pin order the library uses, it was pretty easy.
Continue reading WiFi and Steppers and Slots! Oh, My!Started Work on a Lunar Clock
Last night I’ve started in earnest on a Lunar Clock project: a gizmo to physically display the current phase of the moon.
I say “in earnest” because I’ve created a GitHub repo for it, and a repo for the main library it uses. I wrote a (since obsoleted) library to filter out ESP8266 WiFi Shield messages from the text returned in an HTTP Response.
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