Geneva Clock

myminifactory

Our youngest son sent me a video of a wrist watch that he found interesting and wanted to know if I could explain to him how it worked. Well that would be too easy (for my ego at least, or maybe I'm just being played? ), so instead of simply explaining it to him, I decided to show him by designing, 3D printing, assembling and programming "Geneva Clock". I had never seen a wrist watch utilizing a Geneva wheel in this manner and apparently there are quite a few watches that do. Watches such as these incorporate three Geneva wheels with each wheel containing four digits; the first wheel containing the digits 1, 4, 7 and 10, the second containing the digits 2, 5, 8 and 11, and the third containing the digits 3, 6, 9 and 12. A "standard" Geneva wheel utilizes a fixed position rotating cam that rotates a fixed position rotating Geneva wheel. However, in these mechanisms the Geneva wheels are rotated around a fixed cam, and with the staggered digit patterns on each wheel, as the mechanism rotates, the digits appear in proper order around the face of a clock from 1 through 12. This model utilizes a mechanism quite similar to the watch designs but is powered by a stepper motor, which in turn is powered by a stepper motor controller driven by an Adafruit Feather Huzzah32 processor. The model software is designed to home the clock to 12:00 upon power on or reset, obtain the current time via an NTP time server, then seek the current time. To accomplish NTP time acquisition, the clock uses a wifi connection via a network ssid and password entered by the user via a smartphone or other wifi connected device, avoiding the need to change the source code and download the changes to the processor. Anyway, Marc, I hope you like your new "Geneva Clock"! As usual, I probably forgot a file or two or who knows what else, so if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask as I do make plenty of mistakes. Designed using Autodesk Fusion 360, sliced using Ultimaker Cura 4.12.1, 3D printed in PLA on Ultimaker S5s and an Ultimaker 3e, and programmed using the Arduino environment.