The build itself is absolutely wonderful! This part is totally my hangup, but a second hand that has to reset bugs me to no end. :/
A nicer voltmeter clock
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: A nicer voltmeter clock
#22I built one of these recent after Princess Auto had an amazing deal on surplus meters like these. They were under just over 1$ each and I bought a lot of them.
The one I built isn't as nice, but it's a really nice way to display the time and people are mildly fascinated by it when they see it.
Re: A nicer voltmeter clock
#23Nice work, looks cool!
Re: A nicer voltmeter clock
#24Nice! Needs just a tweak to prevent the overshoot and bounce when going from high to low.
For that, you just need to not make the transition from 100% duty cycle to 0% duty cycle instantaneous, but to ramp down linearly the duty cycle over a large fraction of a second or even an entire second.
As another poster said, the overshoot may look cool, but I would be worried that a cheap panel voltmeter would not survive a very large number of such shocks.
Re: A nicer voltmeter clock
#25Nice! Needs just a tweak to prevent the overshoot and bounce when going from high to low.
making it worse with more code is not trend one should follow
Re: A nicer voltmeter clock
#26I expected seconds arrow to move much more smoothly than in the video is 10Hz control just too slow?
might be on purpose to emulate some analog watches that do similar micro-stepping of second
Re: A nicer voltmeter clock
#27Random idea:
volts as Hours amps as Minutes
Resulting wattage drives an iridescent bulb
Re: A nicer voltmeter clock
#28Random idea: volts as Hours amps as Minutes Resulting wattage drives an iridescent bulb
I think I don't completely understand your idea. The current flowing through the amperemeter¹ depends on the voltage and the resistance of the incandescent(?) lamp. To vary current by the minute, you would need a digital resistor or potentiometer, I guess. Is that your suggestion?
¹) I just found out that it is more commonly called 'ammeter' in English - which is so unintuitive that I prefere 'amperemeter'.
Re: A nicer voltmeter clock
#29This is gorgeous. I really need to hunker down and learn 3d modeling. It unlocks so many options from cnc to 3d printing.
tinkercad
TinkerCAD is easy to get started with and is a fine starting point. If you want to go farther than TinkerCAD can reasonably take you, I’ve done a lot of modeling in onshape (after using Fusion360 for a few years). Parametric CAD systems (Fusion, onshape, solidworks, freeCAD) feel like a nice intersection of design and programming to me.
My current workflow is onshape for all modeling (because it has excellent multi-player concurrently editing support, relevant to FRC robotics), then Fusion for CAM¹ if it’s going to CNC equipment. Onshape added support for CAM in the last 8 months, but I haven’t switched yet.
¹ - Computer Aided Manufacturing-turn a shape into a series of instructions for the CNC equipment. Roughly:
CAM : CNC :: slicer : 3D printer
Re: A nicer voltmeter clock
#30Random idea: volts as Hours amps as Minutes Resulting wattage drives an iridescent bulb
I think I don't completely understand your idea. The current flowing through the amperemeter¹ depends on the voltage and the resistance of the incandescent(?) lamp. To vary current by the minute, you would need a digital resistor or potentiometer, I guess. Is that your suggestion? ¹) I just found out that it is more commonly called 'ammeter' in English - which is so unintuitive that I prefere 'amperemeter'.
If you have a feedback loop I'm sure you can still do it with an either implicitly or explicitly filtered PWM. Remember we're talking averages not instantaneous, so the average current through the bulb should be proportional to the average voltage across it, though the resistance will change as the bulb heats hence the feedback. You could also do this with a buck/boost regulator and current sense resistor plus op amps to create a constant current supply.