Gallery, Projects and General > The Design Shop
How can you "drive" a wind clock?
John Hill:
I think a rotary encoder could be used but it would need another bit to drive the wall 'clock'. Something like a rotary encoder at the wind vane and another on the wall clock and some electronics to compare the two and a stepper motor to drive the wall clock. That would at least be a fairly easy electronic and software project?
The encoders used would have to be absolute as zeroing the direction indication would be a chore and likely somewhat impractical.
awemawson:
Rotary encoder up aloft suitably weather proofed with a wind vane:
Four wire cable down to ground level:
Arduino taking input from encoder:
Small Stepper Motor with pointer directly on its shaft driven by the Arduino
There is library code for the Arduino to accept quadrature encoded rotary data to my certain knowledge, and I'd be very surprised if there wasn't also library code for driving stepper motors as it's only a question of outputting a sequence on four outputs.
John Hill:
I am sure you are right but what about zeroing the direction? Are those encoder absolute? You also need to 'know' the position of the clock needle at turn on.
awemawson:
That one I pointed to is incremental, but it doesn't take much to see which way the wind vane points and turn the pointer to suit :scratch:
BillTodd:
Guys, I think the design brief puts us into the relm of mechanical or at best electro-mechanical. CPUs aren't an option here ;-)
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version