Tuesday, February 28, 2023

The up and down of it all...

This video is sped up 500% to show the movement sequence quickly. In real time, these sets of moves and pauses take a little over six minutes in total. I spent two weeks trying to wrap my head around this and I finally found the "magic numbers" to run all the segments in the proper sequence. The movements are coordinated by three separate microcontrollers - each one controlling 2 stepper motors. All six clock frames move as follows beginning with the seconds column: frame A moves close to position/frame B moves completely out of position/frame A moves to final position. These three moves take 16 seconds total. After these moves, all frames wait 15 seconds. This sequence is repeated in succession by the minutes column, then the hours column. Then starting back again with the seconds column, each column does the same set of movements in reverse. The sequence then starts all over again and continues to repeat until powering off. The really tricky part was placing the correct delays in the code for each of the microcontrollers so all six stepper motors would move at the correct time. 77,85,39,0,B