Since I was already doing enough wiring, using the Qwiic connectors made it a LOT easier. I needed a way to set the time so I added four Qwiic buttons. The hour and minute hands are friction fit onto these two shafts. The outer shaft is attached to the gear and that gear is driven by the second motor. The center longer shaft connects directly to the motor inline with it. This first render shows the two output shafts. I designed a movement where the minute hand would be directly driven off the motor shaft and the hour hand would be driven via a gear so the motor could be offset to the side. The internal gearing also means they have enough internal resistance to easily keep their position when powered off. They also are internally geared and output plenty of torque. These are quite a bit bigger but still plenty small for the clock. Giving up on these, I ordered a bunch of 28BYJ-48 stepper motors. They output only the smallest amount of torque and trying to drive them hard enough to work made them heat up to the point of them melting the 3D printed PLA parts. Unfortunately, these little motors just weren’t up for the task of turning the gears. We also recommend checking out these tutorials before continuing. If you aren't familiar with the Qwiic system, we recommend reading here for an overview. 1x Enclosed AC-DC Switching Power Supply.1x UBEC Adjustable BEC UBEC 2-6S for Quadcopter RC Drone.48x StepStick Stepper Motor Diver Module with Heat Sink.While there are quite a few ways to machine parts for this project, here are the tools we used: Add it to your cart, read through the guide, and adjust the cart as necessary. You may not need everything though depending on what you have. To follow along with this tutorial, you will need the following materials. The Qwiic connector on both boards makes this easy. By linking a microcontroller and FPGA together you get the best of both worlds. Some tasks are very simple in software but incredibly complicated in hardware. I actually think this will be a useful paradigm for many projects. The Arduino is the controller and issues all the commands to the FPGA. The FPGA in this project acts as a peripheral instead of as a controller. Conveniently, the Alchitry Au has exactly 102 IO pins.īesides showing off the massive amount of IO FPGAs are capable of, this project uses the Qwiic connector on the FPGA in a semi-unconventional way. This required two more IO pins for a total of 102. To talk to the Arduino, I decided to use I 2C over the Alchitry Au’s Qwiic connector. I also wanted to use an Arduino to generate the animations as it would be much easier to do this in code than hardware. This added four more outputs (one for each “digit” of the clock). I wanted to be able to disable the drivers when the clock was stationary to save power. Using a standard step/direction stepper driver means you need two control signals per motor or 96 outputs. There are 24 “clocks” and each one has two independent hands. First, the clock requires 48 stepper motors. There are a couple reasons this project makes such a great FPGA demo project. I came across this concept a few years ago and always thought it would be a great demo FPGA project since it requires so many control signals. So meta.įirst, let me start by saying this wasn’t my original idea. What is a ClockClock? It is simply a clock made of clocks! The idea is to use many analog style clocks together to form the digits of the time.
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