标签: chronograph

I love the Maker Movement and the fact that so many folks are now coming up with crackerjack contraptions and gripping gizmos. As a case in point, I just heard from Stephen Fraleigh, who is an engineer at Alorium Technology .   As an aside, the guys and gals at Alorium are the ones who created the XLR8 ("accelerate," get it?). This little scamp is a drop-in replacement for a regular Arduino Uno -- same footprint, same connectors, same clock frequency, etc. The difference being that it also contains hardware accelerator blocks that can significantly improve the performance of things like floating-point math and dramatically improve the accuracy of tasks like servo control.   XLR8 FPGA-based Arduino Uno clone (Source: Alorium Technology)   The XLR8 made one of its first public appearances at ESC Minneapolis 2015, but let's not wander off into the weeds here...   In his email, Stephen said: "I've very much enjoyed your writings about your Cunning Chronograph project and I’d like to share with you my own clock. As you can see in this video , the design inspiration is a 1960s Ford Mustang dashboard."   Stephen went on to say that the guts of his clock include: - An Arduino Uno. - A ChronoDot real-time clock (RTC) with a temperature compensated oscillator that communicates with the Arduino via I2C. - A pair of small stepper motors that are commonly used in automotive speedometers (these steppers are small enough to be driven directly by the Arduino's digital outputs.   Well, this immediately reminded me of my other ongoing timepiece project -- the Vetinari Clock . Unlike Stephen, I'm using antique analog meters, but the overall concept is much the same.   Vetinari Clock prototype (Source: Max Maxfield / EETimes.com)   I do like the way Stephen has illuminated his hours and minutes displays; I wish I'd done something like this with my Vetinari Clock; maybe on the next revision after I finish this one (and the Inamorata Prognostication Engine, and the Caveman Diorama, and the... LOL).   Stephen also sent me the following image of the insides of his clock, saying: "On the bottom of the case, mostly obscured, is an Arduino Uno. Through the back there is access for the 9V power input and the USB port. The perfboards on the back of the dials contain an automotive stepper motor (Switec X25.168) and a bunch of diodes to clamp voltages between the rails. The diodes protect the Uno, which is directly driving the steppers. Hanging off the side of the minute-side perfboard is a “ChronoDot” real-time clock module with a temperature compensated oscillator. This communicates with the Uno via the I2C bus."   Inside the Ford Mustang-inspired clock (Source: Stephen Fraleigh)   Stephen went on to say: "The ChronoDot was a late addition. My first stab at the clock just used a timer interrupt based on the Uno onboard oscillator, but that didn’t keep good time at all. The Uno clock wasn’t spec’d with the accuracy that I want. (Or maybe my software was to blame, but that can’t happen, right?) With the ChronoDot upgrade, not only do I get accuracy within one minute per year, but now I have battery backup."   I'm using the same ChronoDot module as Stephen, which leads us to the fact that we just moved to Daylight Saving Time. I hadn't even thought about this until I went into work yesterday and realized that my Cunning Chronograph was an hour off.   I mentioned this to Stephen, who responded by saying: "I don’t have a summer time change feature on my clock, either. With the ChronoDot being accurate to within one minute in a year, it would be nice if I didn’t have to fully reset the time every six months. On the other hand, it’s fun punching the buttons and watching the hands move!"   Hmmm, my chum Steve Manley in England is also making a Cunning Chronograph, I wonder if he's thought about this. It may be that he hasn’t run across this problem yet, because they don't transition into Daylight Saving Time until a week this coming Sunday (March 27) in the UK.   What we need is an auspicious algorithm to address this sort of thing. In fact, I just posted a column about this very thing. I'm planning on making this into a little coding competition, with the most capriciously cunning solution being the one I'll incorporate in my Cunning Chronograph. Maybe you have some ideas you'd care to share...

I must say, there are so many things going on in my world at the moment that it's making my head spin. In the case of my Caveman Diorama, for example, I have some mega-exciting news with regard to some of the artifacts (see Caveman floodlight design ). For the purposes of this column, however, I want to focus on my Capriciously Cunning Chronograph.   As you can see in the image below, this is starting to look rather tasty, not the least that I've finally gotten around to implementing the Time display mode (until recently I'd been focusing on one of the Music display modes as illustrated in this YouTube video ).   (Source: Max Maxfield / EE Times)   Even though the Chronograph looks pretty fabulous in this image, I have to say that it looks way better in the real world. Out of all of my projects, this is the one that causes folks to exclaim "Wow!" when they first see it running.   As an aside, observe the conglomeration of circuit boards to the right of the clock. On the near-side-left we see an Arduino Mega at the bottom with my audio spectrum analyzer shield plugged in on top. Behind this we see a breadboard containing a temporary deployment of my real-time clock module. My chum Duane Benson has created a new shield to hold this module along with a temperature pressure sensor module and a 9DOF (nine degrees of freedom) module containing a 3-axis gyroscope, a 3-axis accelerometer, and a 3-axis magnetometer. Last but not least, on the right we see a smaller breadboard containing a Simblee module, which allows me to control the Cunning Chronograph via Bluetooth using my iPad. I'm going to be relocating this Simblee module onto a prototyping shield as soon as I get a spare moment, but we digress...   The last time we looked at the Cunning Chronograph, I was ruminating over the back panel. Sometimes we get so excited about the way something looks from the front that we neglect the parts that typically remain unseen, but I want people to say "Oooh!" no matter which part of this little beauty they are looking at. On this basis, I decided I wanted my back panel to look like the Visio drawing I created below.   (Source: Max Maxfield / EE Times)   I'm particularly pleased by the Morse code sequence in the center depicting the rather apposite Dr. Seuss quote: "How did it get so late so soon?" The problem, of course, was to implement this little scamp. Cutting out all of these slots and holes by hand would have been extremely time-consuming; also, it would have been incredibly difficult to get everything precisely aligned. The other side of the coin is that even small misalignments would have made the back panel look pretty shoddy.   Thus it was that I contacted the creators of the Makerarm -- Zaib Husain and Azam Shahani -- and asked them if they could help me out.   I think you'll agree that the result as seen below is pretty spectacular, especially now it's been stained. The following images show the panel on its own and mounted (just resting, not screwed) on the back of the cabinet.   (Source: Max Maxfield / EE Times)   (Source: Max Maxfield / EE Times)   (Source: Max Maxfield / EE Times)   My next tasks will be to attach the power, USB, and audio connectors to the small panel at the bottom; move all of the sensors and the Simblee module onto shields, mount everything inside the cabinet, and reattach the main back panel.   This latter task leads me to a new problem. The panel is currently attached using 5/8" #6 flat-head (counter-sunk) wood screws (you can see some of these holding the smaller connector panel in the final image above). The issue is that I'm currently using screws with a Philips drive and a plain finish. Ideally, I would prefer screws with slotted heads and a black oxide or black phosphate finish, but I've not been able to track these down anywhere. I can live with Philips drive -- although I’d prefer slotted for the antique look and feel -- but I really want the black finish, and painting existing screws black simply doesn’t look as good (any suggestions?).   Last but not least, I'm thinking of lighting the back panel up from the inside. In the case of the slots around the outside of the panel, I was thinking of illuminating the inside of the cabinet with a subtle red glow (maybe have it flickering a bit as though there are flames inside). Meanwhile, I could use white light to illuminate the Morse code area in the middle. I will, of course, be using NeoPixels for all of this, which will allow me to add some interesting effects, but we'll leave that as a topic for a future column. In the meantime, as always, I welcome all comments and suggestions.

After reading Max’s blog on the Neo-Pixel clock by Duane Benson, I decided leap into the fray and make one myself.    The first challenge was to assemble the four 15-LED segments that make up the 60-LED ring. I saw how Duane had assembled his but I wanted to do it a little differently. I like to make and use the odd jig. Lucky for me I have a wood turning lathe and some skills in woodturning, and that’s where this particular blog is leading: a demonstration on how I made the jig to assemble the four Neo-Pixel segments and the mount or clock face for the three Neo-Pixel rings.   All I need for this jig is a disk of wood I can cut a circular groove into with sufficient depth that the LED segments fit into it snugly, with the LED’s facing downward and where the circuit board is flush with the jig face. This permits maximum accessibility for solder the joints and secure enough not to move:     First I had to find the internal and external radius of a finished60-LED ring, so I took a piece of paper, drew a big + on it, lined up one of the segments as shown in the image below, and measured the internal radius to the centre of the +. The width of the PCB was then added to the internal radius measurement to obtain the external radius.     I won’t go into the detail of how I created the jig because I include a video below on how I made the mount for all three Neo-Pixel rings. The process is exactly the same, so more about that in a moment.   With all four segment inserted into the jig, I used Duane’s method for connecting the four segments together. Although the jig worked perfectly it unfortunately can’t be used again without re-work, because the wood has shrunk in one direction due to temperature and humidity differences between my garage (where the wood was stored for years) and the house where it resides now. This means the grove is no longer an accurate circle but more of a slight ellipse. This is a common problem when working with wood but it can be worked around in various ways, like acclimatizing the wood in the environment where it will ultimately reside before turning it, or roughing it out, leaving it for a some time to settle (days, weeks, or sometimes months) before finishing.   With three complete and tested Neo-Pixel rings, it’s time to make a mount for them. After some deliberation I decided to mount the rings concentrically mainly for ease of construction. This is where the lathe comes into its own.   I found a nice piece of sycamore and mounted it to a faceplate with four screws and attached the faceplate to the lathe. The lathe headstock is swung out to give better access for the first task, which is to true up and finish what will be the back face of the clock mount. I also need to cut a 25 mm diameter chamfered recess in the back face for remounting the disc to a four-jaw chuck when creating the front face.     I used four tools for to make the clock face as can be seen in the next image. From left to right, these include a round skew chisel; modified bowl gouge with a fingernail grind that has more flexibility in the types of cut it can make; a standard roughing out gouge normally used in spindle turning; and a parting tool.     There are two main types of woodturning: bowl and spindle, and the difference is the direction to wood grain is presented on the lath. Each type of woodturning has it’s own tool set best suited for the purpose. The type of turning employed here to make the clock face is bowl turning even though it’s not going to be a bowl. The bowl gouge is used to true up the blank in 2 ways, for finer cuts, by dragging the long cutting edge of the gouge across the blank from centre out and for more aggressive cuts using the short cutting edge (tip) from the outer edge inward and truing up the edge or circumference.   The roughing out gouge more suited to spindle turning is used to make the face nice and flat and remove the tooling marks left by the bowl gouge. In all honesty I should be able to do all this with the bowl gouge, but I’m not skilled and practiced enough to do it well. So I cheat by using the roughing out gouge, which I find easier to control when trying to obtain a very flat and smooth surface that requires very little sanding.   The parting tool is ideal for cutting grooves and the skew chisel is used for creating the chamfer or undercut depicted in the four jaw chuck image above. The diameter of the recess must be very fractionally larger in diameter than the chuck jaws when fully closed; in this case it’s about 25mm. The chuck jaws have a slight chamfer to them so the recessed chamfer needs to be a similar angle so when the chuck jaws expand they grip the wood disk firmly. (You wouldn’t want the blank to fly off the lathe, believe me it’s happened and its scary.)   Lets now have a look at the video before I conclude with a textual version of the remaining tasks:   (Note: Besides the jig setup, you can also see the clock in operation near the end of this clip.)   The back of the mount is then sanded using 180, 240, 320, 400 600 grit abrasive, sealed with two coats of sanding sealer, sanded again with 600 grit, and finished with a wax to make a very smooth surface.   The faceplate is carefully removed from the lathe, and I use my woodturning tunic to protect the finished back face from damage while the faceplate is removed.   Unfortunately I failed to record decent video footage for some of these activities described here and the video appears to skip bits. Hopefully this dialog is sufficient to fill in the gaps.    A four-jaw chuck is then fitted to the lathe and the recess in the back face is slipped over the closed chuck jaws. The chuck jaws are then expanded until they sufficiently grip the wood disc so as not to damage the wood itself. This makes a very secure fixing for the remainder of the turning.   Next the edge and front face is trued up and the diameter of the finished clock face is measured and drawn on in pencil; the diameter I chose was 190mm. Next the diameter of the disk is reduced using the bowl gouge and finished using the roughing out gouge. This is done with the work face directly over the lathe bed for best accessibility.   In the video I chose to make the clock mount quite deep at 18mm. This was to allow for the screws I was to use when mounting the electronics. The fixing method changed before too long and the thickness reduced to 10 mm; this reduction is unfortunately not shown in the video. The required thickness is measured and a line drawn around the circumference, and this was done prior to rotating the lathe headstock outward for better access.   Most of the excess wood is removed using the bowl gouge tip from outer to inner, then cleaned up using the long cutting edge from inner to outer just like the back face. Final truing and flattening is then done using the roughing out gouge. I then sanded the face down to 600 grit, sealed with sanding sealer, and finished with 600 grit again, but without wax this time.   The rings were measure and the inner and outer ring diameters marked in pencil on the now flat and smooth front face. The parting tool is used to cut the grooves for each ring taking it a little at a time and checking to see if the rings fit before cutting the grove to its final depth of 4.5mm. This depth leaves the Neo-Pixels about ½ mm below the clock face.   Before removing the now finished mount from the lathe and after masking the outer circumference, I painted the front face with matte black spray paint and a clear lacquer. After the paint and lacquer were dry I removed the mount from the lathe.   Not shown in the video (because I forgot to record it) is the marking out and drilling of the holes in the groves for the power and signal wires that attach to the Neo-Pixel rings to pass through to the back of the mount. Measurements were taken from relevant solder pads on each of the Neo-Pixel rings for +5 V, 0 V, and Data In and transferred to the mount for drilling.     I have turned a housing for the clock face and added a diffuser to give the project a little pizazz, so more to come in another column, but here is a sneek peek at what the clock currently looks like:   In the meantime, did you find this short introduction to some wood turning techniques interesting? Maybe you found it an inspiration for you to go and try woodturning for yourself? Let me know your thoughts by posting comments and questions.   Steve Manley (a.k.a. Steve the Sensational) is a Desktop Consultant for a large IT outsourcing company. Steve specializes in the creation and deployment of Windows images within the UK Nuclear Industry. He moved from a CI maintenance role at the UK's flagship Nuclear power station (Sizewell B) in the late 1990's into IT support and has enjoyed working in this field ever since. Steve obtained an HNC in Electronics way back in the early 1980's and now has multiple areas of expertise that include analog and digital electronics design and embedded software development. As a hobby, he loves anything and everything to do with systems involving flashing lights.

I can’t believe how the sands of time manage to slip so quickly between my fingers. It's not my fault; it's just that so many things have been happening recently.   The problem is that, while I've been running around, others have been making strides in our Capriciously Cunning Chronograph Competition . Take the Contemptible Cowie, who has an office in the bay next to mine, for example. This little scamp (the clock, not the Cringing Cowie) now boasts a real-time operating system and some very tasty lighting effects. This little rascal (the Cowering Cowie, not the clock) already has the ability to talk to his chronograph. I can also talk to mine, of course; the difference being that his actually pays attention and responds to what he's saying.   And, just today, I heard from my chum Steve Manley in England that he's been making a lot of progress with his implementation, that he is currently uploading a video, and that he will be sending me a detailed set of construction details (I'll be posting a column showing all of Steve's stuff in the very near future).   All of this activity has spurred me into action. Feast your orbs on this video , which shows the current state of play with regard to my own humble attempt.   This is just a very simple test jig I threw together with a piece of hardboard that I spray-painted black and mounted to a chunk of plywood (a hot glue gun really is one's best friend). Actually getting this to work took a lot longer than you might expect, but this was my fault as we shall discover.   As an aside, here's a picture of my kitchen table just before I commenced work on the clock. The various tools and bits and pieces are left over from a previous project.   My kitchen table has seen a lot of weird stuff.   What project? Well, I'm teaching electronics and microcomputers to a young lad called Jacob -- his grandmother runs him down to my office for an hour's instruction once a week. As you can imagine, Jacob loves my BADASS Display . When he heard this, my chum Duane Benson was kind enough to send Jacob one of the PCBs he'd created for the spectrum analyzer shield in the display.   As fate would have it, I had enough spare parts on hand to populate this shield (I always order extras), so on Jacob's last visit we populated the card and soldered everything together -- apart from the two 8-pin MSGEQ7 chips, which we are socketing -- and we were all ready to rock and roll... except that we'd run out of time.   Actually, this entire process was very cunningly timed, because the next step is for Jacob to use his multimeter to check that all of the voltages are as we expect. Then we'll insert the MSGEQ7 chips, plug in an audio source, and use the spectrum analyzer to drive two LEDs. Finally, we'll move up to creating a mini-BADASS display using six NeoPixel strips (each boasting five pixels) that we'll use to display the base, middle, and treble for the left and right channels.   The thing is that I know how disappointing it can be when you are younger and things don’t work as expected (I can teach him about the pain joy of debugging stuff later), so I took everything home and checked it out myself this past weekend. I then removed the MSGEQ7 chips again so that Jacob can have the pleasure of testing the board and inserting them himself (using full anti-static protection, of course).   Last but not least, it turns out that Jacob listens to all his music using earbuds plugged into his iPhone, so the first thing we needed was an amplifier and some speakers with a 3.5mm stereo jack input. Fortunately, there's a technology recycling center just round the corner from my office, so I was able to pick up some cool-looking amplified speakers and a wall-wart power supply, all for under $10. Jacob is going to be a very happy camper on his next visit.   But we digress... For the purposes of our Capriciously Cunning Chronograph Competition, we're all using three concentric NeoPixel rings. The inner ring has 12 elements; the middle ring has 24 elements, and the outer ring has 60 elements. It's up to each contestant to decide how to best use these rings to reflect the current time (speaking of which, there's still time for you to join in the competition).   The 12- and 24-element rings come pre-assembled, but the 60-element ring comes as four quadrants that have to be soldered together. So I assembled the 60-element ring, attached power, ground, and signal wires to each ring, and then mounted all three rings on my jig. I then cut the wires short on the back, connected everything together, created a simple test program, powered things up... and nothing happened whatsoever.   Well, that's not strictly true. I did get one element to light up on the 60-element ring, but that was it. After a little pondering, I tracked down the first problem. I'd written something like the following, which I originally intended to display a single pixel racing round the ring: for (i = 0, i 60; i++) {    ring60.setPixelColor(i,255,255,255);    if (i == 0)       ring60.setPixelColor(59,0,0,0);    else       ring60.setPixelColor(i-1,0,0,0); } delay(20); ring60.show();   I'd also created similar code snippets for the 24- and 12-element rings. Can you see the problem? The delay() and the show() commands are outside of the main loop, so it's not surprising that I will only ever end up with a single LED lit. The solution was to re-write this snippet as follows: for (i = 0, i 60; i++) {    ring60.setPixelColor(i,255,255,255);    if (i == 0)       ring60.setPixelColor(59,0,0,0);    else       ring60.setPixelColor(i-1,0,0,0);    delay(20);    ring60.show(); } Following this change, the 60-element ring worked for the first three of its four segments, but the remaining segment remained dark. Furthermore, the 24- and 12-element rings remained totally unresponsive. That's what you get for using "cut-and-paste" -- I'd forgotten to change the ring60.show() command to ring24.show() and ring12.show() commands in the other two loops. Following a quick tweak, we soon had those up and running.   All that remained was the fourth segment of the 60-element ring. It was obvious that I'd either messed up a power, ground, or signal connection -- or that the segment itself was dead -- but the only way to sort this out was to dismantle the jig again.   This was the point where I started to kick myself (I still have the bruises). Why on earth hadn’t I tested all of the rings before mounting them on the jig? I think I'd just become a little too blasé -- I won’t make that mistake again.   Thus, I had to cut all of my wires and strip everything down. Dang! There was a tiny little solder spur shorting the control signal to ground. In just a few seconds everything was working as planned, so I reassembled the jig and whipped up a little program to race a pixel around all three LEDs in synchronization as illustrated in the video we looked at earlier.   I brought the jig into my office to show it to the other guys. On the off-chance you are interested in seeing the code for this, just post a comment below and I'll make it available. Meanwhile, I'm poised to start creating a capriciously cunning power-up sequence. Watch this space...

Well, things are currently bouncing along in Max's World (where the colors are brighter, the butterflies are bigger, the birds sing sweeter, and the beer is plentiful and cold). For example, do you recall this video showing the prototype for the spectrum analyzer board for my Bodacious Acoustic Diagnostic Astoundingly Superior Spectromatic (BADASS) Display?   Well, a couple of weeks ago, my chum Duane Benson took my original circuit and created a jolly tasty Arduino shield for me as shown below (Duane is going to offer these boards on his SteelPuppet.com website).     The weekend before last, I populated this little beauty and verified that it worked as planned; then, this weekend that's just past, I installed the little scamp into my BADASS Display. As you can see in this video , it all functions amazingly well.   Actually, I'm really rather proud of this, because I use the same display function to create all of the effects shown in the video, and this function contains only 10 lines of code. Now that we’ve got the base level working, there are all sorts of visual effects I want to play with, but we can return to those in a future column.   Meanwhile, our Capriciously Cunning Chronograph Competition is starting to pick up steam. In addition to Duane, Ivan, and myself, community member Elizabeth Simon says she is going to make one. Also, I heard from my chum Steve Manley in the UK that he's ordered the parts to build his own incarnation of this tasty timepiece.   As an aside, someone suggested that I use the same sound card for the BADASS Display to give my clock a music display capability. Duane did send me a spare card, so this may well be a possibility.   Actually, Ivan has been making a lot of progress while I've been distracted by my BADASS display. He's set up some sort of scheduling mechanism that allows him to request actions to take place at certain times without having to use delays. This is making me wonder whether I should implement a really simple real-time operating system (RTOS) in my chronograph.   The only downside to this cunning plan is that I don’t have a clue what I'm doing. But wait, there's more, because progress is also being made on my Inamorata Prognostication Engine project. The last time we talked about this little rascal, I'd just created a prototyping jig and populated the control panels with my antique meters and knobs and switches as shown below.     Well, just this morning, I heard from my master carpenter chum, who we'll call Bob (because that's his name), that he'd finished the cabinet for the Ultra-Macho Prognostication Engine , which sits on top of the main Inamorata Prognostication Engine.   I raced down to pick this up and bring it back to my office this lunchtime. You can see how it looks in the images below. The main cabinet is from an antique radio circa 1929. Bob's addition -- including the four hand-carved rosettes -- is the box sitting on top. I have to say that this has come out way better than I ever expected; it really looks as though these two cabinets were created together.         Last, but not least, Bruce, who sits in the office next to mine, just sent me this link to website that boasts a rather amazing mechanism as shown below.     The website takes a little while to load, but it's worth the wait; once the site has loaded, scroll down a little way until you reach the video. Ooh! I would so like one of these little beauties here in my office, but I've promised myself that I'm not going to start any more projects until I've finished the ones I'm currently working on. How about you? Are you working on anything interesting that you'd care to share with the rest of us?