mechanical clock

For this assignment, students were tasked with creating an “analog” clock (meaning no digital displays) using at least one servo motor. We had 5 days to design, build, and test our machines. My group decided that we wanted to challenge our CAD and mechanical design skills by using a mechanical counter mechanism which used a Geneva drive to increment the different digits of the clock.

Because the servo motor’s motion was constrained to about 180 degrees of rotation, we had to convert it to 360 degree motion. To translate from this constrained motion to intermitent rotation, we used a rachet mechanism. All parts were designed in Solidworks and the gears were designed using equation-driven curves in Solidworks. This project was quite difficult given the extreme time constraints, but our final clock worked reasonably well as seen below.