A nicer voltmeter clock(lcamtuf.substack.com) |
A nicer voltmeter clock(lcamtuf.substack.com) |
I thought it was pretty cool, but a bit expensive for what it was.
So I made my own with a PIC chip: https://www.n1kdo.com/meter-clock/index.html
Mine is more of a novelty than a accurate clock. It is a interesting desktop geegaw to invite discussion.
Can't access it. Connection attempts time out.
Ways to keep more than one brain center active!
I have an analog computer I'm finishing up. I have ADC's to convert the analog to digital to display the values on an LCD (with an ESP32 dev board—it was more flexible than panel meters, cheaper than an oscilloscope).
But because looking at "simulated" panel-meters seemed to kind of undercut the point of the analog computer, I went ahead and created a small PCB to go from my analog computer to a panel meter like the one in the clock.
Running a "Spring + Mass" simulation on the analog computer and seeing both the LCD/ESP32 representation of a panel meter and an actual panel meter move in sync brought it all home.
(nor would the missus be pleased for me to buy them - but that's another matter)
Source: am a furniture maker professionally. Have worked out of a makerspace, and have done equivalently complex projects on their Shopbot.
Edited to add: if you skip the rabbets around the gauges on the front panel, you can make that a single-sided CNC job, which makes it much easier. With some care, you could do those with a handheld router and a rabbetting bit.
The one I built isn't as nice, but it's a really nice way to display the time and people are mildly fascinated by it when they see it.
As another poster said, the overshoot may look cool, but I would be worried that a cheap panel voltmeter would not survive a very large number of such shocks.
;-)
volts as Hours amps as Minutes
Resulting wattage drives an iridescent bulb
¹) I just found out that it is more commonly called 'ammeter' in English - which is so unintuitive that I prefere 'amperemeter'.
I skimmed TFA, came back here to ask for the obligatory 11:59:59 rollover, but then went back and found it.
My current workflow is onshape for all modeling (because it has excellent multi-player concurrently editing support, relevant to FRC robotics), then Fusion for CAM¹ if it’s going to CNC equipment. Onshape added support for CAM in the last 8 months, but I haven’t switched yet.
¹ - Computer Aided Manufacturing-turn a shape into a series of instructions for the CNC equipment. Roughly:
CAM : CNC :: slicer : 3D printer
is 10Hz control just too slow?
Note that transistors can be controlled to directly regulate the voltage. This will draw much more power than pulsing them.
It is also kind of neat how voltage is measured. Probably day one stuff in EE school but I thought it was interesting. Meters like the one in the article are sort of obvious. pull a spring with an electromagnet and see how far it gets. but how is voltage read electronically. The answer is capacitors. you time how fast a capacitor charges.
V=I*R
If V = Hours and I = Minutes, then by necessity R=Hours/Minutes. Typically a light bulb has mostly fixed resistance (R). Adding a potentiometer to the circuit allows you control the value of R.
That being said, the bulb does have a well-defined resistance at a given point in time, so voltage and current are of course not quantities that can be indefinitely controlled.
This falls into the same category as “why isn’t my power supply with voltage and current controls working correctly?!?”
I originally assumed that the bulb would be somehow connected to voltmeter and amperemeter.