You’ll also need to power your Arduino, this can be done from the same 12V power supply. You don’t need to connect both, if you’ve connected all of the pins between the two boards together then power will be supplied across your connection as well. You’ll need to connect your 5V 5A BEC to your 12V power supply and then connect the leads to the terminals on one of the boards. Power is supplied to the servos through the terminals on the servo driver boards. Lastly, you’ll need to connect your real time clock module pins CLK, DAT & RST to pins 6, 7 & 8 respectively. Note that you’ll only connect one board to the Arduino, the second board is connected to the first board and will access the Arduino through this connection. You’ll also need to connect the I2C interface on the servo control boards to your Arduino pins A4 and A5 (SDA and SCL respectively). You’ll need to connect both the clock and the servo control boards to your Arduino’s GND and 5V pins to supply them with power. You’ll also need a wiring harness to connect these two boards to the Arduino along with the clock module. ![]() ![]() Once you’ve added the header strip and changed the address on the second board, you’ll need to make up the cable to chain the two together. You only need to bridge one set of terminals on the far right for this project. They work like dip switches, allowing you to set a different address for each board. This is done by bridging the small terminals on the top right of the board. To chain the two together, you need to first add a pin header to the other side of the first board and then change the address on the second board so that it’s uniquely identified. We’re going to be using one for the two hour digits and one for the two minute digits. This means that you could theoretically independently control up to 992 servos with just two IO pins. I used two PCA9685 16 channel PWM drivers which allow you to control up to 16 servos on each board and chain up to 62 boards together over an I2C interface, which uses only two IO pins on your Arduino. Use black PLA for the spacer blocks and bases so that they’re not visible on the black background. You could use any brightly coloured PLA for the segments, red would create a more traditional looking 7 segment display. You’ll also need to print out the 28 base blocks to support the servos as well as the two dots for the centre and their bases. You’ll need to 3D print the 28 segments using a translucent green PLA with 15% infill. The segments are designed to glue straight onto the standard servo arm so that no additional hardware is required.ĭownload The 3D Print Files – 7 Segment Clock 3D Print Files The micro servos move each segment vertically when on and 90 degrees to the side when off. I started off by designing an individual 7 segment display numeral which could be actuated using a micro servo for each segment. How To Build Your Clock 3D Print The Components If you don’t want to get a 3D printer yet, there are a couple of online services which will print components for you and ship them to you. The one below is affordable and produces pretty high quality prints for the price. If you don’t have a 3D printer and you enjoy making things, you should definitely consider getting one. You’ll also need to 3D print some components.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |