Brett Oliver's Aviator Clock Mounts Custom 3D-Printed Instrumentation on a Reclaimed Oak Plinth
Rather than hunting down real aircraft dials to reuse, Oliver designed his own — driven by NEMA17 stepper motors in the back.
Maker Brett Oliver has designed a desk clock that uses aviation-style instrumentation to display the hours, minutes, and seconds, driven by an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller.
"Housed on a reclaimed lump of oak," Oliver writes of the clock, "three off 3D printed instrument gauges show time in hours minutes and seconds. A secondary display on the seconds gauge also shows seconds on a seven-segment display. Chimes sound out the hours and quarters and can be set to day, 24/7 or off as required."
The reclaimed oak plinth houses three convincing-looking analog gauges, designed to evoke aircraft instrumentation — but labeled "hours," "minutes," and "seconds" rather than altitude or airspeed. Unlike rival clock designs, these aren't upcycled aircraft parts but custom-designed 3D-printed devices created specifically for the project — driven from the rear by NEMA17 stepper motors with Hall-effect sensors for positional tracking.
A housing around the rear of the clock holds an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller, and a secondary Microchip ATmega328 to drive the seven-segment LED display, on a piece of prototyping board, which connects to the internet and sets its time via the Network Time Protocol (NTP) on boot. A passive infra-red (PIR) sensor detects movement, putting the clock into a power-saving mode if nobody's present and firing it back up again when a person is detected. Finally, the clock's settings can be controlled via a pleasingly tactile front-panel interface on the oak plinth.
A detailed write-up of the project is available on Oliver's website, with additional details available on Instructables alongside the project source code and 3D-print files.
