It's Time to Admire This Mechanical Marvel Made with Magnetic Metal Marbles
Eric Nguyen's unique clock displays the hours and minutes using steel balls in a seven-segment arrangement.
While smartphones are perhaps the default way for getting the time these days, as creators and hackers, it seems that unique timepieces are in our collective DNA. As an extremely impressive first Arduino project, Eric Nguyen came up with a clock that shows the time in steel balls, with rows of four balls each forming lines that combine into seven-segment digits.
The device is mechanically quite clever, with a face that rotates down under the control of two heavy-duty servos for time changes, facing a steel ball tray that’s pushed up to meet it with four smaller servos and a rack-and-pinion setup. Inside the face assembly, seven servos are used for each digit (and one for the colon), capturing or releasing balls as needed with magnetic linkage setups. The unused balls are left in the tray setup, which are pulled out of the way so the face can turn to observers.
Everything is powered by an Arduino Nano, along with two PCA9685 servo driver boards. An RTC module allows it to keep accurate time, and a touch sensor is implemented to switch between military and “regular” time as needed. The build is made out of acrylic with a wooden outside. This conceals the electronics and internals normally, but can be partially disassembled to show how it works as seen in the second video below.
