Introduction: Botanical Clock.

By
About: A student at the Massey University, Wellington Campus.

For summer school we were given a brief to redesign an instructables clock and create better form and function to good technology that needed some finesse with the design. I chose a clock by antiElectron . I used arduino, illustrator, fusion 360, and slicer for fusion as my main technology and found in the condensed time I really increased my knowledge of all 4 of these programs. This instructables will give you a step by step guide on how to recreate the botanical clock. This project was developed with the help of FablabWgtn.

A video of this clock working can been see by clicking here.

Step 1: What You Will Need for This Project

  • An Arduino Nano V3.
  • A RTC Wires for connection.
  • A micro usb to large usb cable.
  • A usb to wall power source adaptor.
  • A is strip of 60 neopixels.A soldering iron.
  • Solder.
  • An assortment of 3mm acrylic, colours and finishing of your choice.
  • Access to a laser cutter.
  • llustrator.
  • Arduino.
  • Araldite 2 part glue.

Step 2: Assemble Circuit

Assemble the Arduino, RTC and neopixel strip. The best site I found for help with this step is by BioanM. Basically you want to connect the SCL on the RTC to Analog 5 on the Nano, SDA to Analog 4, VCC to 5V, and GND to GND. Then you want to connect the DI/BI from the neo pixel strip to whatever pin you put in for the code, in the case of the code provided it will be pin 8. You want the GND of the Neopixel to go to the other GND on the Nano and the 5V to go to the 5V on the Nano.

Step 3: Upload the Code

Upload the given code written by antiElectron and edited by me 13/02/2019. The original code and instructable can be found on the hyperlinked name. My code can be found below, the only difference is 5 neopixels are lit for the hour instead of 3 and I have changed the colours. I had an issue getting the 5 pixels to stay for the 12th hour, would be cool if someone else could troubleshoot this, was unsure of the equation I would need for the two neopixels on the end of the strip.

Attachments

Step 4: Laser Cut the Form

Laser cut out the back plate, legs and faces of the clock form. You can treat the acrylic however you liked, I sandblasted some of my panels. After this assemble the form. The illustrator files are below, they use a 600mm x 450mm sheet of acrylic. I have also attached a SVG file incase you use a different vector software.

Attachments

Step 5: Assemble

Take the backing of the neopixel strip and stick it to form place the circuit inside and then put on back cover. I had to glue the back cover of mine on as I had some issues with the laser cutter and got some dimensions wrong, they have been solved now, but feel free to glue yours if the form does not feel as stable as you would like it to be. Plug into power supply, I used a generic apple usb to power point adaptor as it was also 5V.

Thanks for reading, let me know if any clarification is necessary on certain aspects of this instructable, its my first! :~)