mosivers

Thank you. The total costs should be below 50 EUR so it definitely affordable.

Thank you.1. The "L" and some of the other letters are not used for displaying the time but just to fill gaps.2. The words can spell the current time in steps of five minutes3. The round circles display the minutes4. Words do repeat every 12 hoursI suggest you also have a look at some of the other instructables for "standard" word clocks this should make things more clear

Yes, it would definitely be easier and probably also cheaper but the point was to come up with an innovative, complicated design. Also the effect would certainly not be as cinematic when using a display.

When the servos are moving quickly they are quite noisy so this is probably not a clock to hang in your bedroom. You can hear it in the video at 00:19https://youtu.be/ZvBI-v3uBo8?t=19

Thank you. Actually, we bought about 120 servos and all of them were working fine.

Thank you. So far (luckily) no one has asked us to replicate this ;-) In this case I would prefer to point people to the instructions and encourage them to build their own version. We definitely like to keep the project non-commercial.

Thanks for the praise and the advice. I have some spare servos and can of course always purchase new ones. The more complicated thing will be to unmount and exchange them, so I just hope they will last for some time. Also the clock is currently not running 24/7 but only switched one when needed.

I never noticed this subtle difference in language but you are of course correct ;-)About the power consumption, I did not measure this for the complete clock but only for a single servo. I expect the most current to be drawn during the display effect where all servos are moved back simultaneously. The current of a single servo in this case was about 50 mA. So the total power consumption of the servos should be around 114 x 0.05 A x 5 V = 28.5 W plus another estimated 114 * 0.02 A * 5 V = 11.4 W for the LEDs, i.e. the 50 W power supply we are using should suffice.

Thanks. I also thought about making the backplate from transparent acrylic. It would be nice to be able to see all the components from the back.

I have not tried to bend the particle tracks using a magnetic field. It is probably not possible to generate a field that is strong enough to visibly bend the tracks from muons or alpha particles but it may be possible for low energy electrons.

Micro-channel plates are also not that easy to obtain ;-) I thought about making a scintillation detector. I did some test where I coupled the crystal to an APD but did not see any signals, probably due to the small active area of the APD. Another problem is that my crystal has some cracks and, as you pointed out, it would need to be polished but I like to keep the crystal they way it is. I found this website which sells old NaI(Tl) crystals and photomultipliers relatively cheap but you would still need a HV power supply.Regarding your questions, the CaWO4 crystal will completely absorb the UVC light but adding a shield made from transparent acrylic around the box sounds like a good idea. I did not measure the spectrum of the UVC LED but ozone is only produced for wavelengths below 240 ...

Micro-channel plates are also not that easy to obtain ;-) I thought about making a scintillation detector. I did some test where I coupled the crystal to an APD but did not see any signals, probably due to the small active area of the APD. Another problem is that my crystal has some cracks and, as you pointed out, it would need to be polished but I like to keep the crystal they way it is. I found this website which sells old NaI(Tl) crystals and photomultipliers relatively cheap but you would still need a HV power supply.Regarding your questions, the CaWO4 crystal will completely absorb the UVC light but adding a shield made from transparent acrylic around the box sounds like a good idea. I did not measure the spectrum of the UVC LED but ozone is only produced for wavelengths below 240 nm so it is probably not an issue.

That sounds like a great project. If you have multiple minerals it makes sense to put them on a rotating platform. Let me know if you make this I would really like to see it in action.

I agree that UVC light is dangerous and you should take proper safety precautions. To excite the fluorescence in CaWO4 wavelenghts below 280 nm are needed so there was no way to avoid it. As I see it during operation no LED light can get out since it is either blocked by the housing or absorbed by the crystal.Regarding the health risks of UVC please see the exempt below from the EU health agency’s safety guidelines.“UVC is strongly attenuated by chromophores in the upper epidermis (Young, 1997) and UVC-induced DNA damage in the dividing basal layer of human epidermis is not readily detected (Campbell et al, 1993; Chadwick et al, 1995) which may explain why the dose response curve for UVC erythema in human skin is very much less steep than for UVB (Diffey and Farr, 1991). It is unlikely ...

I agree that UVC light is dangerous and you should take proper safety precautions. To excite the fluorescence in CaWO4 wavelenghts below 280 nm are needed so there was no way to avoid it. As I see it during operation no LED light can get out since it is either blocked by the housing or absorbed by the crystal.Regarding the health risks of UVC please see the exempt below from the EU health agency’s safety guidelines.“UVC is strongly attenuated by chromophores in the upper epidermis (Young, 1997) and UVC-induced DNA damage in the dividing basal layer of human epidermis is not readily detected (Campbell et al, 1993; Chadwick et al, 1995) which may explain why the dose response curve for UVC erythema in human skin is very much less steep than for UVB (Diffey and Farr, 1991). It is unlikely that UVC from artificial sources presents an acute or long-term hazard to human skin. However, UVC is likely to cause acute photokeratitis… UVC exposure is unlikely to cause acute or long-term damage to the skin but can cause severe acute damage to the eye“

You might want to try different grounding schemes, is the shield connected to the ground of your power supply? Also a 1000 µF capacitor between the positive and negative leads of the power supply, in parallel to the amplifier can help to reduce noise.

Thank you, I am glad that you like the build.In my code each strip already corresponds to a different frequency band but the strips are controlled by a single data pin. The function "calcAmp()" first calculates the amplitude for each frequency band, then "lightPixels()" lights up the corresponding LEDs. If the number of LEDs per strip or number of strips is different in your design you just need to change the variables "NUM_LEDS" (total number of LEDs), "NDOTS" (LEDs per strip) and "BANDS" (number of strips). Also the order of the LEDs for each strip may need to be changed in the function "lightPixels()".

Hi there, your Sanyo also looks very cool. It is certainly possible to connect it to your mp3 player. If the amp of your Sanyo is still working you can connect the mp3 player to the radio input as I did. Otherwise you could just reuse the speakers and add another amp, e.g. a TPA2012 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1552)

Thanks. If you are referring to the song in the video, this is actually a track by Pomplamoose.https://youtu.be/ooZR4LSuppk

I agree, it would be a shame to trash an old boombox. It is certainly possible to connect some buttons to the GPIO pins of the RPi and configure them accordingly. The buttons in my boombox were directly attached to the tape deck so unfortunately, I had to remove them.

Yes, this looks great. Please share the design or write an instructable.

Thanks for sharing your design Vincent, it will be of great help.

Your modifications seem to solve a lot of problems I am having with this build. Would you be able to attach stl files for the modified pieces? Also could you send a link for the exact type of bushings you used? A dxf file or exact dimensions for the holes in the baseplate would also be very helpful.

I have not tried any other material than microscope slides yet. If there is a plastic layer it will propably not withstand the high temperatures during soldering. It might be worth just to try.

Thanks. I am glad that you like the project. Keep me updated on your cube.