Frankie Graffagnino - Projects :: Bob Blick Propeller Clock

"Bob Blick" Propeller Clock

Sunday, March 4, 2001 - Day 4

We just couldn't help ourselves. We were getting so close, we just couldn't stay away from the project. We started working on it again Sunday afternoon. We put the motor assembly inside a PVC pipe and wrapped some pink egg-carton shipping material around the motor to keep it tight. (We later found out that the motor created a substantial amount of heat this way. Next time, we will have to have some air around the motor and maybe a fan to blow on it to keep it cool.) We completed the LED assembly and screwed it onto the bracket on the circuit board. Here we are hooking up one LED (with a resistor in series of course) to see what they will look like:

This is what it looked like looking directly into one of the lit LED's. We later found out that the viewing angle on our LED's had not been taken into consideration and our viewing angle was too small.

The next thing we did was make the LED strip have a plug so that if we decided to change the LED's for any reason, it would be a lot easier. The only plugs available to us were kind of big and we were so anxious to see if it worked, we weren't going to wait so that we could by a smaller plug. We had to connect thicker wires to the plug and junction these thick ones to the smaller ones coming from the LED's.

We finally got to test it. So we hooked it up to a DC Voltage Supply and… nothing. We went back and traced through the circuit and realized we had accidentally soldered the common to the LED's to ground instead of to the plus side of the rectified voltage. We unsoldered it and soldered it where it belonged. We tested it again and got light!!! It was amazing. We were all yelling and slapping hands. Finally it seemed as if our work had actually paid off. The time was actually backwards, but after reversing the voltage on the motor and making spin the other way, the time displayed correctly.

But, it still needed alot of work. It was shaking violently (due to our gross ignorance of balance altogether). This would get fixed the next time we had a chance to work on it.