Robot Brigade

Here is the final word on my Buildlounge.com laser cutter contest entry where I have built a sun-powered clock. For those of you who haven’t seen my previous posts, here is what I have been up to:

When thinking about what I would do for this contest, I decided that I wouldn’t go high tech and do something involving lots of LEDs doing color mixing, video, or just displaying patterns. I have done that before. Instead, I decided to go ‘no tech’ and build something that had no moving parts and no electronics and yet still managed to ‘blink’ some lights on and off. What I ended up building was a clock that used the sun to display the current time. Above, you can see the face of the clock. The body is made out of aluminum. Instead of hands, I have a large number of acrylic rods running behind the clock face to illuminate the frosted glass in the location where the hour hand would be.

On the outside of the building, facing southward is a camera obscura (pictured above). This camera has a rather large hole as compared with a regular camera obscura that doesn’t have a lens in the front of it. This hole allows a beam of sunlight to pass through and hit an array of acrylic rods that are carefully arranged on the back. These rods channel the sunlight from the camera to the clock face. Below you can see a picture of the inside of the camera.

Below is my entry video for the contest. At the end of it you can find three links that take you through how I built it from start to finish.

This entry was posted on December 19, 2011 at 8:46 AM and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.