The Moving Pixel Clock #Projects #ARM @McuOnEclipse

Clock projects are cool. LED projects are cool too. And if it moves, the better. So why not building a moving pixel LED mechatronics clock? A matrix with addressable RGB LEDs, each can change color and is moved by a tiny stepper motor, to let pixels stand out? Erich Styger has built such a clock.

It took longer than expected (1.5 years), with huge help and contributions of three students working on that project: Leoni Etter, Jan Rohrer and Livio Stadelmann. It started with a crazy idea, exploration of different concepts, through solving multiple challenges up to a final working and moving pixel clock.

The project uses mini actuators from China and custom circuit boards allow for the movement. The software runs on the ARM Cortex M4F (tinyK22, NXP K22FN512), is written with Eclipse/MCUXpresso as IDE in C/C++ using FreeRTOS. Files are on GitHub.

Check out the video below and a comprehensive description of the design and build process in the post here.


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