Clockception

I wanted to have some kind of backlight so that it would be possible to read the display aat night as well. Therefore I integrated a ring of LEDs at the outer boarder of the front side of the PCB. With the help of a 3D printed light guide the LED light is then led through the outer border of the "clock circle". In the video you can see the initial start up animation that is displayed when the modules boot up.

I really like the concept and idea behind Power Delivery. Thats why I try to use it in my projects as well.

To gain some first experiences I integrated a FUSB302 Power Delivery phy into my PCB. It communicates over I2C with the ESP32 on the master module and triggers the highest available PD profile to keep the voltage drop on the inter-module-bus as low as possible. 

Below you can see some details of the current PCB version.

The PCB Version 1.5 is a big step from the initial approach. Basically I completely redisgned the inital apprach. When I first started with this (and realized it does not work as expected) I was a bit frustrated and the whole project was buried for some years.

In the meantime I gained some experience in PCB and CAD design which contributed a bit to this new design.

The new design is now based on a BKA30D dual stepper (like many other of these projects).

Each PCB has space for the slave module and master module electronics.

The slave module shall only control the stepper motors and some other parts that need to be available on every module.

The master module has additionally an ESP32 installed that controls all other slave modules via CAN bus based communication.

The following pictures show my first design. I started with this a long time ago and even if it ended with a frustrated me, I learned a lot from it.

The initial idea was to use the famous 28BYJ-48 stepper motor that controls a belt driven 3D printed axle mechanism. 

Long story short: In theory it worked, but in daily life the pointers often lost their calibration and therefore lost the alignment.

After investing so much time and money I was really frustrated at that point and buried the whole project for some time.

Below you can see some pictures of the initial prototype.